Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don’t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone‘sthere yet, but many are; many we don’t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some…
This admission is privately echoed by top players at magazines owned by major publishers, who sometimes cite more lax ad/edit divisions at European magazines as a catalyst. But a jacket showing up in a fashion layout doesn’t equal, say, a series of paid-for Cadillac references showing up in a short story that doesn’t have the…
He cried when she showed him photos she had taken of giraffes. Then, in one of his unexplained flashes of clarity, he told Debbie: “I don’t want to have Alzheimer’s.” — A frank, gripping article by Marsha King —A journey through dementia: Family surrenders to reality (Seattle Times) Similar:Giving Obsolete Books an Afterlife as Theatre…
In the 1980s millions of teenagers world-wide would battle dragons armed with just dice, paper and pens. D&D became part of youth sub-culture but as the game celebrates its 30th birthday, is anyone still playing? —Darren Water —Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons? (BBC) Similar:Gil Gerard (1943-2025) I built a model of the two-pronged Sta…CultureJournalism by…
The Project’s national phone survey of 1,371 adult Internet users conducted between February 3 and March 1, 2004 shows that 14% of online Americans say that at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they no longer do any downloading. That represents more than 17 million people. However, the number…
Colorado-based independent scholar Marie-Laure Ryan, author of Narrative as Virtual Reality and editor, most recently, of Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, who has offered comments here at GTxA, spoke about the ludology vs. narratology debate, admitting that she was preaching to the converted, not to the heathens… She took on the anti-narrativst arguments…
PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100. And after a coffee, Josh realized what this must mean. He called up one of his friends, a search engine affiniciado who took computer class. Matt arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this, and equally quickly Matt checked the rankings for…
Handwriting Analysis and Fortune Telling Yesterday I was at St. Vincent College’s “Earth Day,” where a man named Dennis collected handwriting samples and offered a personality reading. I let him go through his schtick — which included all sorts of affirming things like I am a resource person for too many people, I’ve either had…
Speaker #n will present a statistical analysis of the activity on a student weblog community in order to identify possible correlations which may advance our understanding of the pedagogical value of weblogs. The community is a group of personal blogs, all hosted on the same server and sponsored by the university. Activity on the site…
There is no day on the calendar six months or a year away, when you can say, ?OK, I‘m done promoting now, and I can stop.? Promotion needs to be a significant part of the ongoing work of maintaining your blog. If I?ve learned one thing in my years working with creative people of all…
What do films like Independence Day, Armageddon and X-Men have in common? The answer is that apart from costing millions of dollars to make, they all feature in a new course called Physics in Films that is being taught to students at the University of Central Florida. Costas Efthimiou, the mathematical physicist who teaches the…
Crunch Time: Seton Hill Blogs Bursting at the Seams Blogalicious… bloginator… “blog rally“… my students have been fiercely you-know-whatting, in order to fulfill the broad, very general requirements of their blogging portfolios. These range from the typical “write a blog responding to book X” or “blog about classroom activity Y,” to “disagree politely with one…
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m.at a speed of 35mph. The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just…
Effie is an old jade of 50 summers, Jessie a frisky filly of 40, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and soon were waved frantically at the suffering spectators. The mouths of their rancid features opened like…
Knowledge is different from capital, and from material goods, in that there is no inherent scarcity to knowledge. A piece of knowledge, once produced, may be replicated almost for free, distributed around the world in the blink of an electron, fed almost as easily to one person as to one billion people. Oh sure, there…
Conseco, which sells life, health and annuity policies to middle-income clients, expected to save millions by moving the work to the world’s second-most-populous nation. Instead, the switch was hurt by 9/11, cultural differences and intense pressure to quickly cut costs.–Bill W. Hornaday —Outsourcing didn’t pay off for Conseco (IndyStar) Similar:Many things in the world are awful,…
Taking almost 3 years to make, this is the one of a kind 4″ scale figure toy that I always wanted, and now I have built it. I just wish I’d had one of these when I was a kid. And for kids this Star Destroyer has been built. The ship is constructed almost entirely…
Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads. “This is what happens when the game’s off, basically,” said Mike `Burnie’ Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue‘s creators. “They’re chatting away,…
Time to get my AARP card, apparently. I’m 22, and I have officially been “ma’am’ed” for the first time. —Donna Hibbs —Ma’amed for Life (Nothing Left to Do but Rant) While pondering the language politics of the situation Donna describes, I was surprised when I realized that I would feel comfortable referring to a polite adolescent…
Stephenson’s immensely creative novel offers a story about the disequilibrium between space and time, about reconstituting subjectivity in a world where geography has conquered history, and about the importance of narrative in the creation of subject positions. In this chapter, we argue that geography’s conquest of history defines the struggles over culture, identity, subjectivity, and…