Researchers are finding players can make sharper soldiers, drivers and surgeons. Their reaction time is better, their peripheral vision more acute. They are taking risks, finding themselves at ease in a demanding environment that requires paying attention on several levels at once. While there are countless examples of children vegetating in front of the box,…
If you use Google to search for “Judaism”, “Jewish” or “Jewish people”, the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of…
Part attention to detail, part science, part Vulcan mind meld, exegesis allows a critic to enter and extend the context of a work of art, whether it be through the useful reductions of Sunday book reviews, the half millennium of minutiae that have accumulated to make Shakespeare ?The Bard? or revelatory reappraisals in the manner…
Much of the Blogosphere’s current claim to fame, of course, has to do with its outward criticism of already established individuals and institutions. Blogs have been responsible for keeping Big Media on its toes and correcting common errors, misjudgments and mischaracterizations that have been spread by Big Media regarding various important stories and issues. Blogs…
You may feel excitement or dread — or a combination of the two — if you have been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It’s a tall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you’re likely to wish you had at least three semesters in which…
A Greensburg woman who celebrated her 21st birthday at a Hempfield Township bar and later broke seven teeth after falling from a vehicle in a drunken stupor filed a lawsuit Monday against the bar. —Woman sues bar (Tribune-Review) According to her lawyer, “At one point, she asked for water, and they gave her another (alcoholic) drink.…
Better Dialog BoxJerz’s Literacy Weblog) I recently wrote about a survey with a confusing dialog box… while trying to download a Microsoft update, I came across this dialog box, which does a much better job. Similar:The Case for Banning Laptops in the ClassroomMaybe the students in this photo are dil…AcademiaAnother section of a #steampunk control…
Voice recognition systems have come a long way in the last decade and are used in places like call centres, home PCs and even mobile phones. Dashboards are becoming the hub of the car But over the next 10 years, we could even be holding virtual conversations with the car dashboard. —Richard Taylor —Talking to…
—Airline Meals (AirlineMeals.net) It’s been so long since I’ve actually been served a meal on an airplane… Golly, I wish there were a website that had a retrospective of airlime meals from the 70s, 80s and 90s, an index of movies in which in-flight meals were featured, and an archve of thousands of photos of airline…
[H]e looked overseas where he could pay $6 an hour instead of $60 for programmers. He hired a large, reputable Indian outsourcing firm a few months ago, then sat back and watched his troubles mount. Not only did the offshore team produce code that was full of bugs, they ran up big bills working overtime…
The logic of the remix has made its way into consumer culture – we know that. But what we haven’t yet identified is how to integrate that logic into the university (what I wrote about in my ctheory article). It took hundreds of years before the university completely adopted the logic of print as an…
John Valiska, known as “Johnny Peeps” to his friends, is trying to eat more than 1,500 Peeps candies this Easter season. —Indiana Man Tries To Break ‘Peeps’ Record (WCPO – Indiana) Similar:Shen Yun Chinese dance troupeOne of seven touring groups devoted to s…ArtFirst Day in the Theatre for Twelfth Night (May 3-12) Daughter: (is sad her…
Check out this news item from Userland CEO Scott Young who started getting calls from Chris Allbritton’s NYU students yesterday who were doing a story on blog software companies… —Student Journalists Outed Via Weblog (Weblogg-ed) One more hazard of edublogging to worry about! Similar:Journalism students guiltily ignoring the "no electronic devices" note in the program duri…That…
—Playmobil Security Checkpoint (Playmobil||Metafilter) I’m not sure what I think of this. It’s far better than plastic grenades to strap around your waist. By the way, the site designers make it extremely hard to link to an internal page… I guess they don’t want much inbound traffic. Link goes to MetaFilter’s page on the subject. Similar:‘So,…
Back in the 1960s a model of color vision propounded by the late Russell L. De Valois, a Berkeley psychologist, had been interpreted as establishing that the categories red, yellow, green and blue were hardwired into the brain. That interpretation, however, fell apart after the model failed to predict the mix of frequencies that the…
Computer games represent one of the fastest-growing, most profitable entertainment businesses. Making movies, by contrast, is getting tougher and more expensive, now costing, with marketing fees, an average of $103 million a film. That is one reason, among others, that those with power in Hollywood are avidly seeking to get into the game business while…
You are a GRAMMAR GOD! —How Grammatically Sound Are You? (Quizilla) The image is supposed to be of God from Monty Python’s “Holy Grail.” Update: Snagged the image from Amanda‘s copy. Similar:Ursula K. Le Guin: A Personal Take on Go Set a Watchman Before Watchman was published, I…BooksThe Case Against Reading EverythingRight now, I’m teaching “American…
“Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human psyche, the new Yahoo soul-search engine helps users find what’s deep inside them quickly and easily,” Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said. “All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past.” —Yahoo…
—After some discussion all the outstanding issues in game studies had been settled. (Barry Atkins | Yahoo! Photos) A great collection of cartoons… I do wish the captions were searchable. This one about a deep space anomaly is also good. Atkins is the video game scholar whose talk at the Princeton video game conference, amplified by…
Most of what is being said regarding blogs in composition has been said before. Looking at the ?Guidelines for Using Journals in School Settings? approved by the NCTE on Commission on Composition on November 28, 1986 drafted by [Toby] Fulwiler, it seems that the basic assumptions of learning through blogging have been stamped as legitimate.…