I posted this Friday to KairosNews: Several years ago, a student in one of my tech writing classes needed a bit of extra credit, so I asked her to write up a set of tips on e-mail etiquette. I’ve modified and expanded it since then, and now it’s one of the most popular pages on…
“When I wrote in one story about ‘bloody street fighting in Baghdad,’ it appeared the morning TV viewers were seeing jubilant Marines and Iraqi civilians tearing down statues of Saddam Hussein on the eastern side of the Tigris River. Some readers, believing all of Baghdad was like that, were livid. They did not grasp the…
“The hunter-gatherers whose genetic make-up we inherit devoted all their energies to getting food. Labour, danger, stress and companionship attended their provisioning. Having secured their meal through their shared hardship, it is hardly surprising if our ancestors consumed it in a common ceremony, with rejoicing, affection, and gifts to the gods. | That experience of…
“As technological utopians, they believe that everything will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds, if technology is modelled on the American dream and the American way. And as opinion formers, they claim no formal power base, operating instead by linking exhaustively to one another.|Fortunately for them, in the hyperlinked world…
“In the study, teens who had no cell phones and whose numbers were not included in someone’s phone book could pretty much write off the possibility of speaking with any of the teens with cell phones, a group Blinkoff refers to as ‘mobiles.’ | While saying he didn’t think the cell-phone-toting teens were intentionally acting…
“It may still be a man’s world. But it is no longer, in any way, a boy’s. From his first days in school, an average boy is already developmentally two years behind the girls in reading and writing. Yet he’s often expected to learn the same things in the same way in the same amount…
“Linguists estimate that there are 6,809 ‘living’ languages in the world today, but 90 per cent of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 people, and some languages are even rarer – 46 are known to have just one native speaker….By applying the same principles used to classify the risk to birds and mammals, Professor…
“Officials of past Democratic and Republican administrations marvel at how the White House does not seem to miss an opportunity to showcase Mr. Bush in dramatic and perfectly lighted settings. It is all by design: the White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles…
“Often, when information goes through a formal marketing or PR process, the end result is an attractive, expensive, stale, diluted document written in corporate speak. This result is generally due to the processes that evolved to accommodate the costs and standards of print technology, rather than to the incompetence or malevolence of corporate communicators. The…
“Fugitives can best be recognized by their relaxed attitude during office hours. However much work they have to do at the office, it can’t be any more stressful than what they have to deal with at home. Fugitives usually have at least one extremely comfortable chair in their office, and can occasionally be spotted sitting…
“If your name is David Nelson you can expect to be hassled, delayed, questioned and searched before being allowed to board aircraft anywhere in the United States for the foreseeable future.” —David Nelson, Could You Step Aside for a Few Moments? (The Oregonian) I have a David Nelson in one of my classes. This is really…
“What we can know, just by reading his blog, is that this Salam is up to no good. He is spreading “inside views” of the new Iraq, not only to the blogosphere, but directly among the journalists still encamped at the Meridian (formerly Palestine, formerly Meridian) hotel. Not the “embeds” who’ve gone home after remarkable…
…and watching the fur fly sure is fun. Paul Krugman (of the for-the-forseeable-future-always-to-be-associated-with-sloppy-reporting New York Times) wrote on Tuesday: Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad’s fall he told “those who opposed the liberation of Iraq” — a large minority — that “you were sickening then, you are…
“Yes, Neo has to save humankind. Yes, it is a job for the mind over computer-simulated matter. And yes, he is Jesus….There is no end to the biblical parallels that have been found. There are names like Trinity and Zion. There is a baptism and a betrayal. After a while though, the parallels start to…
“Despite the crash and the resulting disruption, more marriage licenses were granted in 2001 in San Francisco than any year prior. In Santa Clara County, more babies were born in 2002 than in any year of the boom, and house purchases have bounced back to near-record levels, despite the massive evaporation of wealth. The culture…
“It’s true that in the recent culture wars academics and journalists have often been at each others’ throats. But this very antagonism is now a sign of proximity rather than of distance. Whereas academics and journalists once disdained one another from afar, they now compete for preeminence in the common role of explaining the contemporary…
“In 1987, Brown told Hunter and two dozen other first-graders at Brookfield Elementary School that she would put them through college if they graduated from high school. Four years ago, most of them did, with 19 enrolling in college. On Saturday, Hunter became the first person in her family — and the first from that…
Brenda Laurel’s Purple Moon computer games aimed for the tween girl market. Her book Utopian Entrepreneur is excellent — I’ll certainly use it in an upcoming media course at Seton Hill. Here’s a choice quote from the Stanford talk: 1. We covered a truck in pink fuzzy material. Boys didn’t go for it. Pink fuzzy…
“Today, students who come to a campus with Spider-Man on their minds may have trouble believing it, but they share the superhero with middle-aged professors. For, in our scholarly lives, many of us are not just harking back to distant memories of the Marvel comics of our childhoods, but creating a new scholarship on the…
“A high school teacher could be out of a job in a dispute over a personal web site he created before he was hired by a western Pennsylvania school district…The Grove City Area School District placed music teacher and assistant band director Dan Konnen, 24, of Hermitage, Pa., on an unpaid suspension in March when…