“Ravitch reports that a textbook committee rejected the heroic story of Mary McLeod Bethune, the black woman who founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls nearly a century ago. Why? The word ‘Negro.’ That was bad. Also because Bethune raised the money for her school from rich white men like John…
“Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them…
“The idea that you should let a fire burn, and destroy valuable forest, was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service a hundred years to realize the problem and to change the strategy and let the fire burn.” Jared Diamond —Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?Edge) Hit “page down” three times to…
“I expect this course to be challenging, but that’s not what I want. I want just to be able to write better.” — anonymous freshman comp studentTough Lesson: Good Writing is HardMy Files) Similar:Versu's Epilogue: How an Interactive Fiction Pioneer's 15 Year Project Ended Up in Limbo a…However there’s a particularly sad tale …BusinessRules for…
“Mosaic wasn’t the Web’s first browser. It wasn’t even, as it’s so often been described, the first browser to sport a graphical user interface. Tim Berners-Lee’s “WorldWideWeb” was the first graphical point-and-click browser, followed by Pei Wei’s Viola browser.|But for most people, Mosaic was the easiest browser to use. It installed easily, and allowed people…
“A company is making two versions of the same product… One has a little more gold and foil on it, but they’re essentially the same. One is $14.95; the other is $18.95.” Not surprisingly, the $14.95 item is selling better. It’s also the lower-profit product.|”Then a competitor comes in with a third product. Again, it’s…
Robert Frezza writes: I ran across an interesting passage in a book about the native peoples of Siberia called “The Shaman’s Coat.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of well-educated Polish revolutionaries were exiled to eastern Siberia where they acquired a certain reputation among the natives. As one of them put it:…
“For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple Computer’s new music service, a quick look suggests that it’s a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market….The integration between the one-click purchase service, Apple’s iTunes music jukebox software and the iPod player goes well beyond what any other music service has done. It…
One of several paintings that were, according to a spam I received Sunday, stolen from a museum in Manchester, England. WARNING: Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin have been stolen in UKE-Mail) When I went online to check the validity of this spam I found a BBC story which reports “The paintings – Van Gogh’s The Fortification…
“Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. People read differently on the Web. They scan read?jumping quickly from one piece of content to the next. People are much more action-orientated on the Web. They get online to get something done. Words should always be driving actions.” Know your reader Take…
“For years Slashdot has had an abundance of game related content. Unfortunately, we’ve also had limited space to post those stories. We strive to cover a wide range of tech news, and this often means passing on a good game story because something else is more important. But today I get to announce the creation…
“The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging.| Who needs television? Let’s just eliminate the middleman….Candidate gives speech. ABC News reports speech. ABC’s Note blogs speech. Then candidate blogs his own speech, knocking down any negative interpretation by other bloggers. And we blog the whole incestuous process.” —Modem MadnessWashPost…
“The anti-science movement in health promotion has arisen as part of the humanistic perspective within the discipline that positions itself in direct opposition to a science-based approach that it terms ‘positivism.’ According to this view, the application of the scientific method — that is, an approach to the world founded upon experimentation and hypothesis testing…
“[Cyberpunk novelist William] Gibson is currently winding up the book tour in Ireland and Britain. Once it is over, he’ll end the weblog, he says. ‘I have to go do whatever it is I do, to find the next novel,’ he said. ‘Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social.’” Karlin Lillington —Gibson…
“In an enormous blow to the music and motion picture industries, a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against file-sharing services Grokster and StreamCast Networks Friday, saying that they can not be held culpable for illegal file trading done over their networks. | The ruling, made by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, represents…
“A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of…
“Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.|And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage,…
That’s a good one. Via Microdoc News. —What is the best search engine?Ask Jeeves) Similar:In June, 2000 I was blogging about anagrams, 1750 Paris, ambiguity, a hyperlink patent cl…In June, 2000, I was blogging about …AmusingTexting? Pets? Millennials Are Flunking Job Interviews – CNBCThe other day, a Facebook friend posted …BusinessWhat Twitter Changes Might Mean…
“Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way ‘back to basics,’ moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren’t learning how…
fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt. Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk. Over the past month, I’ve seen the verb “fisk” pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous…