Rewatching ST:DS9 Odo walks stiffly into the infirmary, where Bashir scolds him for not taking better care of his recently-acquired humanoid body. Quark presents a bottle with what he says is a dead changeling. Odo, entranced, says it’s alive. Bashir manages to mostly unflabbergast the creature’s cellular jimberjams, and there is certainly no plot significance…
Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and even people who intentionally break the law, are less likely to kill people with their cars. On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about Marshall McLuhan here, a bit of Harold Innis there… Blogging this so I keep this in mind the next time I teach a course like The History and Future of the Book. (There’s so much out there!) [S]ome media are…
Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves), a pleasant-looking Bajoran monk welcomes guests to a “days of atonement” retreat, and is zapped by a beam of light. In the infirmary, the very pregnant Kira, griping comically that the herbs she’s been prescribed mean sedatives don’t work, learns that Latha, formerly a violent member…
This morning, after students submitted a homework assignment (a 200-word evidence-based argument paragraph), I asked them to annotate a printout of the instructions (including a rubric), had them peer-review their own submission, and then had them write additional annotations on the assignment sheet, in which they stated what changes they now realized they needed to…
Given that they need to write multiple stories a day, while also appearing on podcasts and 24-hour news channels, lobby journalists cannot plausibly understand policy detail or how financial markets work. It’s also not what they’re good at. Their skillset is to nose around and cause trouble. If you want a scandal covered or to…
About 20 of us are here in Brooklyn to play a large-scale war game — think Risk — but we’re also each assigned a character, which is a bit like Dungeons & Dragons. We’re told it’s Jan. 6, 2021. We’re given rows and rows of hand-painted mini-figures, a bowl of dice, and a measuring stick showing how far…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira is moved by the interest Sisko shows in an artifact recently recovered from the Cardassians. After a classic “zoom in and enhance” scene where Sisko uses a reflection to unlock an archaeological mystery, a technobabble accident flabbergasts Sisko’s neural jimberjams, which Bashir says will likely give him heightened sensory experiences for a…
I had fun recording this in the studio — with live foley artists! Similar:Explaining Twerking to Your ParentsI still haven’t seen the video, but this…AmusingHanging with the rude mechanicals @setonhilluniversityA Midsummer Night’s Dream.CulturePittsburgh in the Round review of The Outsiders”It’s due to a slew of rich, physically …BooksA Merry Look at Journalism in "The…
Here’s my letter responding to an recent article about the future of the student newspaper I advised for over two decades. A pause. The Seton Hill University student paper is on what my English department colleagues described in a recent email as “indefinite hiatus.” At the time, we didn’t know for how long. I was…
Full version Similar:If you win the very first time you play a game, that means you are skilled and brilliant, …Awesome10 journalism resources for PR prosFrom PR Daily.com: In no particular o…CultureAt Computers and Writing #cwcon for the weekend.Am I wise now? At an event for encouragi…AcademiaWhat Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain…
Similar:The Incredible Shrinking Ad [The Future Web Is Mobile]Is higher education ready for the switch…AcademiaWhen the Reporter Becomes Part of the Story (Aggressive Reporter Covering Pittsburgh Zoo D…Students who are new to journalism often…AcademiaYou are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.Some people out there will never like yo…CultureNew…
I felt like a capitalist, buying in bulk on the cheap and selling individual books for $2 (about a 20-cent profit, per book, but I’m really rounding up so I don’t have to deal with change). Students will spend time in class annotating printouts and writing in their copybooks. They’ll still do online activities but…
Similar:Those Were the Days: On 'Nostalgia' When missing home was a diseaseAlthough we now associate nostalgia with…CultureJournalism, Fake News, and "Clickbait Defamation"Sometimes when my social media contacts …CultureIn "World Drama" I'm adding the absurd, optimistic "The Skin of Our Teeth" (dropping bleak… In light of current events, I’m droppi…AcademiaThe Medium is the MoralIt has been…
In the halls of power at Amazon, busy executives have no time for PowerPoints. At the start of a meeting, everyone gets a printed 6-page memo, and spends 20-25 minutes reading it silently and marking it up. After the discussion, the printouts (typically with detailed hand-written comments) are handed back to the person who called…
This sort of thing was funnier back in 2017. Similar:Airport retro video games collect spare coins in SwedenFliers arriving at Swedens two biggest a…AestheticsSimulated iceberg, preserved artifacts and re-creations at the Titanic installation. …CultureI'm no longer surprised, but still want to document.This is really noteworthy. Today the Pre…Current_EventsThe White House’s plan to colonize the moon,…
Carving out some time to enjoy this show as I prep to teach the Pittsburgh Cycle @SetonHill Similar:After Halloween where do all the pumpkins go? Now we knowIn the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jonathan…AmusingWinnie the Pooh saga turns 100 years old todayOne hundred years ago today a Canadian s…BooksYou don’t hate millennials. You hate 21st-century technology.A favorite…
I’m also thinking of the cost to the students who have to repeat a course or fail out of a demanding program because they couldn’t AI their way to a passing grade. “People use it much more than we expected,” the cofounder wrote, later adding in response to another user that he “personally chose the price and…
It was not that hard to leave Twitter. I removed the app from my phone and followed a lot of journalists and professionals on Bluesky. I still checked Twitter on my laptop, but not every day. Then one day when X asked me for my password to log back in, I decided not to bother.…