“Under every scenario used in the study, the winning margin remains less than 500 votes out of almost 6 million cast.” —Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush (Washington Post) Similar:The Duolingo owl has been judging my German every day for the last year.EducationHappy Easter 2019 Current_EventsYep, it's time to read student papers on Flannery O'Connor.AcademiaEgypt…
“So who is this mysterious kingmaker who changed the world from her shadowy government bureaucracy? Has she seen any good movies lately? Is her marriage happy? America wants to know. America needs to know!” —Official Terry LePore Ballot Designer Fan Page Similar:Actors Fail to Distract Audience from Prop Newspaper HeadlinesMy daughter and I were talking…
A lake. A salt mine. An oil drilling rig. A lack of communication. You figure it out. —Peaceful Lake Peigneur Turned into Maelstrom Similar:A Merry Look at Journalism in "The Year Without a Santa Claus"In the classic stop-action TV special “T…AestheticsTechnology won’t fix America’s neediest schools. It makes bad education worse.[N]o matter how good the…
Coca-Cola spent $750,000 to develop a procedure to serve carbonated beverages in space. Pepsi filmed a $5 million commercial aboard Mir. And then there’s “Final Frontier Beef Jerky.” —A Brief History of Space MarketingSpace.com) Similar:In October, 1999 I was blogging about college application essays, Willie Crowther, and Eli… Jessica found herself wishing that s…AcademiaJuly 7,…
Hmm. Jakob Nielsen writes a column with a headline that implies you are being inhumane if you don’t make your web pages accessible to the disabled. Jakob Nielsen‘s company is selling a 148-page report on making web pages accessible to the disabled. Coincidence? (Nielsen is smart. He’s doing good deeds. He’s giving away lots of…
“Everything, everything, everything boils down to the heart, and poetry is a vehicle of clarity, an articulate and strong voice screaming through the static and white noise.” -Frank Matagrano, a poet featured on Jan Carroll’s poetry weblog. —And Now It’s Dark: Three poets talk about poetry after September 11, 2001 Similar:The Visitor #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season…
“Corporate English obscures reality by excluding people.” While this article is marked as “commentary,” I find it ethically unsound for its author to suggest that magazine writers should intentionally insert biased language that promotes a pro-union / anti-business point of view, on the grounds that “corporate English commonly portrays economic processes as if they just…
Novell releases a survey showing that British companies lose billions annually due to spam. Guess who sells a product that helps companies filter out spam? “Surveys are a time-honoured PR tactic for getting coverage in hard-to-reach publications.” —Junk Mail Costs Lives (The Register) Similar:Replacing Disputed Flags with Related ArticlesInstead of flagging links to questionabl…BusinessThe Media…
“[L]anguage is often under-estimated, under-valued, and under-funded. How many times have we seen companies import bland, cheap information instead of hiring talented, knowledgeable writers to write fresh, original, interesting content?” Julia Hayden —Language: The Ultimate User InterfaceA List Apart) Similar:My son showed me #PacificRim.My son showed me #PacificRim. Liked the …CybercultureDesiderata (Nerdy Inspiration)This is a…
Ever been frustrated by a “404: File Not Found” message? Did you ever stop to wonder how the web server feels? —File Not Found! Similar:Carolyn performed as Ariel yesterday in the New Renaissance Theatre Company's production o… Carolyn performed as Ariel yesterday i…AmusingAn English professor tries to help ChatGPT write and revise a sonnetShortly after…
Eugene Schlanger is a corporate lawyer and a respected poet. “Poets today tend to write to audiences of other poets. It’s unfortunate. You have poets celebrating pure emotion, but it’s not grounded in anything.” —Wall Street Poet Takes Stock of LifeSunSpot.net) Similar:The future is in interactive storytellingAn interesting piece. Easy-to-learn hype…AestheticsWhy ‘Cats’ the Movie Fails…
“[M]ost tragedies are caused not by hate-filled maniacs, but by small, unnoticed failures in complex systems. A badly trained worker makes a tragic error; an oversight by an engineer produces a fatally flawed component.” (Review of Inviting Disaster.) —When Malfunction and Error Meet: a Compendium of Disasters (Boston Globe) Similar:Sobering data; stunning visualization.This NYT story…
Which is real and which is fake? The website behind curtain number one? Or the website behind curtain number two? Read about The Yes Men, who use a fake World Trade Organization website to trick the organizers of an international conference. (See: “Evaluating Online Sources.“)Parody? Activism? Lies? Similar:Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani: My Great-Grandfather, the Nigerian Slave-TraderThis…
Digital cameras are great, because you can preview the shots immediately, and delete the ones that aren’t any good. “But if a photographer is focused on getting three, four or five pictures to the news desk as quickly as possible, he is not just getting rid of the rubbish; he’s not entering the alternative viewpoint…
Like the dystopian autocracy depicted in George Orwell’s novel 1984, Microsoft has a policy of eliminating “offensive” words from its official dictionary. (A Slashdot poster asks, “Do we really want to trust Microsoft to make decisions on our behalf regarding our use of language?”) —Bowlderlized by Microsoft (NY Times — registration req’d) Similar:Oh, No. YouTube…
Charging that Microsoft has started hijacking browser users who mistype an address (users are sent to a Microsoft page rather than shown a generic error message), Yahoo! has started doing some hijacking of its own. Microsoft has started excluding non-MS users from parts of its website (which, thanks in part to the hijacking described above,…
“Boilerplate was a mechanical man developed by Professor Archibald Campion during the 1880s and unveiled at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.” A remarkably convincing fake website by Paul Guinan. —Boilerplate: Mechanical Marvel of the Nineteenth Century Similar:Unplugging for a Few Hours at Spruce Flats BogVisited a bog created when loggers clear…AestheticsReading fiction early in life…
: I have no idea how useful this article really is — it’s a classic case of “I found it on the Internet.” (A few posters have evaluated this article on MetaFilter.) —“Real” Deal about Nuclear, Bio, and Chem Attacks Similar:The difficulty is the point (teaching critical thinking skills differs from teaching facts…In the past…
What’s up with public high school students? “They’ve had careful self-esteem training since they were 2. They’re told exactly what to feel about everything and they have to be happy all the time,” says researcher Elinor Burkett. —School Daze in America (Wash Times) Similar:Reading Game/Text: EverQuest, Alienation, and Digital Communitiesthough Limbaugh is wrong to decide…
The Disney Channel airs a cartoon that comments on file-swapping software. An insightful real-world teenage morality tale, or corporate brainwashing? —Disney’s Peer-to-Peer Pressure (Wired) Similar:Theatre Crowd Mustn't Be Bitter The entertainment industry seem…CultureEnjoyed watching the restored version of the hugely influential 1927 sci-fi movie #Metropo…Enjoyed watching the restored version of…AestheticsBias Check! Consult different sources for…