Dear organization from my past that just sent me a scolding email for missing an “important deadline” for making your job easier: How nice that you have “arranged a deadline extension” for me so that I can “finalize this important… project by verifying [my] data.” Perhaps this is all a “critical concern” to you, but in…
Someone is regretting this PR move. The official @NYPDnews Twitter account made an attempt at social media outreach today only to get promptly torn to shreds by users resisting the PR push. Hijacked hashtags are a common Twitter phenomenon, but tend to be played more for giggles (“trolling,” some call it) than to make a…
It’s one thing to be able use a service like Facebook or Instagram, and to use it well; it’s quite another thing to code a web page by hand, tweak a CSS file, or design the navigation for a large website. While I don’t expect my English students to be professional programmers, I do aim…
Data visualization is one of the most important tools we have to analyze data. But it’s just as easy to mislead as it is to educate using charts and graphs. In this article we’ll take a look at 3 of the most common ways in which visualizations can be misleading. —Heap Data Blog.
Victoria Blodgett, director of Graduate Career Services at Yale University, told me, “People who take their Ph.D.s into other realms are not necessarily being hired for their content expertise, but for their process skills: the ability to do excellent research, to write, to make cogent arguments.” These skills, it turns out, are in high demand.…
Great article featuring the little girl from the 1981 Lego ad. What’s the problem with girl LEGOs? Why is everyone against pink? ask many parents. I’ll let Rachel Giordano answer that question: “Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. I know that how I played as a girl shaped who I…
“The big danger always confronting CNN — and it’s confronted CNN since CNN went on the air and started doing 24-hour news — is how loud to shout, how much to do this, how much ‘breaking news’ is really breaking news, and how do you convey to your audience this a huge story?” Sesno said…
[C]hildren play to get oxygen, to understand hierarchy, to achieve mastery at a skill, and to socialize. The patterns were simplified into four categories: under the radar, hierarchy, mastery, and social play. —LEGO turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents – Quartz.
In a points-based grade book, the student at the top, Zoe, might assume she’s doing great, but according to the standards-based grade book, she (and the teacher) can see that Zoe is not proficient in an essential skill she needs to move forward in her writing education. Conversely, Pierce’s points-based grade would be lower than…
xkcd: Types of Editors.
This image, of the audio waveform from a sound clip in Audacity, shows a little “umm” right in the center, surrounded by the larger waveforms of legitimate, fully-voiced words. One reason I enjoy working with audio is I can make myself sound very articulate by carefully snipping out all the vocalized pauses in my speech.…
And so, on the first day of testing, I arrived to pick my daughter up at middle school at 9:25 a.m. I went into the office and checked her out. She and I started walking to my car. It was just as I started reaching for my keys that we realized that someone was in…
In exploratory programming, there’s no specification or problem to be solved, but there are things to be discovered. Those programming in an exploratory way could be making art (in a generative mode) or trying to understand a topic or subject through data (in an analytic mode), or perhaps doing something that doesn’t easily fit into…
When I find something interesting that an online friend has shared via a linkbait site, I hereby pledge that I will link to the origin of the story, rather than a third-party site that republishes it without commentary. The people who share and like and respond to Upworthy and similar linkbait websites are just responding…
I ask my students to contextualize links with informative text, rather than hype. Puppies! Schadenfreude! Thinly veiled primal urges! If you aren’t weeping angry tears by the 3rd paragraph, a gargoyle has your soul! Prove your cleverness and sensitivity by sharing this link! Also so you can find this article again! Link traffic! Earlier this…
This author is probably overthinking things, but I myself have been known to overthink musicals, so this is worth blogging. It turns out that Elsa is wrong — unleashing her powers in this particular manner brings disaster on the people she was trying to spare (though of course she also wants to flee their judgment,…
Me: Yes, that sound was me choking up while running The Secret Garden lines with Carolyn. Wife: (Laughs.) Me: So, you married a sensitive man. Now shut up. Wife: You should blog that.
Really. These things aren’t at all associated with nerds. Look at the manly color. Look at the size of those straps. Guys who wear this use metal filings as toothpaste. Chuck Norris wears these in memes! For God’s sake, would you look at the keywords! There’s no reference to how convenient these pockets would be for SD cards,…
I don’t see learning to code as a substitute for learning another human language. True, computer programming is learning a “foreign language” in the sense that you are trying to map how you give instructions in your native tongue to how a digital recipient recognizes what you’re trying to say in its highly structured vocabulary…
