I don’t attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me. The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction — it’s a research paper bared down to the bones. Flash scholarship? 60-second-scholarship? About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined…
As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein’s lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and “Yes, Sister… No, Sister” was to give…
Schneier on Security: Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required. Except that…
My kids are playing on the floor as I carry out my online routine. Carolyn is mixing and matching from different Lego sets in order to create characters from the “Magnificent Blimpship” steampunk bedtime stories I’ve been telling her. She aims Captain Rod Gearhart’s gun at her brother’s minifigure. “I just killed you.” “No, I…
The article made sure not to phrase the poetry lessons as punishment — the one who actually bought the beer served a few days in jail. This sounds like a creative and proportional way to respond to the problem. USA Today (Thanks for the tip, Rosemary.) More than two dozen young people who broke into…
“Celebrities in rehab, political punditry and a mauling at the zoo – this is what we’re calling news these days” at JibJab.
A good overview of the context and significance of the Sokal Hoax (New York Sun). (Thanks for the link, Robert.) Most of us, most of the time, arrive at our beliefs for a host of psychological and social reasons that have little or nothing to do with logic, reason, empiricism, or data. Most of our…
A thoughtful post about the fate of film criticism. Much of this boils down what happens when film criticism leaves the world of print journalism and adapts to the TV — not only in the content of the review but the context of celebrity/insider/gossip in which movies are presented to the public. (Armond White, New…
The idea isn’t new, but the phrasing is clear and effective. Todd Alcott: Just as movies began as novelties shown before “real” entertainment, or as nickel entertainments in amusement arcades, well, that describes the early days of gaming as well. Movies went from Train Arriving at a Station to The Great Train Robbery in twelve…
More cruel jokes to play on literal-minded people.
The Weekly Standard does not like The Newseum. Our terrific country offers lots of ways to make a living, but with the possible exceptions of movie acting and architecture, only modern journalism would have the nerve to celebrate itself with something as gaudy and improbable as the Newseum.
Wired: The U.S. Army Intelligence Center is using a custom game to train interrogators, or “human collectors,” as they are euphemistically known. Known by the staggering title of Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer Human Intelligence Control Cell, the simulation was designed by General Dynamics from the shooter Far Cry. The Army game features…
Imagine that, since childhood, you’ve been a fan of a now-obscure genre of computer games called interactive fiction. Imagine that, since 1999, you’ve kept a weblog. Imagine that, since 2003, you’ve taught journalism and new media courses, in which you have introduced students to weblogs and interactive fiction (among other topics, of course). Recently, after…
Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry. The problem with a “what do you think about this”, or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until…
Yesterday was my daughter’s sixth birthday. My wife told me that there was a horrific meltdown at the store when the ice cream cake they picked up did not match the picture in the catalog. Screams, tears, and a half hour of sobbing. Last night, I told my daughter the story of The Birthday Party…
I’m not a student. I found your web page while looking for a certain use of slashes. I thought maybe you might know something about it. In the legal field, we sometimes use slashes to indicate that there is nothing following the text when there is extra space at the end of a page. An…
The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It’s the kind of place where…
New to me… disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum. In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, either “G*d”…
From Orwell’s 1984, which I’m teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein. By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal…