The disasters that have occurred so far have been on the local or regional level. They have been horribly damaging to lives and properties in the regions in which they occurred, but they have not been the paradigm-shifting harbingers of doom that the pessimists, like Kunstler, continually warn about. In fact, so far the pessimists…
First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes…
Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages – you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well,…
Honor, with its emphasis on doing the right thing for its own sake, is no match for the anxious cynicism of many college students. This point was driven home to me by a junior I met last year in North Carolina. Why not cheat, he argued, given how many of America’s most successful people cut…
In graduate school, I ransacked the library in my quest for inspiration: it was a kind of archaeological excavation. Today, because of online catalogs and specialty Web sites, information can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy and accessed with stunning speed. Hence I doubt whether that kind of untidy, often grimy engagement with neglected old books…
It was in Romania, while making a film about Ceausescu, that I first stumbled across the historical legacy of the communist joke. There I learned that a clerk from the Bucharest transport system, Calin Bogdan Stefanescu, had spent the last ten years of Ceausescu’s regime collecting political jokes. He noted down which joke he heard…
In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary. Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son’s arrest last August in a drunken driving accident that left his…
Congressman John P. Murtha will be the keynote speaker at this year’s commencement, Saturday, May 13 at 11 in the Katherine Mabis McKenna Center on Seton Hill’s Greensburg campus. —Alexandra Nseir —Murtha to speak at May commencement (Setonian) I have heard both faculty and student grumblings about Murtha, who is, depending on who’s talking, either pro-labor…
She was supposed to slam the door, but Baldwin held the door so tight, she couldn’t close it. “He made a drastic change in the blocking,” she said. “He was showing me the door, metaphorically. The stage management apologized to me about it later.” Baldwin said, “If, in one show out of the scores of…
The Connections class for fall 2006 is going to do a session on SHU etiquette centering around how students can appropriately present themselves to faculty and staff on campus. E-mail, phone, meetings, classroom, verbal encounters are all open for discussion. With this in mind, will you please give your replies to the following so that…
Dear Candidate: Thank you again for meeting with us at the American Historical Association’s annual conference. We have narrowed down the applicant pool to three very strong candidates, yourself included, but we just can’t decide among them! We hope you would be willing to come to the campus, along with the other candidates, and fight…
—Dad shoots at computer, saying son spends too much time playing games (Tampa Bays 10 News) Guns don’t kill video games. Angry parents with guns kill video games.
Worried that I would not like him, my victim had used his humor to engage me, to make me laugh, to join in his witty barbs, and because I did like him, I had joined in. But we were not on equal footing and my comments contained a much more powerful threat because I did…
The gathering was the monthly meeting of “Dorkbot,” a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world. […] Repetto has finished a project called “foal table.” The idea originated in a request from a friend working on a theater production to design a table that…
This week I am going to ask you to participate in a media fast for TV Turn-Off Week, as part of the Media Fasting Reflection due on May 3. If you give up TV, but watch DVDs on your computer, are you really making any progress? If you turn off the TV, but turn up…
McClure said that some students seem to feel “that e-mail is a casual form of communication, where professional relationships somehow do not exist as they do in the classroom — students feel comfortable saying things in an email that they would never say to you in person.” —David Epstein —Be Polite, E-Polite (Inside Higher Ed) Nothing…
The key word for me here is not ‘Fun’. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and…
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. —The Bill of Rights: Amendment I The First Amendment, among…
I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he’d spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit…. I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a “spaz” in the school playground, though I’m visually impaired and not what we once called “a spastic”. To confuse the issue, a…
The Times article adds, from the CIRP survey, that the proportion of students who applied to 12 or more colleges increased by 50 percent from 2001 to 2005. The article does not go on to note that the 50 percent increase brought the percentage from 1.4 to 2.1. Most of the students who are using…