You might have been asked to submit a short video assignment. Don’t do what I’m doing! You can’t see my eyes, the background is distracting, you’re looking up my nose and the lighting is awful. This short video demonstrates some quick tips that will greatly improve a video submission assignment. Your instructor and your classmates…
After mounting a half-hearted defense of a woman who says masks don’t work, that there’s a cure for COVID-19, and that doctors make medicine from DNA from aliens and that experts are working on a vaccine that makes you immune from becoming religious, Trump ends a press conference by walking out of the room. Background…
Several times in the past few days I’ve come across this claim in my social media feed. I didn’t share it or try to fact-check it; I just kept scrolling. Here’s the verdict, from USA Today: “Based on our research, this claim is FALSE. While the education secretary has advocated for schools reopening in the…
Trump really did tweet “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!” Plugging those words into Google Translate yields “Dies ist ein Kampf um die Rettung des Erbes, der Geschichte und der Größe unseres Landes!” I could be wrong, but I think Größe in German just means “physical size,”…
It started as a murmur of dissent, but over the weekend the campaign to persuade brands to boycott Facebook ads for the month of July turned into a major crisis for the social media giant. It began badly on Friday when Unilever, one of the world’s biggest advertisers, announced it was joining the Stop Hate for Profit campaign, which had already been backed by Verizon, Patagonia, and Ben and Jerry’s.
A Facebook meme that claims “3 of these 4 honorable men were killed by ‘protesters’” is false. I don’t mean that I can prove that not a single one of the guilty parties ever participated in a protest. However, Police never connected Beaty’s death with the protests (and the FBI declined to do so when…
Throughout the protests over the death of George Floyd, journalists have been injured and arrested covering the unrest. That trend continued Saturday and there were examples across the country but journalists on the ground in Minneapolis expressed dismay at how law enforcement officials seemed to be targeting members of the media. In the Friday night…
Microsoft is laying off dozens of journalists and editorial workers at its Microsoft News and MSN organizations. The layoffs are part of a bigger push by Microsoft to rely on artificial intelligence to pick news and content that’s presented on MSN.com, inside Microsoft’s Edge browser, and in the company’s various Microsoft News apps. Many of the affected workers are part of Microsoft’s SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division, and are contracted as human editors to help pick stories. Robots will now pick news stories for MSN and Microsoft News.
On social media recently I saw people mocking Trump for “refusing” to unveil the traditional presidential portrait of Obama, and I saw people attacking “the fake news media” for pushing a narrative designed to make Trump look bad. The original NBC story that broke this item accurately states that neither Trump nor Obama is interested…
I just found a post on economics in early computer games, tucked away as a “Draft” in my WordPress database, dated Jan 2011. I’m not sure why I never published it. The web page I was responding to has disappeared from the Internet, so I’ve linked to the Wayback Archive instead.
Every time I have taught an online class, I have made it asynchronous. I’m blogging these synchronous teaching tips so I can find them again when I’m prepping my fall classes (which will likely be HyFlex). The tips offered here won’t miraculously eliminate the initial awkwardness of virtual class sessions, but they’ll help. And over…
Fascinating use of social media. To be clear, this story about “Carolyn Gombell” is a fabrication, intended to spark Twitter to take action against people (such as Donald Trump) who use Twitter to publicize unfounded accusations. Will that matter to people who share it? It’s parody accounts, not journalists, who are retweeting this story as…
Researchers identified more than 100 false narratives about COVID-19 that are proliferating on Twitter by accounts controlled by bots. Among the misinformation disseminated by bot accounts were tweets that conspiracy theories about hospitals being filled with mannequins, or tweets connected the spread of the coronavirus to 5G wireless towers, a notion that is patently untrue.…
In May, 2000, I was blogging about The “I Love You” IRC virus A college that shifted to online applications only A poem about Pez that has lodged this couplet forever in my brain: What art thou, Pez, that must needs be dispensed? T’ be merely wrapped would leave thee so incensed? Hacking the URL…
In April 2000, I was blogging about… HTML frames (who remembers how much they sucked?) The sorry state of web design (AskTog) The future of reading “Rules grammar change: English traditional replace to be new syntax with” (The Onion) Journalism students who don’t read or watch journalism A design critique I published in the innovative…
Today my Facebook feed featured memes that mocked Trump for telling people to drink bleach, pour it into their bodily orifices, etc. He did say some reckless things, but Donald Trump did *not* suggest that people inject bleach, drink disinfectant, or expose their bodily orifices to sunlight. An opinion on the president is more valuable if…
Sometimes when my social media contacts are complaining about “the media,” they are really responding to headlines, which they cite as examples of “fake news.” Sometimes the headlines they respond to are creative interpretations supplied by a third party with a dog in a particular fight; but other times I can see very clearly…