Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society
A very clever interactive essay that uses embedded game-like simulations to show a point. Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society.
A very clever interactive essay that uses embedded game-like simulations to show a point. Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society.
He’s not holding back here; he is telling these people, now that he’s poked their fear of booze, elites, outsiders, slippery slopes, and those who would interfere with authentic and worthy pursuits they perhaps love like harness racing, that the difference between pool and billards, those six pockets, mark a person as decent or not.…
GPAs and majors don’t matter to employers as much as internships, according to a survey conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Of course, you need relevant coursework and good grades in order to land the best internships. Some key findings: Colleges and universities should seek to break down the false dichotomy of liberal arts and career…
In a nutshell, introversion is not about a preference to be alone. It not about being anxious around other people. It is not about being overwhelmed by cortical activity in the absence of stimulation. At its core, introversion is about deriving less reward from being the center of social attention. Getting the spotlight is not…
This article makes an excellent point. The essential connection between the positive message that makes the pro-girl ad worth sharing and the product being sold is tentative at best. In a recent ad for Always feminine hygiene products, women and men are asked to demonstrate how it looks to “run, throw and fight like a…
Former NFL player and current pastor Joe Ehrmann reflects on the power coaches have over the identities of boys. There’s two kinds of coaches in America: You’re either transactional or you’re transformational. Transactional coaches basically use young people for their own identity, their own validation, their own ends. It’s always about them — the team…
Unlike that of most physical and natural scientists, the ability of social scientists to conduct experiments or rely on high-quality data is often limited. In my field, international relations, even the most robust econometric analyses often explain a pathetically small amount of the data’s statistical variance. Indeed, from my first exposure to the philosopher of…
NPR has a story that should probably have run last weekend, for Fathers’ Day. It’s still an interesting exploration of how the traditional definition of masculinity in culture has changed, as more men are not only studying and working alongside women (and seeing them as peers) but also playing a larger part in childcare. Noguera…
I was happy a few years ago when Seton Hill got a new phone and email system that allowed me to get my voicemails directly via email, but I do so little work over the telephone that the feature is really not that useful. Having grown up in a texting-friendly culture, with unmediated cellphone access…
We tend to assume that pressure makes us more efficient. I work fastest when I’m on deadline. I stretch my grocery budget the most when my funds are running low. But in reality, it’s not that you’re working better when you’re stressed. It’s that the opposite situation, overabundance, often makes us less efficient. It’s a…
Great example of the application of well-established humanities critical processes to the analysis of a technological artifact. Of all the possible options in the real world — increasing funding for education, reducing overcrowded housing, building mixed use developments, creating employment opportunities, and so on — it’s the presence of the police that lowers crime in…
Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s. […] If there were more college graduates than the economy needed, the pay gap would shrink.…
I arrived in Toronto in 1992 as a 22yo grad student, and left it as a 29yo assistant professor, husband, and father. I spent a lot of that time walking. Just before I woke up on September 11 2006, I was having a dream about walking down Yonge street. I wrote down as much as…
Fantastic data visualization. How Americans Die.
Interesting social science approach to how university faculty spend their time. [O]n a recent trip abroad when an immigration officer asked how I could afford to be away from work for a month. I said simply that we were on winter break and the officer jokingly lamented about going into the wrong profession. I didn’t…
I played the open-source version of Uru with my daughter for a few weeks when she was about six or seven. I enjoyed the opening tutorial game, but after that found little to do and found the learning curve was too steep to keep my daughter interested. She was happy running around and endlessly re-dressing…
[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.
Relationships start with a period of courtship: on Facebook, messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other’s timelines. The following graph shows the average number of timeline posts exchanged between two people who are about to become a couple. We studied the group of people who changed their status from “Single”…
Tasked with creating “a piece of art that would reveal something unseen” as part of a pre-college fine arts program, Ziebell approached 29 strangers on the University of Michigan’s campus, handed them a pen and half a sheet of paper, and asked them, on the spot, to draw a map of the world. Ziebell, who…
Teens also don’t seem to care that Facebook is more technically sophisticated than other platforms. Miller believes that the last straw for most teens is a dreaded friend request from a parent. “It is nothing new that young people care about style and status in relation to their peers, and Facebook is simply not cool…