From Buzzfeed: Sitting before the Stars and Stripes, another flag pinned to his lapel, former president Barack Obama appears to be delivering an important message about fake news — but something seems slightly…off. Similar:As part of an ongoing feud over the rights to use a particular shade of ultra-black paint,…As part of an ongoing…
I had a complex model that I created in Blender 2.79, and imported (with some tweaking) successfully to Unity 2018 a few months ago. When I switched to Blender 2.8 and Unity 2018.2, I found big problems with my model. Blender 2.8b tells me that all the normals are exactly what I expect — the…
It seems YouTube will soon discontinue the text-based “annotation” feature that made interactive videos like this possible. Similar:If Google+ Heads to the Grave, at Least It’ll Have DirectionForced Google+ integration in Google Rea…BusinessOn Instructional Technology and Face-to-Face Interaction CybercultureMisSpelled: Premiering Oct 1In this podcast series, I voice a mage w…AmusingProofreading matters. (For the record, Blanche…
From Wikipedia: In 1888 Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days’ notice,[19] she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of…
As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800…
Not fun, but done. Similar:Amazing show. Young lovers, a witty (but often stupid) servant, speeches, rants, exaggerat… PersonalHorrifying deepfake tricks employee into giving away $25 millionNo names in this single-source anecdote …BusinessFor God's sake John, sit down!CultureThe #yorkplays never performed with pageant wagons this close to each other but I’m seeing…PersonalBoy that feels good. AcademiaThe Rise…
We just bought a new refrigerator from our local Sears. As a kid, I remember circling toys I wanted in the Christmas catalog. Pages of Legos, Matchbox cars, sleeping bags, remote-controlled cars. There might have been no Sears at all if Richard Sears, a 19th-century railway agent, hadn’t received an unwanted shipment of watches. He…
More than half of the hostile responses to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the Star Wars saga, were politically motivated trolling or the result of non-human bot activity, according to an academic paper published by a US digital media expert. Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), analysed Twitter activity about the…
The girl performed musical commercials for a fund-raiser in the Laurel Highlands. On the way back we stopped at a Denny’s, and after I paid the bill the waitress said she was impressed to see a teenaged girl enjoying an outing with her father without having a phone glued to her hand. (Carolyn had just…
Who, I thought, besides a multidisciplinary team in search of research funding, could possibly imagine that a digital account of the impact of reading digital print on human cognition would be effective? For such an account rests on the supremacy of the very thing it seeks to counteract, which can be summarized as a view of the human mind/brain that is itself computational in form.
I was surprised to see how closely happiness maps to non-phone activities, and unhappiness maps to phone-related activities. The author notes that this is a study of correlation, not causation. When I went through moody phases as a teen, I wrote, or worked, or did theater, or church youth group activities. When I was busy,…
My job includes teaching students to read long, complex texts (novels, play scripts, and academic texts.) My job also includes asking students to write researched essays that are longer documents than many of them at first seem comfortable reading. Years after they graduate, students often thank me for what I’ve taught them, and say the…
I still use blogs.setonhill.edu, which I started in 2003. Not for every class, but for most of my discussion-heavy in-person classes. Weblogs@Harvard, as it was then known, was considered pioneering. Facebook didn’t yet exist. Social media was in its infancy. And starting a blog usually required some knowledge of code. Harvard’s blogging platform, now known…
Young men are more than twice as likely than the general public to say they changed their mind on an issue because of social media. Americans who identify as Democrats, black, or Hispanic are also more likely than the general public to report change their minds because of social media. The survey seems to have…
Because what he never managed to grok then was that the company he created was destined to become a template for all of humanity, the digital reflection of masses of people across the globe. Including — and especially — the bad ones. Was it because he was a computer major who left college early and…
Here’s a thought… nothing you can write can possibly encourage me to click through 40 separate chunks of text. Bye. Similar:Facebook is predicting the end of the written wordFacebook’s video push threatens the edit…BusinessWe Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now | History & Archaeology”Hear my voice. Alexander Graham Bell.” …CultureTwitter…
Verrit, like Snopes, Politifact, and a host of other fact-checking sites, reflect fundamental misunderstandings about how information circulates online, what function political information plays in social contexts, and how and why people change their political opinions. Fact-checking is in many ways a response to the rapidly changing norms and practices of journalism, news gathering, and…
On this date in 1999, I first dated an entry in the collection of web links I had been curating since at least that January. Similar:Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reducing print edition to 2 days a week; cites plan to go all digi… The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is scaling …BusinessJust finished a good literature class discussion on this…
Journalism matters. Educated citizens who understand and appreciate the role of the free press in a democracy are a threat to authoritarian figures who benefit by sowing mistrust. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out errors and bias in specific news stories. (News organizations love reporting about when their competitors get a story wrong, and journalists…
We learned that though a degree made a big difference in the success of an entrepreneur, the field it was in and the school that it was from were not significant factors. YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki, for instance, majored in history and literature; Slack founder Stewart Butterfield in English; Airbnb founder Brian Chesky in the…