Similar:Verizon's $4.4 billion deal for AOL sends AOL stock on a tearVerizon has experimented with journalism…BusinessThink Like A Journalist | Kelsey Samuels | TEDxPlano CultureAn alternate universeMy plans to use a Chromebook over the we…CultureTell Me a Smart Story: On Podcasts, Videos, and Websites as Writing AssignmentsIt does take longer to evaluate student …AcademiaMy Teenage…
Promoting science and technology education to the exclusion of the humanities may seem like a good idea, but it is deeply misguided. Scientific American has always been an ardent supporter of teaching STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But studying the interaction of genes or engaging in a graduate-level project to develop software for self-driving…
Not knowing what else to do, in the numb hours after the towers fell, I made a web page that explored the World Trade Center in literature and culture, as well as urban technology in general. I updated it a bit over the next few weeks or months, but have mostly left it as an…
Facebook makes editorial decisions that affect its presentation of news through its “news” (?) feed. But Facebook is in the business to make money for Facebook, and the trending topics feed is just a tool to keep people on Facebook. Someone needs to assign Facebook a faculty adviser. In the space of a single day,…
Number of times one of my $9.99 headphones fell out of my ears while I was mowing the lawn this morning: 3. Likelihood I might spend $159 on AirPods: 0%. Likelihood I might spend $15.90 on AirPods: 0%. Similar:Teaching with iPads: Motivation, Inspiration and Alienation in the AppleverseHere are the slides for the half-day wor…AcademiaCreated…
When you plug an audio cable into a smartphone, it just works. It doesn’t matter whether the headphones were made by the same manufacturer as the phone. It doesn’t even matter what you’re trying to do with the audio signal—it works whether the cable is going into a speaker, a mixing board, or a recording…
I just saw the following clickbait for an ongoing non-story in the technology world: “All the latest speculation about [topic X] in one place.” That’s less like a news headline and more like the punchline to a New Yorker cartoon. No, I did not click the link. Similar:Whoops, I Accidentally Used a Photo of Donald…
Don’t trust your Facebook feed. All Facebook wants is for you to spend time on Facebook, so that they can sell your attention to the highest bidder. Facebook recently fired 18 employees whose job was to write headlines for and monitor the “Trending Topics” list. When that list fell under scrutiny for an alleged…
Today, Facebook announced that human curators will no longer write short descriptions that accompany trending topics on the site. Instead, the company will rely on an algorithmic process to “pull excerpts directly from stories.” The company also said it will stop using human curators to sort through the news…. It’s important to note that Facebook originally…
Our future robot overlords never looked so squishy. A team of Harvard University scientists has built an entirely soft robot — one that’s inspired by an octopus. The octobot, described this week in the journal Nature, could pave the way toward more effective soft robots that could be used in search and rescue, exploration and…
This short film documents an early attempt to use hypertext to help students study poetry. A fascinating early collaboration between computer science and the humanities. Similar:How to Use the Feynman Technique to Identify PseudoscienceSimon Oxenham quotes physicist Richard F…CultureFormer Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh sentenced to 3 years for ‘Healthy Holly’ children’s …Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine…
Similar:Term grades submitted. Homeschool son graduated. Time to breathe.AcademiaImagine all the people. Just reading their damned syllabus.These are not the rhetorical choices I w…AcademiaiTunes 11: It’s time for Apple’s horrible, bloated program to die.At the head of the team is a grizzled ol…AmusingNerd Break! Listening To: Wilhelm Scream / Castle Thunder / Amen Break (While…
If movies about space have taught us anything, it’s that no one can hear you scream. If you get lost in space, nobody’s going to find you. Unless you’re a spacecraft with a direct link to NASA. Then, there is hope for you yet. STEREO-B, from the Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory mission, went missing on…
Americans are more worried than enthusiastic about using gene editing, brain chip implants and synthetic blood to change human capabilities. Majorities of U.S. adults say they would be “very” or “somewhat” worried about gene editing (68%), brain chips (69%) and synthetic blood (63%), while no more than half say they would be enthusiastic about each…
I’ve only glanced at TextureWriter, but already I wish I had seen it two months ago, so that I could have incorporated it into my online “Digital Storytelling” class. (I’ll use it this fall, though.) Similar:All the 'Happy Birthday' song copyright claims are invalid, federal judge rules In a stunning reversal of decades of c…BusinessCrazy-looking keyboards…
Now imagine the resources required to simulate the brains of millions or billions of dead people. It’s possible that some future technology will allow for unlimited RAM and we’ll all get free service. The same way we’re arguing about health care now, future activists will chant, “The afterlife is a right, not a privilege!” But…
A Midsummer castmate shared a link to this online memorization tool. I’ve been using it for a half hour. It really helps. You paste in the text, then it blanks out all but the first letter of each word. At the next stage, it shows just the first two words of each line. —Memorizer (Memorization Tool) Similar:Canada's…
I’ve never liked Instant Articles — Facebook’s Newspeak term for “We want to make it harder for users to leave Facebook even when they’ve chosen to follow a link to an article on a news source.” In The New Yorker, Om Malik writes about Facebook’s evolving interface. There are days when I look at my…
This is nerd heaven — a deep analysis of all the text that appears in the 1980s cult science-fiction film Blade Runner. (I really want this typeface to be Caslon, but despite everything else matching nicely, the top of the 6 is just wrong. I can only apologize for the discrepancy.)UPDATE: Several folks have noted in the comments…
Facebook’s video push threatens the edited TV news package as much as it threatens the written word. I’ve definitely noticed a difference in traffic when I post a YouTube video (which generally gets modest attention on FB but often accumulates views over time) vs when I post similar content directly within Facebook (which FB seems…