By Amitava Kumar. I like listening to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac with my daughter. She is in seventh grade. We catch the day’s broadcast on my phone while waiting in the morning at the bus stop. More...
15 mai 2016
15 mai 2016
Lucifer in the Flesh
By Lucy Ferriss. As a Luciferian from birth, I listened with interest when word of John Boehner’s recent characterization of the Republican candidate Ted Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh” got out. Apparently, there’s no worse insult. The Internet exploded after Boehner made his comment, accompanied by the apparently tamer “miserable son of a bitch,” at an interview at Stanford University. More...
15 mai 2016
The Versatile Octothorpe
By Lucy Ferriss. Hashtag. Pound sign. Space. And then there’s the use of the octothorpe to replace the word number, as in “He was #4 in the queue.” How did those little cross-hatched horizontal and vertical lines come to mean so many different things?
Apparently it begins, like so much else, with the Romans, whose abbreviation for libra pondo, or pound weight, was (as it still is) lb, but with a stylized l including a finishing, cursive-like slash across the center, to distinguish it from the number 1. By 1850, bookkeepers had adopted two uses of the octothorpe: If it followed a number, it retained the sense of pounds, but if it preceded a number, it simply indicated number. More...
15 mai 2016
Grammar-Test Dispute Resolution
By Geoffrey Pullum. Once again, the question insisted on a straight correct/incorrect binary choice between present perfect and preterite (exactly as with another such case I was recently asked to adjudicate on; why are test-devisers so intent on this?). I stressed that We respond as if we had been programmed and We respond as if we were programmed are both fully acceptable in the given context. More...
15 mai 2016
Famous Women, Banknotes, and Online Abuse
By Geoffrey Pullum. In Britain you can be jailed for tweets. A defense based on constitutional protections for political speech is out of the question: no written constitution, no Bill of Rights. Online abuse is just menacing behavior, and illegal. More...
15 mai 2016
10 Ways to Make Tech New Again (and Your Soul Shiny)
By Prof. Hacker. Will you lose your job to a robot? According to The New York Times a couple of years ago, possibly. And this cute test from Oxford University’s Martin School lets you check whether it’s a real possibility. Read more...
15 mai 2016
The Importance of Reflection When Learning Technical Skills
By Jason B. Jones. It’s not hard to find books, websites, or videos that will help you learn just about any technical skill you’d like, from making animated GIFs to X. But even with the most hands-on approach, it can be hard to get that knowledge to stick, or to figure out why you’d want to keep with it. Read more...
15 mai 2016
Challenging Openness & Innovation – Takeaways from #OER16 & #OLCInnovate
By Maha Bali. I did this crazy thing again of attending two conferences virtually at the same time – I presented at OER16 in Edinburgh in the morning, then was participating in OLCInnovate in New Orleans in the evening. Read more...
15 mai 2016
Early Evidence: The College Scorecard Made a Difference, but Only for Some Groups of Students
By Beckie Supiano. New research finds that the government’s college-comparison tool had an impact, but that it was concentrated among advantaged students. More...
15 mai 2016
When Everyone Goes to College: a Lesson From South Korea
By Karin Fischer. When Daehoon Jho hears American officials, from President Obama on down, say that the education system in the United States ought to be more like South Korea’s, it’s a bit of a head scratcher. More...
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