Through some twist of lucky faith, I had the immense privilege of serving as column editor for Henry Jenkins way back when I first started working on Flow. One of my favorite pieces was one discussing the problem of Sarah Silverman’s film, Jesus is Magic.
We recently ran a kind of “greatest hits” issue, and […]
As I’m moving toward a place in my academic career where I’m thinking more about publishing my work, I’m drawn to thinking about some of the problems with academic publishing. In particular, I’m concerned about how limited access is to academic journals. danah boyd recently-ish posted about why she’s made the decision to post only […]
Plagiarism is reaching new levels of ridiculous: A romance writer has lifted passages from a Defender article about wild ferrets. The author of the original article has written about the experience for Newsweek. Apparently, bits of the nature writer’s semi-dry description of ferret society have been misappropriated as romantic dialog by Cassie Edwards for her […]
The man above is Gordon Bell. He’s a researcher at Microsoft, and among his projects is a personal archive. An obsessive personal archive. A personal archive that is perhaps the most exhaustive of its kind. The project is called MyLifeBits. As pointed out in the New Yorker in May, the project has some ambiguous implications […]
danah boyd has compiled an excellent bibliography of research on social networking sites. It’s a work in progress, so if you know of things she’s missed, you should e-mail them to her. Regardless, though, the bibliography includes some interesting pieces of work, particularly with regards to privacy on the net, so if you find […]
Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, researchers here at UT, just published a massive study they did of why people (specifically, college-aged people) have sex. The results of the study: men and women have sex for roughly the same reasons.
While the researchers readily acknowledge that the results may vary across age groups, the […]
“Since a number of students apparently were, and are, choosing courses, majors and even careers based on foreign language requirements,” says Horwitz, “I felt some urgency in determining what was causing the anxiety. Over the past 25 years or so, the FLCAS has shown us that students with debilitating foreign language anxiety can be identified […]
Let me preface this by saying that I am very sad about the shootings at Virginia Tech today. I cannot imagine how deeply upsetting an experience like that would be for the people more directly involved, as it’s deeply upsetting to me, and I’m not even involved tangentially.
The video above is to the Boomtown […]
The results of a study of more than 1,000 of the brightest five per cent of young people will come as relief to parents whose offspring, usually long-haired, are devotees of Iron Maiden, AC/DC and their musical descendants.
Researchers found that, far from being a sign of delinquency and poor academic ability, many adolescent “metalheads” are […]
I received in the mail yesterday a review copy of Reading Desperate Housewives: Beyond the White Picket Fence. The book is part of a series of books on reading contemporary television. While this sort of timely academic work is just the sort of thing I’m fully in support of (at least in principle), the cover […]