What do you do when you can no longer go home for family dinners? This is the question our family recently faced when my sister and I relocated to Maryland this June, moving 588 miles away from our dad and our hometown in Lansing, MI.
Family dinners are important to the three of us and we were able to recreate the experience with Skype, an online video calling platform that allows you to call anyone, anywhere, for free. Every other Sunday my sister and I sit down for a Skype dinner with my dad. We each cook
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Social media can be an easy target, but is it really killing the English language?
Three points to ponder:
A 2010 report by Clarion University says social media and text messages are “consistently associated with the use of particularly informal written communication techniques, along with formatting problems, nonstandard orthography, and grammatical errors.” According to the Orlando Sentinel, English professor Terry Thaxton says “Social media has certainly brought attention to the poor and declining writing, communication, and critical-thinking skills that teachers have seen for a long time. But it’s also helping writers develop experimental ways of writing narrative
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This past Friday, lightning in Virginia took out part of Amazon’s cloud computing service. Hundreds of companies use the Amazon Web Services for data storage and computation. This includes Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram. Friday’s storm knocked these sites off the grid for several hours. According to the New York Times, there is still little information for customers about what had happened, or even whether user data was safe.
One thing is for sure, the recent outage has people second guessing the security of using the cloud for themselves and their customers. According to the NY Times:
The interruption underlined
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Video games aren’t just for nerds, they can be great tools to train, build awareness and inspire social change.
Games have long been used to teach complex topics in a rewarding way. Kids reared in the 90’s might fondly recall days in the classroom playing Oregon Trail designed to teach students the realities of nineteenth century life. Anyone who spent class time playing that game won’t forget the hardships on the road to the West. Dysentery, broken axels, and rattle snake bikes still haunt us into our adulthood. It’s a great example of the way games can make learning
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More and more people are watching TV along with their tablets, phones and laptops. According to data from Nielsen, 40% of owners of tablets and Smartphones in the U.S. use their devices while watching TV on a daily basis. In fact, only 12% of tablet owners and 13% of Smartphone owners say they have never used those devices while watching TV.
What are we doing on those devices? Many are checking email during programs and commercial breaks, but a whopping 42% are visiting social networking sites — a trend that is greater among women — and nearly a third
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Narrative Science’s mantra: “We Transform Data into Stories and Insights.” It sounds simple enough. But many writers are questioning the ethics behind the intentions of a company that trains computers to write news stores. It comes down to this, can algorithms become better at telling stories than journalists and should we even let them try?
The Wired article had this perspective on the company:
Had Narrative Science — a company that trains computers to write news stories—created this piece, it probably would not mention that the company’s Chicago headquarters lie only a long baseball toss from the Tribune newspaper
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