The Death of (Science) Fiction

Over at Blinded by Science, Bruno Maddox has an interesting article on the Death of Science Fiction (tip of the hat to Bruce Sterling). Apparently, as we rush headlong into The Singularity, reality has caught up with the events of science fiction such that The Future is Now(tm)! William Gibson’s recent books, Pattern Recognition and [...]

PowerPoint Slide Design

Huzzah! Just found the slides from Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero presentation over at Slideshare.

This is helpful not only as a takeaway from the video I posted yesterday, but also because it is a great example of simplicity-in-presentation.
I’ve really been working on moving to this type of slide design over the last year or so. Academia [...]

Microblogging: Scoble Show Interviews Jaiku Founders

As many of you are aware, I’ve been interested in the various uses for blogging in an academic setting, and have experimented with a variety of platforms for this (I’m looking into using Vox for a social blogging experiement in a political theory class this fall, and probably WordPress.com for a groupblogging project in a [...]

Faux News: Keeping it (Un)Real

My dislike of Bill O’Reilly is no secret. After hearing Jenna Jameson spill about his between segment banter with her on a HTS special, it all made sense, that slimy, crawling-skin sensation that popped up whenever he was on. The condition was only worsened by that clip of his recent “interview” with the Miss New [...]

Merlin Mann: Inbox Zero

Hi, I’m Chris. I struggle with an overflowing email Inbox (have you seen my office, btw?). I am getting better, but still struggle with this terrible, terrible Affliction.
A friend turned me on to Merlin Mann’s posts on managing your email over at 43Folders. Recently, Merlin did a presentation to Google about this, which I’m placing [...]

2008 Elections: Candidate YouTube Videos

I’ve actually found the CNN/YouTube Debate to be an interesting step forward in terms of citizen participation in the debates process. To be certain, the weirder YouTube questions were selected out by CNN, but the ones that made it through were pretty interesting. I also think my wife’s Favorite Reporter (Anderson Cooper) did a pretty [...]

Open Left and other progressive blogs

I just wanted to give a shout-out to a new Progressive blog, Open Left. Open Left was started by Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, formerly of MyDD. According to Chris and Matt, they left MyDD to start a site that would be focused less on party politics and elections, and more on building a broad [...]

Dan Pink on Choosing a Major

I wish all of my students, especially my Freshmen and Sophomores, would watch this video when thinking about choosing a major. I think a lot of fellow faculty members would benefit from incorporating the “whole-brain” skills Pink mentions at the end of the video into their course design and assignments.

The Fuzzy Tail; or, the End of Disciplinarity

 
Ran across this presentation on the front page of Slideshare today. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the application of Long Tail thinking to being an educator and a Political Scientist lately, and also what it means for political activism and campaigns. This is one reason why I’ve been reading Nassim Taleb’s The [...]

Happy Birthday, America…

…you know I love you.

Tip of the hat to AndrewSullivan.com.