Read-Think-b4-u-Write

How do you give a stellar impression to your prospective college? It's not your admission essay, or your volunteer work, or your GPA . . . it's your social media presence. What!? That's right it's what you tweet, post, and blog. Huh? Oh, and I don't mean in a good way. If your college uses social media to narrow the field of incoming freshman you could find yourself reeling when you receive that "Thanks, but no thanks" letter in the mail. At least that's what the good folks over at CNN are telling us as they go through some step-by-step questions. 1. Should I delete my social media account or make it private?  CNN recommends delete, but I think that is a bit extreme. Private is probably a good idea because it narrows what comes up about you. BTW when was the last time you conducted a google search on yourself? 2.Do I have to delete every single party pic of me and my friends? Nah, just be sure you take down the ones that "exhibit poor jud...

Have you ever asked yourself why internet users are so angry? I have and upon reflection took down most of my social media accounts leaving only Facebook, where I have pared back on everyone except REAL friends and family, and Twitter, which is where all comic book people seem to post. Even so I still have to read or scroll past some of my family and friends' flame-filled rants. I admit I have been guilty of the same, but I really try resist throwing a scorching Molotov cocktail in the direction of those I don't agree with . . . most of the time. So why do we engage in this hateful kind of behavior? In the infamous words of Mel Brooks, "C'mon, you do it, you know you do it and you're going to do it again." But why? Does it accomplish anything? Do you feel any better? Does anybody ever change their minds? The answers are simple: No, no, and no. Live Science wrote, "online comments 'are extraordinarily aggressive without resolving anything.'...

Over at Live Science "A new study found that the brains of people who report compulsive urges to use social networking sites show some brain patterns similar to those found in drug addicts." Yikes, that's saying something. One of the problems seems to be that we all love the positive reinforcement we get from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Tumblr. Another may be that most people don't see social networking as a harmful addiction. After all it's not like huffing cocaine or mainlining heroin. But are our beliefs true? There's no harm? What about body image? Seriously, who posts a picture when they look like something a dog just vomited on the floor? We see fabulous pics of our fabulous looking friends doing fabulous things. How does that affect our self-image? And what about being left out when your friends post party pics? There's even an an acronym for that--FOMO (fear of missing out) leaving one feeling depr...

"I think Wikipedia is one of the greatest inventions ever!"  I bet you thought you'd never hear a professor say that. But when thinking deeper about the information highway, what I really love is that with a tad bit of effort you can find anything. The Public Domain Project over at Pond5  has so far collected 10,000 film clips, 64,000 images and hundreds of audio files free for public access. But what does one have access to exactly? “The project includes digital models of NASA tools and satellites, Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, A Trip To The Moon, speeches by political figures like Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King, Jr., recordings of performances from composers like Beethoven," boasts one of its bloggers. There are also every one's favorite cat videos . . . Very early cat videos. Open Culture imagines that some future creator "could make creative use of this stuff indeed, and if they need a score, they could use a concerto for pizzic...

http://www.grammarly.com/ At least that's what 3,000 writers said when they were polled by Grammarly, the world's best grammar checker. But why are women better? According to those polled, women are better writers because they spend more time developing characters, women like to write more about people rather than things. Women are even better writers because they like to write purple prose -- "long, descriptive sentences." Or maybe this is just all a bunch of stereotyping? I would really like to know what the internals of this poll are. How many men were polled? How many women? What were the ages of those polled? If you look at the results of this poll (and it doesn't claim to be scientific), what would you guess about the internals? Do you agree with the results? Do you believe women are better writers than men? Who are some of the greatest writers of all time? Ouch, those are men, but is this the result of the male-dominated culture of the pas...

You go about your life unaware of the Digital Shadow you cast_   Your life is measured in gigabytes. Data comes at a cost_ Algorithms can predict your interests, your desires, even your fantasies_ These are some of the ominous calculations Digital Shadow performs using your digital footprint. Want to know who is secretly stalking you? Want to know who your pawns are? Don't think you have a very large digital footprint? Well, guess again.  Among other things Digital Shadow will tell you about your "Liabilities" or people that consistently post about you making you vulnerable to attack. It also lists your "Obsessions" and "Scapegoats" -- people you would sacrifice if you had too. Digital Shadow looks at your online Facebook data and provides a psychological profile of the digital you.  Perhaps the digital you is "Neurotic and exhibits high levels of self-absorption and insecurity"...

The Root recently published an article entitled Black Heroism Illustrated .  It documents the instances of black superheroes created by the comic powerhouses DC and Marvel.  Beginning with DC's Black Lightening in 1977 and Marvel's Black Panther who debuted in "Fantastic Four" no. 52 in 1966. The article also documents the rise of African American sidekicks -- Captain America's trusted Falcon (1969) -- while interracial justice leagues began appearing in the 1970s. The Shadow League chronicles comic stereotypes, from Harlem as the hometown of every African American superhero to the use of the descriptor "black" in superhero names; think "Black Lightning, Black Vulcan, Black Goliath, Black Racer, the Black Spider, Black Manta and so on." The most recent addition to the black pantheon of superheroes would be Nick Fury - who apparently underwent a race change in 2002's "The Ultimates #1" -- from a white World War II army he...

I love maps!  And the older the better. I like looking at how the world has changed, or being reminded of places I've visited. In my office I have a 1930's map showing the "Voyages of Discovery" with dashed lines and little galleon icons indicating the trips of Columbus, Vaso de Gama, and Magellan, a visual text sparking images of pirates, sea monsters, and exotic ports of call. In my kitchen I have a very art deco map of "Europe in 1932" with pink and teal countries whose borders are very different than the world today. Whenever company comes and congregates in the kitchen it always sparks a conversation about places we'd love to visit.  Rome, Paris, Athens, Florence, London, Alexandria, Constantinople all great cities a world away. Now some of these antiques are available to everyone thanks to the New York Public Library . The library has been scanning maps for about 15 years and now has "1,100 maps of the Mid-Atlantic United States and ...

That is the question.  Well, apparently not for one high school senior attending an informational seminar for Bowdoin College, the school to which she had applied. "Throughout the presentation, she apparently posted disparaging comments on Twitter about her fellow attendees, repeatedly using a common expletive. "Perhaps she hadn’t realized that colleges keep track of their social media mentions," reported Dean Meikeljohn in "They Loved Your GPA Then They Saw Your Tweets." And you thought only employers would track such things? Think about it, if you owned a company or were the Dean of a college wouldn't you want to know what people are saying about your product, company, or college?  Of course, you would.  Would-be employers or colleges don't just Google perspective employees or students, they keep track of their web reputation as well.  "'We would have wondered about the judgment of someone who spends ...

...and I do mean direct!  In the 2002 movie Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, the protagonist enters a mall, is scanned, and then targeted by a variety of direct marketing ads. See for yourself! Today you are scanned the moment you sit at your computer and begin shopping on the internet.  As Michael Learmonth says in "The Pants that Stalked Me on the Web," after shopping for a pair of shorts he began receiving internet ads aimed at his desire to buy summer pants.  Being a marketing executive he "know[s] why I'm getting these ads. But as a consumer I'd be creeped out by it, and definitely a little annoyed." On the other hand, Miguel Helft and Tanzina Vega report that "this form of highly personalized marketing is being hailed as the latest breakthrough because it tries to show consumers the right ad at the right time."   So internet advertisers are doing us all a favor, we aren't inundated with ads for products we aren't interes...

I remember my mother wearing clothes like this when she went to the record store looking for 45s of her favorite songs. There were little booths where she would listen to records before buying them to play on our high fidelity record player at home. But this isn't a record store in downtown San Francisco, this is a record store in downtown Kabul in the 1960s. CSUEB's former president Mohammad Qayoumi had this to say about the Kabul of his childhood ‘Given the images people see on TV, many conclude Afghanistan never made it out of the Middle Ages. But that is not the Afghanistan I remember. I grew up in Kabul in the 1950s and ’60s. Stirred by the fact that news portrayals of the country’s history didn’t mesh with my own memories, I wanted to discover the truth. ‘Remembering Afghanistan’s hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic. But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I...

Project Twins , a graphic design studio, created a visual study of obscure and endangered words. They use bold graphics and visual wit to interpret and represent a collection of strange, unusual and lost words. These are just a few examples, click on the link to see more. After opening the Project Twins site I was instantly struck with tarantism as I viewed graphic words with a feeling of xenization making me scripturient, thus this blog post. What do you think? Can you think of unusual words that could be instantly defined with pictures? Do graphics help you when defining a word? Acersecomic A person whose hair has never been cut. Biblioclasm The practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media. Fanfaronade Swaggering; empty boasting; blustering manner or behavior; ostentatious display. Recumbentibus A knockout punch, either verbal or physical. Scripturient Possessing a violent desire to write. Tarant...

Everybody knows to avoid posting really dumb stuff to Facebook - except, apparently, these guys. Criminal Justice Degrees Guide just posted an infographic entitled "20 Cases Solved by Using Facebook." Here are some of the highlights: An EMT (who lost his license BTW) posted crime scene photos of a beaten and strangled woman on Facebook. A 16-year-old bragged on Facebook about plugging up the local library's toilets causing $247,000 worth of damage and a five month closure. Guess who's going to jail? Another guy tried to hire a hit man via Facebook to kill a woman who accused him of rape. He now faces 11 to 22 years in jail. A young woman posted a video of a burglar she caught in her house. "Wait is that the guy I just befriended on Facebook?" Yup. Arrested. If someone has a restraining order against you, do not "poke" them on Facebook. Don't eat endangered species and then post a video on Facebook. Do not masquerade a...

Job hunters are always reminded of things they should avoid doing in their résumés. But here are five great things to do with, or include in, your résumé. 1. Show enthusiasm. It's okay to be excited about a job possibility. In fact, enthusiasm is often contagious, and says, "I'm ready to work!" What employer doesn't want an employee that conveys a can-do attitude? 2. Include Awards and Achievements. Employers want to see more than job history. If you've won awards for your work, schooling, special interests, or have done volunteer work, it tells perspective employers that you're willing to go the extra mile and that you are passionate about something. 3. Computer and media skills. Many companies maintain a high internet presence. Why? Because a lot of it it is free, and if you know how to navigate through twitter, blog spot, wordpress, Facebook, LinkedIn or other networking sites, that tells would-be bosses that they have someone who u...

Here's the next installment of School House Rock--this time in a country western song about nouns. For the rest of the day you'll be singing "Every person, place, or thing that you can know, ya know their nouns." But there is a lot more to nouns than just concrete people, animals, places, or things. It is also abstract ideas. Here's a larger explanation of nouns from the University of Ottawa . Proper Nouns You always write a proper noun with a capital letter, since the noun represents the name of a specific person, place, or thing. The names of days of the week, months, historical documents, institutions, organizations, religions, their holy texts and their adherents are proper nouns.       Last year, Jaime had a Baptist and a Buddhist as roommates. Common Nouns A common noun is a noun referring to a person, place, or thing in a general sense -- usually, you should write it with a capital letter only when it begins a sentence. A common noun is...

The Chronicle of Higher Ed published an article entitled, " Researchers RateMyProfessors, and Find It Useful, if not Chili-Pepper Hot ." The research "suggests the popular service is a more useful barometer of instructor quality than you might think, at least in the aggregate. And the study, the latest of several indicating RateMyProfessors should not be dismissed, raises questions about how universities should deal with a site whose ratings have been factored into Forbes magazine's college rankings and apparently even into some universities' personnel evaluations." Another study cited in the article, "concluded that the site's evaluations 'closely matched students' real-life concerns about the quality of instruction in the classroom. The paper added, 'While issues such as personality and appearance did enter into the postings, these were secondary motivators compared to more salient issues such as competence, knowledge, clarity...

I used to announce to students that they had to do a social networking project where they had to publish something relevant to whatever we were studying on their Facebook page and then share it with the class. Wait for it . . . About 30 seconds after this announcement, some students would go white, others would start to fidget, while still others looked like their head was about to blow off. Here's what they were thinking, "I have to show my Facebook page to my professor?!@#$" So think about that. If you wouldn't want your parents or siblings looking at your Facebook page, you need to do some adjusting ASAP! What? You don't care what your professor or relatives think? Think about this. When you apply for your dream job, your prospective employer is going to Google you and if your latest post features you in a sexually explicit pose chugging a bottle of tequila, well, guess who isn't going to get the job? Pajamas media just published a list of the ...

Inforporn: The Price of Pot by Cameron Bird at Wired (September 2011). Click here for the full graphic and article. Read Think b4 u Write is always attracted to articles and essays with pretty pictures, and while this graphic is nice looking it accompanies an article about the disparities of marijuana laws in the United States. The graphic displays fluctuations in pricing: the darker the green the cheaper the marijuana ($92 per ounce), while yellow tips the scale at $526 per ounce. The red and purple bars record fines and jail time, and the red cross indicates a medical marijuana state. In part the article reads, "The US is still of two minds on marijuana: While 16 states now consider it a medicine, others continue to hand down heavy sentences—including jail time—for simple possession." Do you think this is an effective graphic? Why or why not? Where do you stand on this issue? Should marijuana be legalized? Or should it be illegal? Or is there some comprom...

James Taranto wrote a column in The Wall Street Journal on the Anti-debt ceiling Republicans that wound up at the global warming issue, an issue that has divided people. An issue that has removed the lens from such environmental disasters as drought-driven famine in Somalia to indigenous cooking fires which "Kill a million and a half people and nobody gives a damn. But become a part of this big climate thing and everyone comes knocking on your door," at least that's what Burkhard Bilger reports in " Hearth Surgery " from The New Yorker , but I digress . . . James Taranto, a conservative writer, reports that liberals believe, “ Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science. "Darwin is a red herring here. Although disparaging people for holding harmless religious beliefs as 'intellectual...

Cheating is rampant and not just in the college classroom. Recent scandals include the Atlanta school district where hundreds (yes, hundreds) of teachers and administrators, NOT STUDENTS, changed answers on state wide tests in order for the district to look good (meaning get more money) on standardized tests. You can blame "No Child Left Behind," for pushing up standards, but my response to those teachers who say the standardized test drove them to it: Didn't you always give tests in your classes? Of course, you did. But I digress . . . Great Neck, New York high school students paid to have their SAT tests taken by others with fake IDs and handwriting samples - tests that cost high schoolers $1 a point, meaning some paid more than $2000 for a good SAT score. David Wangaard and Jason Stephens in the Winter 2011 edition of Excellence and Ethics posted the results of a three-year study of academic motivation and integrity. The two researchers "surveyed ...