Here are today's must-reads:
1. Columbia Professor and GZA Aim to Help Teach Science Through Hip-Hop:
They are an unlikely team of educational reformers.
Christopher Emdin is a Columbia University professor who likes to declaim Newton’s laws in rhyme. GZAis a member of the Wu-Tang Clanwho left school in 10th grade. When the two men met this summer, at a radio show hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, they started talking about science and education — particularly, why science classrooms were failing to engage many African-American and Latino students, who together make up 70 percent of New York City’s student body. Only 4 percent of African-American seniors nationally were proficient in sciences, compared with 27 percent of whites, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
GZA, 46, who was born Gary Grice, had just finished anextraordinary round of meetings with physicists at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, culling ideas for a coming solo album about the cosmos. Dr. Emdin, 34, an assistant professor of science education at Teachers College, was a lifelong hip-hop fan. They discovered a shared interest in merging their two worlds: GZA by bringing science into hip-hop; Dr. Emdin bybringing hip-hop into the science classroom.
2. The rise of mobile phone photography:
Your phone camera is your best camera, because it's always with you. When people say this about mobile photography, or iphoneography as it's also called, they're usually talking about snapping those unexpected moments: a man in a banana suit on his way to work; a celebrity involved in a punch-up; or maybe just a beautiful sunset.
Certainly, mobile photographers are much more prolific than average amateur "big camera" enthusiasts. They have their photographic brains switched on all the time, looking for possibilities. And the ubiquity of these cameras, combined with their unobtrusiveness, have made them particularly effective at capturing candid moments in public spaces.
But, for many, the initial snap is just the start. It's the raw material for a new creative process. Most mobile phone cameras take very dull photos. But it doesn't matter, because there are hundreds of apps to help you turn them into something amazing. And that's what's really at the heart of it. Costing pennies, mobile photography apps give you the creative power of Photoshop, and more besides, without being tied to your desk. This makes mobile photography incredibly liberating for the creative photographic spirit. Suddenly, every free moment is an opportunity to both take and craft images. These apps have accelerated the creative process, as well as allowing you, quite simply, to be more creative, more of the time, for less money.
3. Twitter shows language evolves in cities:
WHERE do new words come from? On Twitter at least, they often begin life in cities with large African American populations before spreading more widely, according to a study of the language used on the social network.
Jacob Eisenstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and colleagues examined 30 million tweets sent from US locations between December 2009 and May 2011. Several new terms spread during this period, including "bruh", an alternative spelling of "bro" or "brother", which first arose in a few south-east cities before eventually hopping to parts of California. Residents of Cleveland, Ohio, were the first to use "ctfu", an abbreviation of "cracking the fuck up", usage that has since spread into Pennsylvania (arxiv.org/abs/1210.5268).
These are some of the other things I've been tweeting about today:
- "Late-Night Gadget Use Damages Your Sleep Cycle" http://pjblack.me/UQAHur (tweeted from my ipad)
- "Facebook Starts Letting iOS Users Auto-Upload All Their Snapshots With Photo Sync" http://pjblack.me/UQJmNv
- from @mcuban: "What I Really Think About Facebook" http://pjblack.me/UQEYxY
- i wonder if i could teach law through hip-hop: "Columbia Professor and GZA Aim to Help Teach Science Through Hip-Hop" http://pjblack.me/XYDA2I
- here is an interesting idea: "Apple and Twitter" http://pjblack.me/UQpNF3
- and a response: "NY Times Columnist: Death To 'Hipsters' (And Irony)" http://pjblack.me/UQpDOa
- a controversial piece in the @nytimes about hipsters: "How to Live Without Irony" http://pjblack.me/XYcIQo
- "Slate Registers 10 Million Visitors for October" http://pjblack.me/UaXJ0Q
- "evolution of the mobile phone by docomo" http://pjblack.me/WqGs7S
- "Twitter shows language evolves in cities" http://pjblack.me/SG7ySf
- "Editor Fergus Bell explains how AP verifies user-generated content from Sandy to Syria" http://pjblack.me/SG7stU
- "Twitter is safer in America: lessons from the Elmo and BBC sex scandals" http://pjblack.me/Wnaolm
- i hope so: "Are 'geek' and 'nerd' now positive terms?" http://pjblack.me/U5AvZK
- "What you can and can't say on social networking sites" http://pjblack.me/U5At4j
- "Online rants land Facebook and Twitter users in legal trouble" http://pjblack.me/Wn82Dh
- a profile of garion hall: "Girls on film: Australia's 'reality porn' king" http://pjblack.me/U5zdOD
- this is fun: "Intelligent Coca Cola Vending Machine Rewards Great Dance Moves With Free Cokes" http://pjblack.me/U5yCwr
- this is clever: "No, you don’t look fat in that shirt: Virtusize searches for the perfect online fit" http://pjblack.me/Wn7r4h
- @ryyder @melmenac we now live in the same building as a high court justice: "Keane appointed to High Court" http://pjblack.me/Ub4hfU
- "The rise of mobile phone photography" http://pjblack.me/Wn4qRF
- "Dismissal looms large for a new political generation" http://pjblack.me/UaCOeg #lwb242 #auspol
- links to the stories i discussed on @612brisbane this morning http://pjblack.me/XUZX9g
Follow me on Twitter @peterjblack.
And you can get my latest links anytime on my Rebelmouse social media front page.
