The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.
Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It's hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures.
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VisGIF
This Tumblr shows a curated list of GIFs created using http://visgif.it/ - Submit yours!
BILL WATTERSON: A cartoonist's advice
To me, Calvin and Hobbes is cartooning perfection – that rare strip that has both exquisite writing AND gorgeous artwork. A strip that managed to convey the joy of childhood, absurdity of humanity and power of imagination all through the relationship between a boy and his stuffed tiger. And most importantly, a strip that was consistently laugh-out-loud funny. I flick through my Calvin and Hobbes books a few times a year, not to read them cover to cover anymore, but just to get lost in Calvin’s world for awhile and to remind myself what comics are capable of. Besides the fact that Calvin and Hobbes is the comic I cherish above all others, Bill Watterson is my biggest creative influence and someone I admire greatly as an artist.
Mixlr
Live broadcasting has never been so simple. No need for special hardware, wires or tech support. Start broadcasting instantly.
Adding a Post Form to WordPress Front End With no Plugin - VoodooPress
Lately I’ve been working on another side project. A wine rating site that we hope to launch soon. But one of the requirements for the site was that once a wine rater logged in, they should have access to a form to rate wines. I didn’t want anyone to have to fuss with the back end of WordPress. I just wanted to present them with a simple form to fill out. Let’s look into how that’s done.
The Shape of Spectacular Speech: A Visual Analysis of MLK's "I Have a Dream" | Brain Pickings
The poetics of presenting, or why beautiful metaphors are better than beautiful slides.
Monarch Butterfly Migration Explorer
There has been a huge drop in the number of Monarch butterflies that made it to Canada this year. Let's see if we can see the difference using Flickr photos. Using geotagged photos from Flickr we've created a heatmap of the migration of the Monarch butterfly over the past several years.
Media History Digital Library - Online Access to the Histories of Cinema, Broadcasting & Sound
We are a non-profit initiative dedicated to digitizing collections of classic media periodicals that belong in the public domain for full public access. The project is supported by owners of materials who loan them for scanning, and donors who contribute funds to cover the cost of scanning. We have currently scanned over 800,000 pages, and that number is growing. Our Collections feature Extensive Runs of several important trade papers and fan magazines. Click on the arrows below to learn more about these periodicals and select volumes to download and read.
Digging Into the Theme Customizer: Overview | Wptuts+
In version 3.4, beside improving current features, WordPress released a very cool new feature. It’s a really useful tool that makes it easier for a user to configure and customize their website. That is the Theme Customizer. So what is the Theme Customizer, what can it do, and how to customize it? In this series, I’m going to walk you through understanding its components and tasks deeply. Once we’re done, you can totally customize it by yourself.
Create a Settings Page For Your WordPress Theme | Wptuts+
Creating your own theme for WordPress is a great way to give your blog or other WordPress powered web site an original touch. But even the nicest looking theme is not that nice if you have to get under the hood and edit the theme’s HTML or PHP code whenever it’s time change some aspects of it. Especially, when it’s not you but a paying customer using your theme. Luckily, creating a settings page for your theme in WordPress is not very hard, and after reading this tutorial, you will be able to create one in no time!
Photography for Enhancing Social-Emotional Learning | User Generated Education
I spent the day attending a full day workshop on Phototherapy by Judy Weiser. This post is not about how to use photos for therapy, but the workshop reinforced the power of images for building social emotional skills in our students. There are many resources online about using digital cameras and images in the classroom. The focus of this post is having our learners use photography and digital images to make personal connections with themselves, the content, each other, and other “cultures” with the ultimate goals of increased self-awareness, cultural awareness, and empathy.
RIP, Elmore Leonard: The Beloved Author's 10 Rules of Writing | Brain Pickings
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
How to Make Perfect Coffee - Michael Haft and Harrison Suarez - The Atlantic
But through trial and error—and an absurd amount of mistakes—we've managed to learn. It's a shame to waste these moments on bad coffee, and if you're going to drink it every day, or if you're going to serve it to other people, it may as well be good, right? Actually, it should be better than good. It should be perfect.
WordPress › UpdraftPlus - WordPress Backup and Restoration « WordPress Plugins
UpdraftPlus simplifies backups (and restoration). Backup into the cloud (Amazon S3 (or compatible), Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and email) and restore with a single click. Backups of files and database can have separate schedules.
James Elkins: How to Look at Mondrian
Our eyes are far too good for us. They show us so much that we can't take it all in, so we shut out most of the world, and try to look at things as briskly and efficiently as possible. What happens if we stop, and take the time to look more carefully? Then the world unfolds like a flower, full of colors and shapes that we had never suspected.
cuny-academic-commons/cac-twitter-stream
This repo contains a single PHP file that has been designed as a drop-in WordPress page template to provide an interface that displays and organizes any number of Twitter's Embedded Timelines. It contains all the PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript needed to connect to Twitter's oembed API, download the information requested and then display that information on a WordPress page. As this was designed for use on The CUNY Academic Commons site, its structure is highly customized to work with our layout and specific Timelines. However, customizing the structure and page layout shouldn't be too difficult, which is why we are releasing it to the public in the hopes that someone will find it useful for their own implementation.
MixBit
The MixBit app and website helps people create videos together. The app lets you record, edit and publish videos as short as one second or as long as an hour—right from your mobile device. The MixBit site is also the first site that lets users collaborate with each other and remix videos uploaded by the community. The MixBit app and website are brought to you by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, co-founders of YouTube. We have always been passionate about video. We started YouTube to make it easy for everyone to share videos. Now we want to help people make great videos. The MixBit website is a community of creators. We believe everyone has something interesting to say. We give people fun, intuitive tools to help them tell stories together. We think video should be a living, breathing entity and that creativity is a collaborative process. More than simply capturing brief moments in time, we help people bring stories to life.
FlowType.JS — Responsive web typography at its finest: font-size and line-height based on element width.
Ideally, the most legible typography contains between 45 and 75 characters per line. This is difficult to accomplish for all screen widths with only CSS media-queries. FlowType.JS eases this difficulty by changing the font-size—and subsequently the line-height—based on a specific element's width. This allows for a perfect character count per line at any screen width.
Dinosaur Discs
"Folk Music in America" is a series of 15 LP records published by the Library of Congress between 1976 and 1978 to celebrate the bicentennial of the American Revolution. It was curated by librarian/collector-cum-discographer Richard K. Spottswood, and funded by a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Radiolab Behind the Scenes on Vimeo
A peek into how the podcast comes together, and what it's like to work at Radiolab.
8tracks internet radio | Free music playlists | Best app for music
8tracks is internet radio created by people, not algorithms. Know your music? Make an online mixtape with 8 or more tracks. Add a title, cover art, tags, and share your mix with friends or find your audience on 8tracks.
The Mobile Story
What happens when stories meet mobile media? In this cutting-edge collection, contributors explore digital storytelling in ways that look beyond the desktop to consider how stories can be told through mobile, locative, and pervasive technologies. This book offers dynamic insights about the new nature of narrative in the age of mobile media, studying digital stories that are site-specific, context-aware, and involve the reader in fascinating ways.
GIF FIGHT!!
GIF FIGHT!! presents a JPG or PNG each week for you to animate the crap out of. Send us Tumbler links here or via Twiitter #GIFFight.
Live From Daryl's House with Daryl Hal
Daryl Hall started Live From Daryl's House, the free monthly web show in late 2007, after having the idea of "playing with my friends and putting it up on the Internet," and the show has since garnered acclaim from Rolling Stone, SPIN, Daily Variety, CNN, BBC, Yahoo! Music and influential blogger Bob Lefsetz, who cited Live From Daryl's House as a perfect example of a veteran artist reinventing himself in the digital age by collaborating with both established colleagues and newer performers.
Incorporating the Settings API in WordPress Themes » cb.blog
I have not yet come across anything that really put everything together, and explained the process and implementation from beginning to end, in a way that even the less-experienced Theme developers (like me) could easily understand. This tutorial will attempt to fill that gap, by providing examples of current (as of the pending release of WordPress 3.1) best-practice implementation, not merely of the Settings API, but of Theme Options implementation as a whole
iPhone Photography
This being said, there is much more to taking a picture than just clicking a button. There are certain concepts and rules, that, when applied, help create an even more beautiful picture. These rules usually beg to be broken, and that’s fine, because iPhone photography, and photography in general, is more about your creativity than your technique. The way is see it, technique teaches you the basics of iPhoneography, while creativity unleashes the real potential of your photographs. If you’re here to learn about iPhoneography, then you came to the right place. Whether you are an experienced photographer or a beginner, you will find this page to be a real wealth of information. From iPhone photography tutorials, to the best apps for iPhone photography, we cover a wide range of topics to help you become a better photographer.
A New Learning Environment for the Future of Learning - EdTech Researcher - Education Week
In the case of the Future of Learning Institute, this pedagogical vision of a networked learning environment aligns much better with our learning goals than the instructionist, content-delivery focused, Thorndikian assumptions built into the typical LMS. We don't really need to disseminate content; we need to empower participants to produce and share their own content. So our first step, and the most important one, was hiring Alan Levine of ds106 fame to help us conceptualize and implement what we wanted to do. Alan has recently struck out on his own as a consultant, and I can't recommend him enough to anyone looking for a great thought partner and developer of online learning spaces. He was incredible helpful in the big conceptual ideas, in the building, and in supporting us during the institute with technical details.
MOOC Killer Apps: The Autograder vs. The Syndication Engine - EdTech Researcher - Education Week
I did some playing this summer with syndication engines myself. With help from the extraordinary Alan Levine of ds106 fame, some colleagues and I built a new online learning environment for the Future of Learning Institute held by Project Zero and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. You can see our syndication engine hoovering up content from blogs, Twitter, Instagram, and even email posts at futureoflearningpz.org/flow.
How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make a Video... - YouTube
How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make a Video...
Customizing Bootstrap | Smashing Coding
Twitter’s Bootstrap has taken off like a rocket since its release a year ago. The popular CSS framework supplies a responsive grid system, pre-styled components and JavaScript plugins to a parade of websites. One of Bootstrap’s appeals is that it just works. It’s a significant time-saver when starting a website, so much so that major organizations such as NBC, NASA and the White House are adopting it. And it empowers even the non-designers among us to turn out something decent.