Jesus' Clothing

Joan Taylor estimates what clothing Jesus wore .

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Academic Book Proposals

Rachel Toor explains the importance of a good book proposal for those considering writing for an academic audience.

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Live Plants and Electricity Generation

Zack Fitzner promotes the use of living plants to generate electricity.

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Length of Exposure

Eric Levenson addresses length of exposure as a coronavirus risk factor.

It makes sense to me that breathing in one virus might take a long time to multiply to cause significant damage, and the slow start of the infection might give time for the body to marshall appropriate defenses. Breathing in thousands of virus particles likely would reach a critical state far more rapidly, placing the life of the host in danger.

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Workplace Surveillance

Natalie Chyi writes about workplace surveillance as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

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Online Instruction

Marian Stoltz-Loike offers tips for making online education more effective:

1. Post your syllabus;
2. Stop lecturing;
3. Get students involved;
4. Solicit student feedback;
5. Think out of the box;
6. Encourage students to self-assess;
7. Use collaborative tools;
8. Make material relevant to the current events; and,
9. Hold office hours.

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The Sleep Industry

Malibongwe Tyilo writes about new sleep technology such as sleep monitors and sensors.

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Virtual vs. Face-to-Face Meetings

Christina Cauterucci explains that the human need for non-verbal visual communication makes Zoom meetings exhausting.

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HTML Nofollow Attribute

Patrick Stox describes an expansion of options for warning against following links to another web site. According to Stox, Google has "added two brand new attributes, rel='ugc' and rel='sponsored'." The first is an acronym for "User Generated Content" such as blog comments. The second is for advertising.

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Google Using Recent Search Activity to Influence Results

George Nguyen reports on Google tracking recent search activity .

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Writing Over the Summer

Noah Shusterman suggest ways to have a productive summer writing . He suggests:

1. Treat your summer writing projects like a long road trip;
2. Have an insanely ambitious plan;
3. Set achievable goals;
4. Never double down on your goals;
5. Focus early, wander late; and,
6. When it's vacation, it's vacation.

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Information Literacy Instruction in an Online Environment

Melissa Wong uses this hour long presentation to provide tips for teaching information literacy to online university students.

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Predicting the Campus Experience, Fall 2020

Elizza Nadwarny considers ways in which university life will be different in Fall, 2020.

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Financial Recessions

John Waggoner provides background facts on recessions .

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Humans Are Cooperative

Rutger Bregman writes about human cooperation as seen when six boys were shipwrecked in the South Seas from June, 1965 to September, 1966. The boys managed to maintain a civil society despite primative conditions.

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No Results Found

Barry Schwartz suggests that marketers using Google should be wary of changes in Google's response when no results are found .

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Zoom Meeting Tips

Johnny Evans gives tips for successful

Zoom meetings. I was impressed with his suggestion that a saavy participant take a picture of the immaculate room where meetings will take place, and thereafter use that pristine image as a background. -DD

Microsoft MCSA, MCSD, MCSE Exams Will Be Retired

Microsoft is retiring several exams in mid-2020. These training programs have been replaced with new certifications with a role-based emphasis.

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Internet Marketing in a Recession

John Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz make a case for maintaining marketing efforts even in a recession.

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Tips for Grading

Kevin Gannon suggests ways to conduct grading which make it less onerous.

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Speeding Your Internet Service

Geoffrey Fowler suggests ways to speed up internet service to your home office.

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The Battle of Good and Evil

Catherine Nichols explores the shallowness of stories where individuals are essentially "good" or "evil" rather than decision makers choosing at each step how to act.

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Living Empathetically

Annmarie Cano discusses the importance of empathy , and how to be empathetic even when exhausted. She suggests that people:

1. Reconnect
2. Be curious
3. Validate
4. Be present
5. Spend time

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Shipping Pallets and Raggle Sticks

Tom Vanderbilt tells of the importance of shipping pallets and raggle sticks in the global economy.

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Gmail

J.R. Raphael provides tips on using Gmail .

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In Group Boundaries and Immigration

Vasiliki Fouka, Shom Mazumder, and Marco Tabellini researched shifts in in-group boundaries as a result of immigration by foreign language speakers.

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Universities and Coronavirus

Genevieve Shaker and William Plater explain how universities are contributing to the battle against coronavirus .

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Keyboard Mapping for Foreign Alphabets

Bill Mounce describes how to re-map an English language keyboard to a different alphabet (in this case, Greek).

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Ladder of Abstraction

Tom Barrett explains S. I. Hayakawa's mental tool for communicating, the "ladder of abstraction ."

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Cutting Your Hair

Louryn Strampe guides a person into determining whether to cut their own hair .

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Zoom Fatigue

Julia Skylar reports that video conferencing products such as Zoom can be especially fatiguing to the human brain, especially when a number of tiny images are projected which don't provide the non-verbal clues embedded in face-to-face communication. Skylar cites Andrew Franklin for the following insights:

[The attempt at multi-tasking] leads to problems in which group video chats become less collaborative and more like siloed panels, in which only two people at a time talk while the rest listen. Because each participant is using one audio stream and is aware of all the other voices, parallel conversations are impossible. If you view a single speaker at a time, you can’t recognize how non-active participants are behaving—something you would normally pick up with peripheral vision.

For some people, the prolonged split in attention creates a perplexing sense of being drained while having accomplished nothing. The brain becomes overwhelmed by unfamiliar excess stimuli while being hyper-focused on searching for non-verbal cues that it can’t find.

That’s why a traditional phone call may be less taxing on the brain, Franklin says, because it delivers on a small promise: to convey only a voice (paras. 12-14).

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Pointed Differences

Kensy Cooperrider describes research that shows different cultures employ different gestures for pointing .

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