On Wednesday, a Texas-based media consulting firm announced the birth of the millionth English word, which arrived on June 10, 2009, at 10:22 a.m., Stratford-on-Avon time.
The lucky lexeme? “Web 2.0,” which edged out “slumdog,” “octomom” and “N00b,” a disparaging term for video game newbies.
Language experts, when asked for comment, found themselves reaching for other words, [...]
Can you spot the real Dowbrigade? On Halloween (which would have been game 7 of the World Series that wasn’t) we were confronted, at the ungodly hour of 9 AM, by an apparition that would curdle the hair of any sane teacher – a dozen Dowbrigades! Luckily the Dowbrigade has little of either hair or [...]
Markos Moulitsas (LAW’99) talks with Maureen O’Rourke, dean of the School of Law, at the conference New Media and the Marketplace of Ideas. Photo by Vernon Doucette
[From an interesting interview with Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos published today in the BU newspaper web site]
Do you think the Republicans will eventually pick up on the [...]
A photograph of a 3 cm drop of ferrofluid, a suspension of magnetite in oil.
Harvard University today unveiled a brand-new website, HarvardScience, devoted to all matters related to science at the various schools, departments, institutes, and hospitals of Harvard University.Now, although Harvard is not as scientifically astute or as storied as its geeky neighbor MIT, [...]
What will millions of poor children do with cheap laptop computers? Play games, of course. But not just any games.
The vaunted “$100 laptop” already being distributed in some countries by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program lacks the horsepower to run flashy 3-D games like Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. [...]
SINGAPORE — Riding the crest of globalization and technology, English dominates the world as no language ever has, and some linguists now say it may never be dethroned as the king of languages.
Whoa, a bit grandiose, that King stuff. Didn’t we found this country to get away from that? And who says English is masculine? [...]
December 12, 2006
More than half the faculty at Boston University, Northeastern, Tufts, and Harvard are part-time or are not on the tenure track, according to a report released yesterday.
These prominent institutions performed poorly compared with their peers around the country, according to the study by the [...]
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. –In his five-year tenure at Harvard University,
President Lawrence H. Summers frequently found himself in the spotlight
because of rifts with faculty at the Ivy League institution.
Tuesday, facing the second no-confidence vote by faculty members in
[...]
The
bar is packed, the floor is wet, and dozens of glassy-eyed young people
are squeezed around tables trying to lob Ping-Pong balls into cups of
beer.
It [...]