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Eclipse Watching: can you read these warnings
No doubt there will be folks who look at the eclipse today without protecting their eyes. And it won’t be because they didn’t comprehend all the safety warnings. Don’t look at the sun directly. Ever 0.9th grade level Age 5.9 Don’t look directly at the sun today. 4thgrade Age 9 Don’t look directly […]
Confederate Monuments Through the Filter Bubble
Search engines, algorithms and simply selective reading essentially result in each of us consuming information that tells a consistent story with a consistent viewpoint. We are seeing and consuming less and less information that disagrees or contradicts our viewpoints. That’s the filter bubble we each live in and continues to make communicating with eachother possible. […]
Trump the linguist
Does anyone else find President Trump’s new-found respect for language strange and ironic. Overnight he finds himself quite comfortable with setting linguistic competencies for the nation! This coming from someone who doesn’t complete most of his sentences and whose impoverished repertoire of descriptives is “beautiful, “right” “tremendous” and “fake”. Thursday Pres. Trump declared that […]
Give me your worthy and your pure.
Zika is Now Local in Texas: So What?
A story in the NYT today is interesting if you’re following the public’s understanding of Zika. First the headline – Case of Zika Virus, Likely Spread by Mosquito, Is Reported in Texas I can just hear someone saying : “But what’s the big deal? We already know mosquitos spread Zika” But it’s the central message […]
Risk of losing health insurance: does this map help?
There’s an article and a large map appearing in the NYT today that I’m having trouble interpreting. The headline for the article reads: How Many People Across America Are at Risk of Losing Their Health Insurance? Then the map: But is the number of people in red in each state the number of people who […]
New York Animal Mysteriously Dropped From Wildlife List
There’s a new public awareness campaign in NYC – WILDLIFE NYC Raccoons Red-tail Hawks Deer Coyotes Piping Plovers Piping Plovers!!! for pete’s sake. What’s not to LOVE about the WildlifeNYC campaign sponsored by Department of Parks and Recreation – to increase public awareness about the wildlife all around us in the […]
Alert the MLA: Trump drops accuracy from English language requirement
I’ve been teaching language and communication for over 40 years. I started as a teacher of deaf children and went on to teach at community colleges, an Ivy League school, a prestigious Medical School and now at one of the world’s best city universities. And although I do look back from my “seasoned” professor vantage point wondering […]
April Showers, Tiny Tim and Learning New Words
April showers bring May flowers. Allergy relief medication Ads spring up everywhere. Relief is in our grasp – it’s as easy as a song. In fact this particular Ad harkens back to a lovely little ditty straight out of the American songbook. But this is the Health Literacy Lab after all. So instead of focusing on […]