Best Practices for Students #3: Spell-check Is Not Your Friend!

A conspiracy is afoot, my friends. Microsoft is in on it, for sure, but they’re only the public face of what may be the vastest, most insidious plot to undermine America’s credibility ever carried out. I’m pretty sure the North Koreans are in on it, and the Teachers’ Union. And MTV, definitely. Their plan: through the cunning manipulation of word processing software, particularly the spell-checking function, they hope to make Americans look stupid and awkward in front of the rest of the world. And it’s working! [Continue reading]

A Peril of Working at Home I Hadn’t Considered

When you are sitting in the garage with your laptop on your lap, writing, and the garage door is open and you’re enjoying the beautiful weather and you have a look of ease and contentment on your face, it’s really hard to convince missionaries that yes, you are in fact working. [Continue reading]

Best Practices for Students #2: Know Your Software

Learning is a craft, a set of skills that you put to use over the course of your life to construct your education. Like any craft, your mastery of the tools at your disposal is crucial. One of the most overlooked tools in the learner’s toolbox is your computer and its software. Your instructors have probably spent a lot of time teaching you how to use books and the research library, maybe how to glean information from the Web, and definitely how to use language to put forth and defend an argument, but how much time have you or your professors spent on how to use your computer? [Continue reading]

Best Practices for Students #1: Keep Everything

This is the first of a multi-post series I’ll be putting together over the summer. The goal is to accumulate a collection of tips that can be compiled into a guide for college and university students. If you have any good advice for students that you’d like to share, please contact me. [Continue reading]

Only the Strong (Verbs) Survive

Here’s a bonus tip I left out of my recent post on proofreading. One of the most common words used in the English language is “is” and its variants. Unfortunately, “is” signifies only existence, a quality of being, and not anything interesting about the nature of the existence being described. So it’s important to use verbs that convey more meaning, that carry forward the action or ideas that make up our work. [Continue reading]

Notes on Whorfian Relativity

The study or linguistics over the last century, as in the social sciences in general, has been characterized by a departure from the historical comparative method dominant in the 1800s. Modern students of language left behind the strongly evolutionist search for origins and took up the investigation of language as a working system and its implications for humans who use language in society. The foundation for such synchronic investigation was laid by Ferdinand de Saussure, from whom all following investigations have either developed or departed (or both). [Continue reading]

Franz Boas and the Rise of Modern Culture

Originally published in three parts in 2000 at Suite 101 when I was the editor of their Jewish-American History section. That section disappeared in a subsequent re-design of the site. This is a compilation of those pieces, edited to improve the flow as a single essay. [Continue reading]

Book Chapter: The God Gene

2006. “God Gene”. In Encyclopedia of Anthropology. H. James Birx, ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 1093-4.

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Book Review: Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture

2007. “Book Review: Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 36(3): 471 – 472.

This is my self-archive version of this article. It is available online to those with access to the SpringerLink service, and be in print with the release of the July issue.

BOOK REVIEW: Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture

By Gail Hawkes, Polity Press, Cambridge, England, 2004, 207 pp., £50.00 (hardback); £15.99 (paperback).

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PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

Maybe a whole planner system, like the DIY Planner I mentioned a few posts ago, seems like overkill to you — too much to carry and worry about? What about a simple, customizable, pocket-sized, use-it-and-toss-it approach?

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