I have only a glancing relationship with the fascinating world of computer security. But I've realized recently that even we non-experts have a pretty rich vocabulary for the many flavors of ill intent in the world of computers and beyond.  Continue reading...

Shannon Reed writes: "Texting, Twitter, Facebook statuses, IMing... all of these take up more of teenagers' lives than reading, hand-writing or (I suspect) conversing these days. Thus, I wanted to find a way to incorporate this familiar way of communicating into my curriculum."  Continue reading...

In last Sunday's New York Times, I wrote about how researchers are using Twitter to build huge linguistic datasets in order to answer all sorts of interesting analytical questions. Some are looking at the emotional responses of Libyans to unfolding events like the death of Qaddafi, while others are tracking the distribution of regional patterns in American English. This latter research area, Twitter dialectology, is just getting off the ground, but the results are already quite intriguing.  Continue reading...

October 20 is the National Day on Writing, an annual celebration of all things writerly. You can take part in the festivities on Twitter by using the hashtag #whyIwrite. For more information see this post from Katherine Schulten of the New York Times Learning Network, one of the sponsors of this year's event.

It's fair to say that when it comes to online discourse we live in the Golden Age of Snark. (That's snark as in "snide commentary," not the imaginary animal of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark.") When every statement you make is open to sarcastic rebuttals, sometimes the best policy is to ridicule yourself before someone else has the chance. Nowhere is this more true than Twitter, where the convention of the "hashtag" has been pressed into the service of self-mockery.  Continue reading...

Ever wonder what those squiggly words are that you have to spell in order to get past security on many websites? They're called CAPTCHAs, and Mike Pope, a technical writer and editor at Microsoft, has the full story on them.  Continue reading...