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Author: Yunzer

Johnny Can’t Write

I an read article in today’s newspaper (yes I’m one of those throwbacks who still get a real newspaper every day) about the demise of cursive handwriting. According to the article, on the 2006 SAT Exams only about 15% of the students wrote their essays using cursive handwriting. The rest printed thier essays in block letters.

The artlcle goes on to say that U.S primary schoools only spend 10 minutes or less a day teaching cursive handwriting. And, as a result, more and more students not only have poor cursive handwriiting skills, but also have problems reading handwritten cursive text.

Read more about the causes and effects of the loss of cursive writing skills here.

Meat Puppets

Guess one really does learn something new every day…or at least every few days.

There was an article in the Washington Post on Saturday, 7 October 2006 about various marketing techniques used on the Internet. The author used a term I had never encountered before…”Meat Puppet,” along with a number of other more common terms.

After reading the article, I thought about it for a while and decided that the marketing techniques the author talked about were not really unique to the Internet. They have been in use for years. Its just that the media used to deliver them has changed and the results are achieved much more rapidly than in the past.

What do you think?

The New Look

As you can see, I’ve once again changed the look of HR’s halfVAST Blog. And, at first glance, you will probably say “It’s even uglier than the previous layout.” Well think about it for a minute. Using design tools available today, even novices can produce web sites that have colorful graphics and fancy layouts. But not everyone can produce web sites that conform to standards and have a consistent loook and feel across different browsers, physical screen sizes and screen resolutions. Although this site’s outward appearance is quite ordinary, the underlying design is not.

And, if nothing else, hopefully this less than stunning layout encourages viewers to focus on the content rather than the “eye candy.”

Michael Steele

There’s a guy named Michael Steele running for the Senate in Maryland. Take a look at the videos of his campaign ads. They do not contain the usual political trash-talk and mud-slinging one sees on TV this close to the elections.

Michael Steele may not win the election, but he certainly has my vote for the most entertaining political ads I’ve seen in a long time.

Speech Accent Archive

I found out from one of my fellow bloggers that George Mason University has a web site called the Speech Accent Archive. This extract from the home page explains its purpose:

“The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.”

Since I’m a GMU Alumnus, I dutifully made a recording of my voice and sent it off to GMU. Maybe it will end up in the Archive…or maybe not. But it is preserved for posterity (or however long HR’s halfVAST Blog exists) right here.

So do I have a regional accent? And if I do, what region of the US?