Hackpacker

A little known dadvocate is unearthed in Darth Vader and Son , an important fathering text by Jeffrey Brown It’s not enough to just raise your kids to not eat their own snot – today the parent is the political as dadvocates push for ward the case for active fathering . Author Jeff Sass reckons iPads are bested by iDads as the latter has better battery life though memory decreases in older units . Not to mention the danger of their dad jokes going viral. But you don’t have to be male to wear the mantel . A uthor of parenting bible What to Expect When You’re Expecting , Heidi Murkoff calls herself a dadvocate and included a whole chapter in the latest edition dedicated to proactive papas. One day dadvocates may even dream of having a book of their own. In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

When asked about the worst words of 2013, The Atlantic ’s Richard Lawson responded that he hated the usage of curation. His objection to the word was that it has shifted far from its original high-art meaning: "It's a reappropriated term that used to mean something good - putting lovely and interesting things in a museum! - but now denotes a technique of cobbling together preexisting web content and sharing it with readers/followers/whomever. In other words, linking to things.” And he’s got a point. Social media means we’re all curators now. Anyone who signs up for a Twitter account is curating a stream of links and cat videos for their followers and friends.  But personalised curation is a response to the information overblown that the web has created. Social media has given many users a way to make sense of this by looking to trusted curators: their friends. Learnist is a good example of social media curating lessons as users learn from their friends about

In the corporate jungle there are few things as dangerous as the slow-moving HiPPO. The meeting is going fine until everyone turns and listens out for the confused charge of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (or HiPPO).  After absently fidgeting with their Blackberry for most of the presentation, HiPPOs will typically yawn, “Yeah, we’re not doing any of that. What about building a MySpace page? Kids love that don’t they?” This is answered by howls of approval from the corporate hyenas. HiPPO decision making is becoming extinct as businesses are placing an emphasis on marketing research and what their customers actually want. In Hollywood, however, amphibious animals are still calling the shots with the announcement this month of – hold onto your balls - HungryHungry Hippos: The Movie . In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment page. 

There's been a lot of death knells sounded for the bookshop. And a few of the big chains have been in strife - Borders, Angus and Robertson were the big news. But an interesting rumination on the future of bookshops from the Association of University Presses got me thinking about how they could thrive. Rather than being defensive about online bookshops stealing business, the article suggests stealing clicks and mortar's ideas like showrooming. Bookshops are becoming the place where buyers encounter books but sneak home to buy them cheaply (or increasingly do it in store on their phones). Last Christmas in the US Amazon paid shoppers to report prices on their mobiles by promising discounts or cash then undercut physical bookstores on. There's no avoiding clicks and mortar in the physical world. So the article suggests bookshops are evolving into a "book place" offering book rental, secondhand options or membership models. It might even be possible to get a qu

Also becoming popular as a tattoo (image by Emily Lewis ) It’s not just words that go extinct, sometimes the symbols before or after them fall off the perch. Take the interrobang – not the sexual torture it sounds like but a handy combination of the exclamation mark and the question mark or ‽ . It was invented in 1962 to handle both alarming and questioning sentences, but despite getting a run on typewriters in the 1970s never really took off. It became defunctuation. The interrobang joins typographical oddities at the foggy end of the keyboard such as irony mark ؟ (a backward question mark invented in France and never seen in the USA) and asterism ⁂ (a triangle of three asterisks used to signal the end of a sub-chapter). Still, there is the hope of refunctuation as symbols get resurrected like the @ sign – once exclusively used by accountants for “at the rate of” before email jumpstarted its comeback.   In Other Words is a regular on the Big Issue 's Ointment pag