Hello. I'm Mark Riechers.
Freelance media dude, nerd-for-hire. Drinker of craft beers, lover of films, games, TV and technology. Boston terrier papa.
Freelance media dude, nerd-for-hire. Drinker of craft beers, lover of films, games, TV and technology. Boston terrier papa.
Most days, my time is taken up by my full-time gig as the digital producer for To The Best Of Our Knowledge a public radio program that reaches 220 stations nationwide. You can see my latest work there at TTBOOK.org.
When was the last time you got up off your couch and actually went out to see a movie? Or a play or a concert? It’s fun to go see things in person, but at the end of a long day, Netflix is streaming and the couch is two feet away. But what happens when everyone stays home? When the movie theaters and art houses and performance spaces sit empty? Do we lose something in the process?
Remember virtual reality? Back in the 1990’s, it was going to be the technology of the future. Today, it’s here. But we're still figuring out what to do with it. Storytellers and even journalists have begun experimenting — and at forefront is Will Smith. He recently created a virtual reality talk show called “The Foo Show,” in which he interviews game developers inside the environments from their favorite games. Will thinks that eventually virtual spaces will go way beyond games into theater, science, and beyond.
On Monday, August 21, a total solar eclipse will cross the United States for the first time in a hundred years. For millions of people in its path, it’ll be like opening a window directly onto the broader universe. Besides chasing eclipses, how else can we see what's out there, beyond our skies?
Ask any woman who spends much time online and she’ll tell you – being a woman on the internet means coping with abuse and harassment. In one study, nearly half of the women surveyed had been harassed online – and 76 percent of those under 30. As a society, why do we have to put up with this? And how do we fight back?
Emily Temple-Wood has been an avid Wikipedia editor since she was pretty young. And early on, she noticed that Wikipedia has a serious gender bias problem, so she began recruiting more women editors to write more Wikipedia articles about notable women. And in return she got… rape and death threats. Instead of retreating, she resolved that every time she got another hate-filled misogynistic message from a troll — she’d write a new Wikipedia bio of a female scientist.
Very cool summer student/scholar series we launched recently, leveraging StoryMapJS from Northwestern's Knight Lab.
Running point on the Twitter account for a highly-respected institution can be intimidating, but if you hold yourself to a high standard, the audience rewards you for it.
This web hub assembles a series I produced, composed of videos and brief stories examining various researchers looking to quantify how uncertainty affects different aspects of the economy. Video was shot and directed by Storyfirst Media and editorial was written by Pat Nedeau.
Speaking in Paris, Hansen pushed alumni, students and colleagues to confront and accept the daily uncertainties we face.
In every building on the College of Engineering campus, there are classrooms and lecture halls packed with students listening to lectures. Yet, increasingly, that very traditional way of learning is not the only way UW-Madison engineering students are learning.
Unlike computers, people cannot be upgraded. They work at a finite speed and at rising costs, so Rob Nowak is improving interactive systems that can optimize the performance of both humans and machines tackling big data problems together.