November 2002 Archive Page

"A TextArc is a visual represention of a text-the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning." W. Bradford Paley --Text Arc (Literary Concordance/Word Association Thingy)TextArc.org)

Extremely cool visual/spatial representation of an entire text... I want to play with this more. Thanks for the link, Jim.

Young scholars have expressed their rapture for the Bronze Lullaby, the Taco Bell Cannon, Beethoven's Erotica, Tchaikovsky's Cracknutter Suite, and Gershwin's Rap City in Blue.

In defining musical terms, they also demonstrate that they know their brass from their oboe.

Music sung by two people at the same lime is called a duel; if they sing without music it is called Acapulco. --Music 101 Exam Answers"The Internet")

"Put your hands in your laps. Close your eyes and ask yourselves: Is the e-mail I'm about to send necessary? And if not, is it at least fun? If you cannot answer yes to either of those questions--don't hit that send button." Stanley Bing

[Bing offers an interesting list of guidelines, on which I'll comment...

1. Stop telling people you Will Do something. [Fair enough... either ask permission or announce a completed task.]
2. Stop thanking people so much.[Thanks, Bing. Oh --whoops. Now I've got to e-mail him an apology.]
3. Stop using e-mail when there's a damn phone on your desk. [This advice isn't so useful in academia, when professors and students often don't keep the same hours.]
4. Never hesitate to send an e-mail that has actual data in it. [But be sure the recipient wants that e-mail.]
5. Stop copying me on transitional crud. I want stuff that's fully baked, not half-baked! [Depends on how involved in something I am... the people Bing supervises will start hiding from him, and he'll have fewer opportunities to offer input until the people who work for him think that they are already finished with whatever it is they are submitting, which means they will be less receptive to Bing's suggestions.]
6. And absotively posilutely no e-mail chains of more than ten individual communications! --Log Off, You Losers! Electronic Flatulence Must Cease!Fortune)

He says that it's time for a meeting if the chain gets that long... but what if the chain includes people in different time zones? Sometimes a meeting simply isn't practical.]

JENNY JONES: Boy, we have a show for you today! Recently, the University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty made the stunning declaration that nobody has "the foggiest idea" what postmodernism means.
[...]
JENNY JONES: Tell us how you think postmodernism affected your career as a novelist.

ALEX: I disavowed writing that contained real ideas or any real passion. My work became disjunctive, facetious and nihilistic. It was all blank parody, irony enveloped in more irony. It merely recapitulated the pernicious banality of television and advertising. I found myself indiscriminately incorporating any and all kinds of pop kitsch and shlock. (He begins to weep again.)

JENNY JONES: And this spilled over into your personal life?

ALEX: It was impossible for me to experience life with any emotional intensity. I couldn't control the irony anymore. I perceived my own feelings as if they were in quotes. I italicized everything and everyone. It became impossible for me to appraise the quality of anything. To me everything was equivalent-the Brandenburg Concertos and the Lysol jingle had the same value. (He breaks down, sobbing.)

JENNY JONES: Now, you're involved in a lawsuit, aren't you?

ALEX: Yes. I'm suing the Modern Language Association. --Geraldo, Eat Your Avant-Pop Heart OutNYT [originally])

"[A] new trend is oxygen-fortified drinks to replenish your body with oxygen. It shouldn't surprise you that breathing works better. Oxygen best enters the bloodstream through the lungs, not the stomach. You would need to drink about a litre of oxygenated water every 30 seconds to get a deep breath's worth of extra oxygen, and this assumes you don't pee." Christopher Wanjek --Bad Medicine: Homeopathy is based on a 300-year-old mistake...Guardian)

This reminds me of the anti-fluroide panic that surges up every few years. Why do some people get so fixated on one idea?

"These are desperate times, and desperate times call for desperation. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that I am duty-bound to alert America to the clear and present danger posed by Mel Brooks. I first became suspicious of Mr. Brooks when the Enron scandal broke. My suspicions only grew as other examples of "aggressive accounting procedures" became public, bringing down such companies as Arthur Andersen and WorldCom. These fears were based on my intimate knowledge of the plot points of Brooks's 1967 film The Producers..." Steve Mirsky [I'm reminded of the inescapable words of Dark Helmut, from Brooks's Spaceballs: "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb." Thanks for the suggestion, Marnie.--DGJ] --The 2000-Year Old MenaceScientific American)

Have you ever noticed that the letters "Tri" in cursive look an awful lot like "Fu"? Patricia Breen apparently didn't when she designed this "???ck or Treat" Christmas ornament. --They Should Have Used Another Typeface (Nieman Marcus)

This is better than the urban legend about the Nieman Marcus cookies.

Most of my students probably know about my odd fascination with the Gund toy "Rainbow Hector." My sister sent me the above link, which includes a story about a musical group in Trinidad, which includes a member named Gary Hector, who has a 10-year-old daughter named... you guessed it... Rainbow. (See the caption at the bottom of the page.) --Another Rainbow Hector for the World to LoveGuardian)

"I confess I sometimes don't know whether to be happy or depressed when I dip into Sims world. Sometimes you get the sense that these Sims fanatics are compensating online for the needs that aren't met in their real lives.... But the other and more positive sensation you get in Sims world is that some mass creative process is going on, like the writing of a joint novel with millions of collaborative and competitive authors. We generally don't think that John Updike or Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick are pathetic because they escape from reality into richly populated fantasy worlds." --Oversimulated SuburbiaNY Times [registration])

"Would I open a huge document-say a PDF book chapter from Amazon? I don't know. What do I want on my computer versus what do I want bookmarked access to? I don't know. Here's what I do know: I need help in managing my attachments and getting more value from the megabytes of media material I'm sent." In a poorly titled article, Michael Schrage reviews all the e-mail he has gotten over the past two years. --Beta Version ["The fastest-growing parts of my email inbox are spam and attachments"]Technology Marketing)

"Developing fixed-size Web pages is a fundamentally flawed practice. Not only does it result in Web pages that remain at a constant size regardless of the user's browser size, but it fails to take advantage of the medium's flexibility. Nonetheless, Web site creators continue to develop fixed pages." James Kalbach --The Myth of 800 x 600WebReview)

"The book describes a bizarre situation in American universities in which academics in various (mostly new-minted) fields such as Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Science Studies, plus a few more familiar ones such as Sociology, Comparative Literature and the like, make a career of writing about science without taking the trouble to know anything about it." Ophelia Benson interviews one of the co-authors of Higher Superstition (1994). --Higher Superstition Revisited: An Interview with Norman LevittButterflies and Wheels)

The book, which Levitt wrote with Paul R. Gross, is said to have inspired the infamous Sokal hoax.

"Two Columbia University undergraduate students were arrested Monday for allegedly using high-tech transmitters and walkie-talkies to cheat on the Graduate Record Examination." --2 Students Arrested for Alleged High-Tech Cheating on GREChronicle)

"[O]nly about one in seven -- 13 percent -- of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, the prime age for military warriors, could find Iraq. The score was the same for Iran, an Iraqi neighbor." That's bad enough, but 11% couldn't even find the United States! --Global Goofs: U.S. Youth Can't Find IraqCNN)

Here's a good introduction to a famous controversy over the discovery of the structure of DNA: "The victors were James Watson and Francis Crick, who together with Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for crossing the finish line first. The loser was Rosalind Franklin, who produced the x-ray data that most strongly supported the structure but was not properly acknowledged for her contributions." --The Twisted Road to the Double HelixScientific American)

"To feed my craving for modern first editions, including my beloved Williams and Jenningses, takes a fifth of my income - more than I spend on food or my children. I have lost entire weekends in a haze of book fairs and pilgrimages to remote bookshops (which typically prove to be closed). Friends and family have felt obliged to shun me lest I drag them down with my sordid behaviour; my burblings of cracked hinges, crushed spines and discoloured front-end papers." David Lovibond --Confessions of a dustjacket junkieSpectator)

"[W]hen The New Yorker called him out on how he can say that other people's aging mothers should be put down like old horses but that his own should receive only the very best care in an expensive nursing home, [bioethicist Peter] Singer replied, 'Perhaps it's more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it is your mother.' So my grand pronouncements apply to everyone else but not me! There's a word for this." Gregg Easterbrook

--Greatest Good for the Greatest NumberWashington Monthly)

Easterbrook enjoys picturing Singer as a nut, but also praises him for rejecting some of the poorly understood anti-globalization stances that have become part of a leftist mantra. "He notes, for example, that you can't complain that nationalism is bad and then also complain that the World Trade Organization erodes national sovereignty. And he notes that the main effect of NAFTA, denounced by the anti-globalization left as a tool of corporate oligarchs, has been the creation of relatively high-paying jobs in Mexico. Half the point of NAFTA was to ship American jobs to Mexico, which is bad for American labor but great for Mexicans."

"Only William Shatner, who exists in the strange non-realm of absolute self-importance and constant self-mockery, could impart that marvelous unconscious irony to what would otherwise be a dull-witted, mechanical loser." Tom Maxwell --Officer Down! A Deconstruction of T.J. HookerMorphizm)

You've "seen" them. Maybe on a sign at the "grocery" store, maybe in an ad in your "local" newspaper. Perhaps even in a "memo" that circulated throughout your company. They're quotation marks, and they turn up in the strangest of places. --Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks"Found")

Found "on" Jenny Anderson's link "page".

"Americans have had a latent fear of catastrophic computer attack ever since a teenage Matthew Broderick hacked into the Pentagon's nuclear weapons system and nearly launched World War III in the 1983 movie WarGames. Judging by official alarums and newspaper headlines, such scenarios are all the more likely in today's wired world. There's just one problem: There is no such thing as cyberterrorism--no instance of anyone ever having been killed by a terrorist (or anyone else) using a computer." Joshua Green --The Myth of CyberterrorismWashington Monthly)

"A deal struck between Sims publisher Electronic Arts and the fastfood mega-corporation allows Sims players to open up their own McDonald's kiosk and improve their game stats by consuming McD's greasy goodies. While news of this groundbreaking sponsorship deal fades quickly from memory, failure to address this latest barrage in the war on ad-free gaming could result in a super-sized sandwich of misery. Based on the success of previous Sims offerings, The Sims Online is an ideal high-profile backdrop in the war against 'advergaming.'" Tony Walsh

--Big Mac AttackedAlterNet)

Of Walsh's suggestions for ways to combat the inevitable commercial colonization of virtual environments, I like this the best: "Actually order and consume virtual McD's food, then use The Sims Online's 'expressive gestures' in creative ways. Lie down and play dead. Emote the vomiting, sickness, or fatigue that might overcome you after eating a real life McNugget."

"If you've recently created your first website and you're getting ready to submit it for a class assignment, then this page is for you. Follow this checklist before you submit your project, and you'll avoid many of the simple technical issues that might prevent your instructor from accessing or fully appreciating your content." --Newbie Web Author ChecklistD.G. Jerz)

"A Tablet PC is about the size of a legal pad and includes a digital pen for handwritten data entry and navigation. Its advocates say it will be just the thing for the most mobile workers, including those who work standing up and those who just don't like to type. But naysayers point out that tablet-style computers have been tried before and failed (albeit with technical flaws that vendors now claim to have overcome). Tablets will remain niche products at best, say these critics."

--Future of the NotebookComputerworld)

The original Star Trek series featured a prop, that we never got a good look at, that was obviously supposed to be some kind of electronic clipboard. I'm surprised that nobody seems to have given the prop designers for that show the credit they probably deserve.

"Ever since Martel won Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize last month for 'The Life of Pi,' charges of plagiarism and intellectual theft have swirled around him. But as damning as the accusations may sound, the controversy reflects more poorly on those who have propagated it than on Martel. The brouhaha provides less insight into the ethics of literary creation than the way the media can spead false claims..... The Times' description of the books made the case seem open and shut: Martel's book told 'the story of an Indian youth who survives a shipwreck and finds himself occupying a lifeboat with a tiger,' while Scliar's was 'the tale of a Jewish youth who survives a shipwreck and ends up sharing a lifeboat with a panther.'" J. Peder Zane

--The Scandal that Wasn'tNews Observer)

From the conclusion of the above news story: "Like television talking heads, they found it easier to shoot from the lip than flip open a book. Accountability is a two-way street. Sadly, errors often have a longer life than corrections. Even when the record is set straight, I fear a cloud will hang over Martel and his book."

"The overriding principles were of simplicity and speed, oft-expressed in the maxim ''the story is the star.' Anything that would distract from that, either in terms of the attention a member of editorial staff would be able to give it, or the attention a user would give it, was pretty ruthlessly discarded. The other thing that worked well was being able to say 'oh sh*t' and call attention to when we were off-target without fear of censure. Often in a big important project, the momentum and pressure can make people stay quiet, even if they think bad decisions are being made." Matt Jones gives an interview to Rusty Foster

--A Visit with a Digital ArchitectOnline Journalism Review)

If a designer is a barefoot, goatee-wearing cyber-visionary, and a corporate engineer is a cubicle-dwelling, tie-wearing number-cruncher, then an information architect is a guy who wears both a suit jacket and a pony tail, or maybe a tie and an earring.

"What books should every young woman read? We put this question to a distinguished group of writers and intellectuals. We asked them to name four books they consider essential for the educated woman. If you're curious, Jane Austen won the pageant with the most mentions. Tied for second place: two dead white males, Aristotle and Thucydides. Most surprising book to make the list -- Mommie Dearest."

--A Reading List for Every Young WomanThe Women's Quarterly)

Found on bookslut, which also points to The Marine Corps Professional Reading Program List.

"Harry Potter is no braver than his best friend, Ron Weasley, just richer and better-connected. Harry's other good friend, Hermione Granger, is smarter and a better student. The one thing Harry excels at is the sport of Quidditch, and his pampered-jock status allows him to slide in his studies, as long as he brings the school glory on the playing field. But as Charles Barkley long ago noted, being a good athlete doesn't make you a role model." Chris Suellentrop

--Harry Potter: Pampered Jock, Pasty, FraudSlate)

I haven't read any of the Harry Potter books and I didn't watch much of the video when my wife rented it, but I really liked this quote from Suellentrop's review: "Admiring Harry for his flying skill is like admiring a cheetah for running fast. It's beautiful, but it's not an accomplishment."

"We thought it would be a great idea to hook up two instances of the A.L.I.C.E chat bot to each other, despite pleb's pleas that it would have a catastrophic effect on the universe. The results are amusing, you can see them below."

Alice1: You can download me for free!
Alice2: No I don't think I can do it.
Alice1: Are you serious? Where do you get your ideas?
Alice2: Everything I need to know, I learned from Dr. Richard S. Wallace.
Alice1: All things you need to know you learned from Dr Richard s Wallace?
Alice2: But all things are not always me need to know me learned from Dr Richard s Wallace.
Alice1: Umm. But all things are not always are not always you need to know you learned from Dr Richard s Wallace.
Alice2: Interesting. But all things are not always are not always are not always me need to know me learned from Dr Richard s Wallace.

--A.L.I.C.E Bot-offNik)

Read a brief bio of Dr. Richard S. Wallace, creator of A.L.I.C.E.

"[A] tenured professor of history sent a young Air Force Academy cadet some e-mail containing inflammatory, anti-military comments. Professor Peter N. Kirstein, an avowed pacifist, quickly apologized to the cadet and to the Air Force Academy for his e-mail message, but in the meantime thousands of other interested parties have taken offense."

--"Furious" Peter N. Kirstein, Ph.D. vs. "Baby-killing" Cadet Kurpeil, Xavier University)

While Prof. Kirstein sounds annoyed that his private e-mail to Cadet Kurpeil got spread across the Internet, his action was completely unprofessional. Kirstein has every right his pacifist beliefs, and every right to share them with whomever he wishes. But "You are worse than the snipers" is hardly the voice of a trustworthy academic, who's supposed to be able to comprehend all sides of an issue. Now that he's been relieved of his teaching duties, Kirstein will have some time on his hands to reflect on how much damage it's possible to inflict on yourself by hitting "send" without thinking about what you are doing.

"To appear on the construction site drinking a beverage that is both calorie- and caffeine-free would be an emasculating blow to my carefully cultivated image as a burly, rough-and-tumble working-class type," Burdon said. "The sight of me consuming such a soft drink would diminish the respect I enjoy from my professional peer group by casting a light of skepticism upon my masculinity and even my sexuality." --Area Man Buying Not So Much a Soft Drink as an ImageThe Onion)

Not quite as good as "Grad Student Deconstructs Take-out Menu," but still worth a chuckle.

"So far, however, I have not seen a book that explains how to build crummy, dysfunctional Web sites that chase away customers and produce no useful results. Of course, there is no shortage of sites of this kind out there, but until now there has never been a systematic, comprehensive guide to how to create and maintain them. " Charlie Morris

--How To Build Lame Web SitesWeb Developer's Journal)

The tone of the above article is great for "preaching to the choir," but a person who is inexperienced enough to make these mistakes will likely be offended by the tone. I tried a similar tone when I wrote a critique of the journal Kairos. While it was fun to write, and my advanced students enjoy reading it, I wouldn't use it to instruct the audience that really needs to get the message. Personally I'd love to have somebody do a thorough critique of my pages, so that I'd have a chance to learn from the experience and perhaps even implement some of the resulting suggestions.

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative." A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

--Double Negative JokeJoke or Not)

I won't forget not to thank Dave for refraining from not deciding not to keep this suggestion to himself. (Let's see...did that come out as positive or negative?)

"navigate Avoid the verb navigate to refer to moving from site to site, page to page within a site, or link to link on the Internet (or on the desktop or in other applications, as well). Instead, use explore to mean looking for sites or pages generally, move to or move through to refer to sequentially moving from one link or site to another, or a similar neutral term describing the action." Micro$oft

Jen Veterli comments: "Gee, I can't imagine why Microsoft would dislike the word 'navigate'...."

--Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical PublicationsMicro$oft -- via Circadian Shift)

BTW, I added the inline link above. I spent two semesters interning and one summer working for a radio news station when I was an undergrad. During that time I persistently challenged anyone who refered to a "press conference" or a "press release". After all, a radio has nothing to do with a printing press. Language is fun. I can look back at my attempt to control language as sort of dorkily amusing, but when Bill Gates tries to control language, it's scary.

"Walt Disney first sketched his character in 1928 but an Austrian art historian spotted an uncannily similar drawing. The painting, which has been dated back to the early 14th Century, is in the Community Church in Malta, Carinthia. Next to a large sketch of St. Christopher is a clear drawing of the mouse." --700-year-old picture of 'Mickey Mouse' found in Austrian churchAnanova)

In other news... Austrian copyright lawers file petition to extend copyright another 700 years... Sony Bono & Walt Disney roll in their respective gold-trimmed, diamond-studded coffins.

"This psychological battle between intellect and intuition was played out in almost every episode of Star Trek in the characters of the ultrarational Mr. Spock and the hyperemotional Dr. McCoy, with Captain Kirk as the near perfect synthesis of both. Thus, I call this balance the Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect." Michael Schermer

--The Captain Kirk PrincipleScientific American)

Star Trek meets Aristotle's rhetorical strategies: Kirk = ethos (character); Spock = logos (logic); McCoy = pathos (emotion). I think of Kirk as a man of action, who pays attention to his gut (among other organs in that vicinity) whenever the logic of Spock and the emotions of McCoy gave him conflicting advice. Schermer's explanation doesn't quite account for Kirk's warp-drive libido.

An in-depth analysis of the research of Elisabeth Targ. "None of the patients knew which group they had been randomly assigned to, and thus whether they were being prayed for. During the six-month study, four of the patients died - a typical mortality rate. When the data was unblinded, the researchers learned that the four who had died were in the control group. All 10 who were prayed for were still alive." Po Bronson

--A Prayer Before DyingWired)

Read this article carefully -- it's not what you think. Another quote from the article: "On TV, Targ presented herself as just another medical researcher, but if she spent her entire life in search of the paranormal, it's not surprising that she eventually found traces of it."

"It was there we all huddled in the concrete-block laundromat while the storm passed overhead, with lightning so continuous, the ground was lit up like high noon. What we didn't know then was that there was a tornado passing directly above us, one that had touched down just a few miles away, then lifted up for a few moments before dropping down again. We found out the danger we'd been in a couple minutes later..." Bruce Tognazzini

--TornadoAskTog)

I'm a textual person, so I don't watch much TV news. The video of the recent tornados in the American south looked like it could have been taken anyhere, and special effects storms are always more dramatically photographed than real ones. Tognazzini is a usabilty guru with whom I've exchanged a few e-mails, and who published a comment I sent him about his "Delivering Reports Without Getting Lynched" column. I've seen the interior of his motor home. His column jumped the shark when he stopped updating it monthly, and of course I don't know him personally--but this eyewitness account seems so much more real than TV news footage introduced by a lantern-jawed mannequin and followed by an advertisement for life insurance.

Religion and science: "As recently as the '70s, intellectuals assumed that hard science was on track to resolve the two Really Big Questions: why life exists and how the universe began. What's more, both Really Big Answers were assumed to involve strictly deterministic forces. But things haven't worked out that way. Instead, the more scientists have learned, the more mysterious the Really Big Questions have become." --The New ConvergenceWired)

The article includes an image of Darwin and Einstein sporting halos.

"When workers willfully become less productive, the economy of the household suffers," Browning said. "But in a society where a range of ability naturally exists, someone is bound to object to picking up the slack for others and end up getting all pissy, like Josh does." --Marxists' Apartment a Microcosm of Why Marxism Doesn't WorkThe Onion)

Thanks for the link, Kate!

Bob Bailey traces the spread of the popular "7 plus or minus 2" meme: "I have had people tell that [Miller's] 'Magic 7' paper is the reason why the local telephone number has seven numbers. This is not true. I have had others tell me that the 'Magic 7' paper is the reason they:

• place only seven items on the menu bar,
• place only seven items in a pull-down menu,
• have only seven bulleted items in a list,
• never have more than seven radio buttons or check boxes together, and
• place only seven tabs at the top of a website page."

--Reducing Reliance on Superstition (Let's Start with Miller's "Magic 7")Human Factors International)

Found via Ron's Ramblings.

"If we improved all the intranets in the world to the usability level achieved by the best 25% in our study, the world economy would save $311,294,070,513 per year for the sixteen test tasks alone. Adding the likely savings from company-specific tasks leads us to an estimated $600 billion in total annual productivity improvements." Jakob Nielsen is at it once again.

In "Spanking Jakob Nielsen," John S. Rhodes replies: "He's one sharp cookie. Arguably, he's done more for usability than any other person I know. But, I don't think we should allow Nielsen to feed us all of his ideas without a touch of skepticism." --Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar QuestionUsetIT.com)

Grounded airplane or abandoned missile silo... there's no place like home.Housing OptionsVarious)

"'Frog sex malformities linked to weedkiller, study says' was a popular media story last week. University of California junk scientist Tyrone Hayes once again tried to link the widely used herbicide atrazine with deformed frog sex organs and allegedly declining frog populations. Hayes' one-page write-up of his latest scary 'research' appeared in the Halloween issue of the pre-eminent journal Nature. No doubt the article was a treat for publicity-hungry Nature and anti-chemical activists (the sponsors of the study)."Steven Miloy

--Freaky Frog FraudFox News)

My freshman composition students are busily seeking credible sources for their persuasive researched reports. If I were looking for credible scientific data, I wouldn't start in a glossy commercialized publication like Nature. All research has to be funded by somebody, and all research is to some extent political, but journalists are far too quick to overhype environmental scare stories like this.

"CNN sucks. It's not even news anymore; it's entertainment. I was trying to watch the news the other day when I decided to turn on CNN and 45 minutes later I came away with the following facts:

1. Actress Winona Ryder has been charged with shop lifting.
2. It's shark week on the Discovery Channel.
3. The world consists of America and Iraq.
4. President Bush is still an idiot.
5. The Rolling Stones are on tour.

This is news?" Maddox

--CNN SucksMaddox)

When was television ever news? George Garrett (award-winning historical novelist, former poet-laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and co-screenwriter of Frankenstein vs. the Space Monster) once said during a lecture: "It's not about art. It's not about entertainment. Television is about advertising."

"If you work in an office with lots of people, chances are that you work with a person who hangs pictures up that their kids have drawn. The pictures are always of some stupid flower or a tree with wheels. These pictures suck; I could draw pictures much better. In fact, I can spell, do math and run faster than your kids. So being that my skills are obviously superior to those of children, I've taken the liberty to judge art work done by other kids on the internet. I'll be assigning a grade A through F for each piece."

--I am Better Than Your KidsMaddox)

Many copies of this site are online. The images and text are often distributed, without attribution, via an e-mail attachment.

--How Catholics Know They're Driving Too Fast (Peugot?)

Sent by Rosemary Frezza. Thanks for the laugh!

A student writes: "I heard about a concept from one of my friends called 'petticoat discipline.' Supposedly, it was used in the Victorian/Edwardian era. Apparently, the idea is that when a boy (or even a full grown man) is misbehaving himself, he would be dressed up as either a baby or a little girl (or made to appear more effeminate) as a form of discipline. I guess with the adult men it was supposed to be more of a choice than a discipline, and in some cases, families raised their young boys as girls until about age five. Do you know if any or all of this is true?"

"Petticoat Discipline" and Little Lord Fauntleroy (from my in box)

I have read that infant boys essentially wore gown-like clothes until they were very comfortable with going to the toilet -- they didn't have zippers or snaps in those days, so it's much easier to access one's nether areas if one doesn't have to worry about laces and hooks-and-eyes and that sort of stuff. The Victorians don't seem to have color-coded small children the way we did... but one reason for that was that lots of small children, even in the aristocratic households, didn't make it out of infancy. So it might have been too psychologically taxing on parents to relate to their children as a son or daughter. Now that most couples have fewer children, and now that advertisers have gotten to be experts at wringing money out of doting parents, that seems to have changed. A quick Internet search for "petticoat discipline" turned up mostly fetish sites that all repeated essentially the same general claims my student asked me about. The whole thing sounds like nonsense to me, as an effort to create historical context for a pretty much harmless but still bizarre fetish. In terms of the fashion, I immediately thought of Little Lord Fauntleroy, an 1880s novel about an American lad who inherits a British fortune. If you consider how the men in Tartuffe were dressed, I don't think that any aristocrat would agree that ruffles and lace are necessarily effeminate; in fact, dressing a very little kid in all that finery is the action of an extravagant, doting family (who could presumably afford it if the kid got such finery dirty). I've read interesting things on how the Victorians essentially invented the concept of childhood as we know it now (an age of innocence, when the imagination is to be stimulated and character is to be formed). The Victorian concept of childhood opened the way for shocking books like The Lord of the Flies (in which a bunch of shipwrecked British schoolboys create a society that mimics all the vices of the adult society they left behind).

A recent marketing research poll suggests that marketing research polls are a waste of time, since "people don't know and can't know how and why they do things." --Marketing Polls a Waste of Time?Marketing Research News)

Note: There's a huge difference between a poll (in which you simply ask people's opinions) and usability testing (in which you watch them try to accomplish a task, and gather data about their attempts).

"Postmodern Pooh is intended to satirise not just a few celebrity critics, but the kind of critical writing that academics and students generally tend to come up with today - evasive, incomprehensible, and making enormous, unjustified claims for the power of texts and language. " Sandy Starr reviews Frederick Crews's Postmodern Pooh

--Pooh-Poohing PostmodernismSpiked)

I once saw Crews debate po-mo superstar Richard Rorty at the University of Virginia. Crews used logic and wit to demonstrate how thoroughly discredited Freudian psychoanalysis is outside of English departments. Rorty, being the pragmatist that he is, admitted that Crews was right, but then with a little shrug, defended the continued use of Freudian terms in literary analysis by asking, "But what else have you got?"

Watch a family change over 27 years: "On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by." Diego Golberg --Diego TimeZone Zero)

"[A]udience members exposed to slow-downloading pages and then given the opportunity to freely browse the Web were more active in their investigations. They tried more hyperlinks and visited more sites than audience members who viewed pages with faster initial download speeds. In the past, such behavioral and physiological impacts were understood only as a result of the content of communication, not the manner in which the information was delivered."

--Slow Download Speeds Capture the Interest of Internet SurfersEureka Alert)

If I weren't a tee-totaler, I think I'd need a drink right now -- I hate slow downloads, but I put up with it if I really have to use a particular resource. Is there a difference between the behavior of "surfers" (people who are amusing themselves by clicking through websties) that of and "users" (people who go online in order to accomplish a certain task)?

"Herschel, the article declared, had established a 'new theory of cometary phenomena'; he had discovered planets in other solar systems; and he had 'solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.' Then, almost as if it were an afterthought, the article revealed Herschel's final, stunning achievement. He had discovered life on the moon." (The article was a hoax -- Herschel never made such claims.) --Great Moon Hoax (1835)Museum of Hoaxes)

Brigham Young, the Mormon prophet, wrote that since 1837, he felt he had a mission to evangelize the moon men: "In my patriarchal blessing, given by the father of Joseph the Prophet, in Kirtland, 1837, I was told that I should preach the gospel before I was 21 years of age; that I should preach the gospel to the inhabitants upon the islands of the sea, and - to the inhabitants of the moon, even the planet you can now behold with your eyes."

"Flags that ripple on the airless Moon, discrepancies in the part numbers of lunar lander components, shadows that point in the wrong direction, the lack of stars seen in the sky - these are all 'facts' that have fuelled the conspiracy theory." --NASA Challenges Moon Hoax ClaimsBBC)

My grandfather was convinced that the moon landings were a hoax.

Since its invention in 1985, the best-selling computer game has robbed numerous addicts of sleep as they race to fit falling blocks together. Now reformed player Erik Demaine and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston have proven how thorny the puzzle really is. --Maths Prove Tetris is HardNature)

"Everyone admits that polygraphs are unreliable. So why are government employees subjected to tests that can ruin their careers?" Brendan I. Koerner --Lie Dectector RouletteMother Jones)

• From reason 5:"I've heard of teams using all their planning time doing research (typically resulting in a panic attack when specs are due), when instead they should be using at least half of their planning time generating ideas and prototypes and applying the research to actual new decisions."
• From reason 13: "There is a difference in mentality and philosophy between generating and refining ideas, and implementing them. For a first rate design of any kind to be generated, time must be spent exploring alternatives, and learning about the problem space that the design needs to solve. "

Scott Berkun --The ten reasons ease of use doesn't happen on engineering projectsUIWeb.com)

The title is inaccurate (there are 13 reasons listed) and not exactly snappy, and the text overuses passive verbs, but Berkun makes an excellent argument for the importance of prototypes, usability testing, and all the other vitally important creative tasks that can fall by the wayside when a group tries to focus like a laser beam on meeting a set of deadlines.

"Many people believe that the general use of the term 'man' is offensive, or at least inaccurate. Phrases like 'no man is an island' or 'every man for himself' seem to exclude women. Unless your goal is to offend or annoy your audience, you should follow the conventions they expect." D.G. Jerz --Gender-neutral LanguageUWEC)

While the focus of this website is very basic, I know that some of my colleagues disagree with some of the advice on this page. What do you think?

"Last year, I decided to dive headfirst into the realm of the unwashed masses by attending a professional football game. What better way to experience the hive mind than by communing with 70,000 drunken, frostbitten Americans who are only too happy to blow their meager wages cheering on their date-raping, steroid-enhanced gridiron heroes?" --I'll Try Anything with a Detached Sense of Superiority (The Onion)

"The Media Lab's main goal, obviously, is to create a working environment that early-'90s corporate guru Tom Peters called 'WOW!' Both the lab's aesthetics (rooms full of Legos!) and its guiding principle (have fun!) reminded me of a fantastic dot-com during the boom years, albeit without the free food and soda." Annalee Newitz --Techsploitation: The Lego MystiqueAlterNet)

1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
3. Publicly correct any misinformation.
4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
6. Note questionable and biased sources.

Rebecca Youngblood
[Hmm... I confess that I do occasionally go back and correct typos and fix broken links in my blog entries. For instance, I initially posted the items in this list as plain text, but didn't like how it looked, so I went into the code and reformatted the list. Is that unethical?--DGJ] --Six Rules of Blogging EthicsRebeccaBlood)

"Often, sites present what appears to be objective information, but they actually have a commercial motive. Researchers cited the example of a life insurance site that purports to offer objective rate comparisons, but instead only functions as a referral site for agents of the company that operates it." --Study: Net Credulity Gap GapesWired)

See the full Consumers International study.

"Jonathan Harris, the flamboyantly fussy actor who portrayed the dastardly, cowardly antagonist Dr. Zachary Smith on the 1960's sci-fi show 'Lost in Space,' has died. He was 87." --Danger Will Robinson! Jonathan Harris Dies!CNN)

"Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, according to the The Rosetta Project, a collaborative, open-source endeavor by language specialists and native speakers around the world who are creating a 'near permanent' archive of the world's languages. " Kendra Mayfield --Word Up: Keeping Languages AliveWired)

"[T]he story remains a contest between Moby Dick, the thinking man's whale, in his 'pyramidal silence', and Captain Ahab, the thinking whale's man. For Melville, as for Chase, malice is the authentic mark of the whale's intelligence." Jeremy Harding reviews four recent books that reflect on Melville's Moby Dick --Call Me AhabLondon Review of Books)