April 2003 Archive Page

"Online advertising software vendor Unicast is introducing a new kind of Internet ad that doesn't just pop up over a portion of the browser but rather fills the entire screen of the computer user.|The New York-based company described the new unit as a 'full-screen, 15-second, 300k online ad.' Unicast promotional materials suggest the new format will enable advertisers to reach their audiences 'with the same impact' as TV."

--Unicast Introduces Screen-Filling Online AdAd Age)

Play the part of the famous lovers with this customized version of the classic Shakespearean drama. Relive the thrill of classic lines with you in them.

"Oh Brad, Brad. Wherefore art thou Brad?"
"But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Helen is the sun."

What's more, if you choose the Happy Ending Version a new scene is added with a twist -- the lovers live happily ever after! A short scene is added after Act V Scene III. It turns out the apothecary's poison didn't work and Romeo survives, and Juliet's stabbing of herself merely made her pass out."

The "Happy Ending Version"? I bite my thumb at Customized Classics and say, "Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!" -- Brad and Helen, Act IV Scene V --DGJ

Update, 01 May: The good sports at Customized Classics write, "Heh. Methinks the blogger doth protest too much," and offered me a 20% discount. --Romeo and Juliet Starring YOU as Romeo or Juliet and a special someone as your true love (Customized Classics)

"Trainee teachers are being told to avoid the word for fear of offending pupils with epilepsy. Instead they are being advised to use 'word storm' or 'thought shower'." Liz Lightfoot

--Talk of Brainstorming 'May Offend Epileptics'Telegraph)

"Say you were trying to find instances of when Bill Gates testified between May 15 and June 1. Using existing tools like full-text search engines, natural language query or speech recognition, you’d have to transcribe the audio into a text file, then index it with a lexicon of terms that included 'Gates.' Such an undertaking would have been labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. But only then could congressmen quickly locate testimony in which they were interested.|The key to expediting the process was eliminating the need for transcription or indexing or both." John Harney --The Grammar of Sound Technology Review)

"I bet Hector would be more fun if we dipped him in gasoline. But, most toys are......." Chad

--Hector the Hectopus (Catch.com)

"Virginia enacted a law Tuesday imposing harsh felony penalties for sending such messages to computer users through deceptive means....Public outrage at spam is causing states and Congress to start looking at stronger measures against it. The Internet industry estimates that spam represents nearly half of all e-mail sent. And a new report by the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday found that two-thirds of spam is sent with either false return addresses or a misleading subject line."

--Spam Sent by Fraud is Made a FelonyC|Net)

"If you know where each truck and driver is, you can use your assets more efficiently--not just the trucks, but the warehouses that are waiting for them to pick up or the recipients that are waiting for them to deliver. In retail, if you can track products more carefully you can dramatically reduce shrinkage, or product that unaccountably disappears. Countering losses due to theft is one obvious benefit of better tracking, but a remarkably large proportion of shrinkage--as much as 18% in some reports--is put down to administration errors that can be targeted with machine-to-machine integration technologies." Carl Zetie --Machine-To-Machine Integration: The Next Big Thing?Information Week)

"Ravitch reports that a textbook committee rejected the heroic story of Mary McLeod Bethune, the black woman who founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls nearly a century ago. Why? The word 'Negro.' That was bad. Also because Bethune raised the money for her school from rich white men like John D. Rockefeller. That was also bad." Bruce Ramsey reviews The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch.

--Exposing the Overediting of Textbooks Seattle Times)

"Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.|I, too, want these things." Bruce Wexler

--Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?MSNBC/Newsweek)

"The idea that you should let a fire burn, and destroy valuable forest, was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service a hundred years to realize the problem and to change the strategy and let the fire burn." Jared Diamond

--Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?Edge)

"I expect this course to be challenging, but that's not what I want. I want just to be able to write better." -- anonymous freshman comp studentTough Lesson: Good Writing is HardMy Files)

"Mosaic wasn't the Web's first browser. It wasn't even, as it's so often been described, the first browser to sport a graphical user interface. Tim Berners-Lee's "WorldWideWeb" was the first graphical point-and-click browser, followed by Pei Wei's Viola browser.|But for most people, Mosaic was the easiest browser to use. It installed easily, and allowed people to effortlessly surf the World Wide Web, which had been conceived of and developed by Berners-Lee in 1991." Michelle Delio --Mosaic Blows Out 10 CandlesWired)

"A company is making two versions of the same product... One has a little more gold and foil on it, but they're essentially the same. One is $14.95; the other is $18.95." Not surprisingly, the $14.95 item is selling better. It's also the lower-profit product.|"Then a competitor comes in with a third product. Again, it's essentially the same thing, but a fancier version. And it's much higher priced: $34.95."..."[W]hat becomes the best-seller? Why, the $18.95 version, of course." Business professor Kent Monroe, quoted by Charles Fishman

[Via Robot Wisdom. The article also includes a good anecdote about Coke's attempt to float the idea of a vending machine that raised prices during hot weather: "Consider what the reaction might have been to this headline: 'Coke testing machine that automatically discounts prices in cool weather.'"--DGJ] --Which Price is Right?Fast Company)

Robert Frezza writes:

I ran across an interesting passage in a book about the native peoples of Siberia called "The Shaman's Coat." In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of well-educated Polish revolutionaries were exiled to eastern Siberia where they acquired a certain reputation among the natives. As one of them put it: "When the inhabitants learned that I was Polish, they came to me for solutions to all their problems; they brought me their broken guns, asked for advice on smoking fish, demanded that I cure the blind, that I heal their sick women, and wouldn't believe that I wasn't capable of doing all this. 'But you're Polish!' Yukagirs and Yakuts would say, surprised and hurt by my refusal. For them, a Pole was a man with 'golden fingers', who knew everything and could do everything."

Polish PerceptionsE-Mail)

"For all the glitz surrounding the unveiling Monday of Apple Computer's new music service, a quick look suggests that it's a solid, but hardly revolutionary, addition to the market....The integration between the one-click purchase service, Apple's iTunes music jukebox software and the iPod player goes well beyond what any other music service has done. It will genuinely make paying for music online easy, even an impulse buy, and artists and music labels see that as a big step forward." John Borland

--Apple's music: Evolution, not RevolutionNews.com)

One of several paintings that were, according to a spam I received Sunday, stolen from a museum in Manchester, England.

WARNING: Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin have been stolen in UKE-Mail)

"Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. People read differently on the Web. They scan read?jumping quickly from one piece of content to the next. People are much more action-orientated on the Web. They get online to get something done. Words should always be driving actions."

1. Know your reader
2. Take a publishing approach
3. Keep content short and simple
4. Write active content
5. Put content in context

Gerry McGovern --Writing for the Web: Part 1McGovern.com)

"For years Slashdot has had an abundance of game related content. Unfortunately, we've also had limited space to post those stories. We strive to cover a wide range of tech news, and this often means passing on a good game story because something else is more important. But today I get to announce the creation of games.slashdot.org, where we'll finally have a home for all the gaming related content that might otherwise have been rejected." CmdrTaco

--Announcing Games.slashdot.orgSlashdot)

"The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging.| Who needs television? Let's just eliminate the middleman....Candidate gives speech. ABC News reports speech. ABC's Note blogs speech. Then candidate blogs his own speech, knocking down any negative interpretation by other bloggers. And we blog the whole incestuous process."

--Modem MadnessWashPost (reg. req'd))

"The anti-science movement in health promotion has arisen as part of the humanistic perspective within the discipline that positions itself in direct opposition to a science-based approach that it terms 'positivism.' According to this view, the application of the scientific method -- that is, an approach to the world founded upon experimentation and hypothesis testing -- to social phenomena is both epistemologically and ethically wrong." D.M. Gorman

--Prevention Programs And Scientific NonsensePolicy Review)

"[Cyberpunk novelist William] Gibson is currently winding up the book tour in Ireland and Britain. Once it is over, he'll end the weblog, he says. 'I have to go do whatever it is I do, to find the next novel,' he said. 'Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social.'" Karlin Lillington

--Gibson Kicks the Blogging Habit Wired)

"In an enormous blow to the music and motion picture industries, a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against file-sharing services Grokster and StreamCast Networks Friday, saying that they can not be held culpable for illegal file trading done over their networks. | The ruling, made by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, represents an almost complete turnaround from previous victories the record and motion picture industries have had in cases involving illegal peer-to-peer (P-to-P) file trading." Scarlet Pruitt

--Judge Tosses Case against P-to-P NetworksInfoWorld)

"A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of a shock to realize that the age of the population explosion may be coming to an end. | Just thirty years ago, people like Stanford University's Paul Erlich were telling us that the Malthusian Angel of Death was at the door." J. Bradford DeLong --The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?Project Syndicate)

"Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.|And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore." Tamar Lewin

--Writing in Schools is Found Both Dismal and NeglectedNY Times)

That's a good one. Via Microdoc News. --What is the best search engine?Ask Jeeves)

"Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way 'back to basics,' moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren't learning how to think anymore - they're learning how to memorize. This might be an ideal recipe for the future Babbitts of the world, but it won't produce the kind of agile, analytical minds that will lead the high tech global age. Fortunately, we've got Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Deus X for that....Game designers don't often think of themselves as learning theorists. Maybe they should. Kids often say it doesn't feel like learning when they're gaming - they're much too focused on playing. If kids were to say that about a science lesson, our country's education problems would be solved." James Paul Gee

--High Score Education: Games, not school, are teaching kids to thinkWired)

fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt.
Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk.

Over the past month, I've seen the verb "fisk" pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous verb is named for Robert Fisk, an award-winning reporter for the UK Independent. His writing talent is without question:

Did I sit on President Saddam's throne? Of course I did. There is something dark in all our souls that demands an understanding of evil rather than good, because, I suppose, we are more fascinated by the machinery of cruelty and power than we are by angels.|So I sat on the blue throne and put my hands over the golden armrests and surveyed the darkened chamber in which men of great power sat in terror of the man who used to sit where I was now. -- Independent 12 Apr 2003

While not flinching from calling Saddam evil, Fisk has been highly critical of the U.S.-led coalition's invasion of Iraq. He is extremely popular with [some] anti-war forces, in part becaue of his opinionated writing; but his consistent pro-Palestine slant does not escape the watchful eyes of pro-Israel media watchdogs, some of whom find his statements anti-Semitic.

But just as "boycott" derives not from something that the evil English landlord Captain Boycott did, but rather what the Irish villagers did to him, so too "fisk" does not refer to what Fisk does, but rather what is done unto him. In the blogosphere, some feel motivated to respond to Fisk's writing by refuting him in minute detail -- often repeating long chunks or the entirety of his articles, and interlineating their challenges. See: "Fisking Fisk."

The best definition I have found so far is by Eugene Volokh, who recalls an article in which Fisk "(1) recounted how he was beaten by some anti-American Afghan refugees, and (2) thought they were morally right for doing so." This, then, would seem to be the very first "fisking". Volokh credits an August 8, 2002 Instapundit post, and asked whether anyone had found an earlier usage. I wonder whether the term owes something to "MiSTing" -- a form of cultural criticism that formed the premise for "Mystery Science Theatre 3000," in which silhouetted wise-crackers in the lower right corner of your TV screen comment on and ridicule bad movies.

In general, then, the term "fisking" can be applied to any point-by-point critical annotation of another text. It is a mode of criticism well-suited to the WWW, since it begins by copying the full text of the target text, and proceeds to point out logical flaws and raise doubts. Since the fiskee's fixed text cannot respond to the challenges, the fisker can without too much trouble make the fiskee look ridiculous. While the term seems to have originated in conservative attacks against liberal positions, I recently came across a postmodern blogger who fisks an anti-postmodernist.

--Fisking as a Rhetorical ConstructLiteracy Weblog)

Google: "switch[ed] to Blogger": 165.
Google: "switch[ed] to Movable Type": 534Blogger vs. Movable TypeLiteracy Weblog)

"Forty German authors are hoping to set a record on World Book Day on Wednesday by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours. | Each of the authors has two hours in which to write two pages of the book." --Authors Plan 'Fastest' BookBBC)

"TypePad is the first new consumer-grade weblogging product in more than a year, but it shows a change in the marketplace: grabbing the new middle ground of users who want all the advanced features of a self-hosted weblog, but none of the tears of having to learn about Linux or Perl or FTP. This should elevate the standard of weblogs in general, as it does away with any correlation between technical skill and artistic merit. We will no longer be reliant on geeks for top quality weblog reading. It takes the seething masses and pulls them up to the same technical level as the best Movable Type tweakers and hackers."

--Bloggers Tool Up (Six Apart announces TypePad)Guardian)

"Whoo whoo whoo oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh ooh ooh oooh oooh." -- Primatologist Jane Goodall imitating a chimpanzee in the U.S. State Department, yesterday. --Notable QuotesABC News)

"With regard to the article by David Whitehouse posted Friday, 18 April, 2003, 13:45 GMT 14:45 UK: Does anyone actually read these BBC stories before they are posted? It would be polite to to spell Mr. Rutan's name properly ('Burt' not 'Bert'). Moreover, this is not the 'world's first manned sub-orbital space programme'. I cannot imagine that Burt Rutan would have ever referred to his new project as the BBC says he did..." Cowling

--BBC Screws Up AgainNASA Watch)

CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US forces have swooped down on an Iraqi primary school and captured 6th- grade teacher Mohammed al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested, Al-Hazar was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a geo-board, base-10 blocks, algebra tiles, a computer, a data projector and a graphing calculator.

President George W. Bush proclaimed that this was clear and overwhelming evidence that Iraq indeed possessed weapons of math instruction.

New Evidence: Protracted Calculations from Iraqi RulerE-Mail)

"In the last 24 years, Mr. Gottman and his colleagues have recorded thousands of such conversations, using careful techniques to measure and notate the participants' emotions each step of the way. After Angie and Dave's talk, Mr. Gottman says, his assistants reviewed a videotape, scoring each sentence and facial expression on such measures as disgust (-3), affection (+4), whining (-1), and contempt (-4). (Angie's grimace as she said 'The bills aren't the issue' was scored as contempt.)" David Glenn on the work of John M. Gottman.

--Every Unhappy Family Has Its Own Bilinear Influence FunctionChronicle)

"A panel of celebrity judges will help eliminate two contestants each week, leaving one lucky winner the undisputed leader of Iraq at the end of the season. Viewers can participate by casting phone-in votes, although Darnell noted that voting is restricted to calls originating from within the continental U.S."

--New Fox Reality Show to Determine Ruler of IraqThe Onion)

"By ordering up athletics-enhanced, music-enhanced, optimism-enhanced children, you are not merely urging them in some direction - all parents do that; you are wiring your own tastes into their genes, literally twisting their minds and bodies into the shape you have chosen. And this staggering arrogance is bound to be futile because the technology will get better over time. If you upgrade your child with 25 bonus IQ points, you can count on a 50-point boost becoming available by the time your children have kids of their own. You've just made Junior obsolete." David Gelernter reviews Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age --The End of Human NatureWired)

"By the time this child graduates from high school, her brain will have absorbed 350,000 television commercials, 100,000 alcohol ads and a daily barrage of sex and violence. If that doesn't turn you off then nothing will."

--TV Turnoff Week -- April 22-28Adbusters)

When a blogger dies, what happens to the blog? "I keep it on my 'friends' list just so I can see his name every so often, but I can never bring myself to click on his name. The first year or so after he passed on I visited it with decreasing regularity, until eventually I couldn't handle the emotions. I had to move on. But the idea that it is still around is comforting -- it's almost as if he isn't dead." Garrett Palm, quoted by reporter Christopher Null

--Online, Some Bloggers Never DieWired)

"In 1999, Fanning, a 19-year-old Boston-area hacker from a broken home, stumbled on the idea for making digital MP3 files easy to find on the Net. Teaming up with fellow geeks he knew only through online chat rooms, he crafted a simple technology that allowed millions to swap music collections free of charge. The operation moved to Silicon Valley that same year, where MTV and other media outlets converted the hackers into heroes, until the music industry squashed the company in court." Brad Stone reviews Joseph Menn'sAll the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning'sNapster. Menn argues that it was actually the greed and thuggery of young Shawn's shady uncle and buisiness partner John Fanning who doomed millions of teenagers to (sometimes) have to fork over money for their music. --Napster's Autopsy: Tracing a Music Rebel's Rise and FallM$NBC)

What if "pi" were a recent discovery? How would journals publicize it, and how would the educational system absorb it?

"Once the discovery had been reported in a contemporary journal, mathematicians could be expected to begin using and citing Archimedes? constant... While the term Archimedes? constant would become increasingly familiar even to school children, scientists themselves would begin citing Archimedes? primordial paper less and less, until finally citations to it would be dropped, and the idea of citing it at all would finally disappear. While Archimedes? constant would survive, his original paper would, in terms of citation analysis, have been obliterated." Eugene Garfield --The 'Obliteration Phenomenon' in Science -- and the Advantage of Being Obliterated!Essays of an Information Scientist [PDF])

"In my opinion, the application forms for humanities Ph.D. programmes should carry the warning: 'Enter at your own risk.' The fine print should read: 'The risks include poverty, shame, humiliation, and clinical depression.' You will of course find no such warning on the graduate-school application forms. And incredibly enough, even at this stage in the game, you may still encounter tenured faculty members in said programmes who refuse to even consider the very sensible proposal of limiting graduate-school admissions in order to address the problem of an oversupply of academic job candidates, and who justify their position with such nuggets as, 'Well, nobody's forcing them to go to graduate school.' The more fools they. And the more fool you if you don't ask yourself some pretty tough questions before you sign on with them." Invisible Adjunct

--Still Thinking about Graduate School in the Humanities?Invisible Adjunct)

"My how times have changed! These days you hear nerd talk spewing out of everyone's mouth! ... Is it computer technology that's made nerds of us all? Or perhaps it's because we really do work for those former "losers" now." Peter Bagge

--The Nerd-ification of AmericaReason)

When I found this in my in box it made my day. It's a report from a former student who is now a techical writer:

"Recently, one of your articles came up in my department at Unisys. Each month, my colleagues across the country and I receive a departmental 'e-zine' that includes links to technical communication Web sites of interest. This month, the e-zine included a link to the article that you and Jessica Bauer wrote called "Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips." I remember how much emphasis you placed on writing good e-mails, and the article was an excellent refresher for me. Also, it's fun to be able to tell my coworkers in the department that this article was written by my former professor at my alma mater. Aside from the article's origination just being a fun coincidence, it also gives UWEC and my degree even more credibility in colleagues' eyes."Greetings From a Previous StudentE-Mail)

"It is rare for a pregnant woman to vanish. But Peterson's case likely received extra media attention from the start because she was from the same town as another well-known missing person and homicide victim -- Chandra Levy, the Washington, D.C., intern who had an affair with then-Rep. Gary Condit."

--Eerily Similar Case [Missing Pregnant Woman] Languishes in ObscuritySF Chronicle)

I'm a little behind in blogging Elwyn Jenkins' response to Dan Gillmor's Making the News. Here's what Elwyn says: "Writing, that you see here in this [Elwyn's] weblog, is not journalism. This is more about pedagogy than it is about journalism. This is about organizing information -- some bloggers do that by simply amassing a list of links and a little comment to cause others to look and think. I practice more of what I used to do in school -- drawing together an argument in order to present, cause thinking and seek from my readers their attention to think this topic through for themselves.|This differs from journalism, whether you are a linker and pointer blogger or a didactic blogger like myself. Journalists are much more even-handed, they are objective, edited and far more objective. We teachers tend to move towards the perimeters of thinking and over-emphasize what we are saying. Or we act like Dave Winer who keeps pointing and pointing to what he is reading and thinking. Do not trust him to be even-handed or objective. He is a teacher -- he has even taken up a teaching job at a University, so much is he like a teacher. Bloggers worldwide would very easily take up teaching, few of us would be able to take up jobs as journalists."

--Helping Gillmor: Making the NewsMicrodoc News)

Jill Walker recently observed, "It's hard to work out quite how to teach independent, critical thought. To my great surprise I've discovered that giving a 2 x 45 minute lecture is way easier than setting up tasks and discussions and problems that actually help the students develop their own skills."

Perhaps blogging offers both Elwyn and Dan a middle ground, where teaching and journalism borrow from each other and become something new and better. Plenty of "Town Square Meetings" look very much like college seminars. I think all Gillmor really needs to do is state his assumptions up front, refer to what is to be gained from people whose opinions are different, and demonstrate how pursuing his particular line of thought will advance everyone's understanding of the subject.

On a related note, Jenkins refers to "pointing bloggers," which, according to "personality blogger" Rebecca Blood, are so different from the "journal blogs" that they need a different term. Taxonomy is fun, fun, fun!

We all look at blogging (and everything else) through the lens of our experience. Jenkins sees weblogging as information management; Gillmor sees it as a new kind of journalism; Blood sees it as a form of personal journal. (If I weren't a teacher, here's where I would say what I think blogging is -- but instead I'm going to be coy.)

"It may sound like sexual prejudice, but it seems that men's much-debated ability to navigate slightly better than women applies in virtual environments as well as the real world. And on average, says Microsoft computer scientist Mary Czerwinski, men are quicker to create a mental map of an environment and orient themselves within it."

--Women Need Widescreen for Virtual NavigationNew Scientist)

"Unfortunately, I never actually heard the protester's name pronounced, just caught him spelling it out for others and jotted it down in my notepad. | I wrote the story for Sunday's paper, tucked the quote down near the bottom, filed it to my editors in Charleston and blithely went about my life, unaware that this one name was about to make my own name known around the country. | On Monday afternoon, thanks to some astute readers with a vivid recollection of elementary school vernacular, I realized I had been duped." James Scott

--Embarrassing lesson: Duped reporter learns the hard wayPost and Courier)

"Fancy media on websites typically fails user testing. Simple text and clear photos not only communicate better with users, they also enhance users' feeling of control and thus support the Web's mission as an instant gratification environment." Jakob Nielsen

--Low-End Media for User EmpowermentAlertBox)

WebCT, like Blackboard and Jenzabar, is a content-management tool for online education. It sets up a password-protected space where students and teachers can present their materials. Laura Gibbs writes: "[O]ne of the major themes of the WebCT presentation was that 'you don't need a website anymore - not like you used to!'. Hmmmmm..... since when is it a good thing to give up your website? I understand wanting better tools to manage your website, tools to make it less time-consuming, tools to make your website more useful, tools to integrate your website with other kinds of technologies beyond the desktop monitor. That would be great! | But why on earth would we want to reduce the number of websites and hide our work behind the walls of WebCT?"

--Desperately Seeking Hrabanus Maurus: WebCT and the WebXPlana)

"The writing skills college instructors most want from incoming freshmen--proper grammar and usage--are considered least important by high school English teachers....Among six writing skills, grammar and usage were taught the least by more than 700 high school English teachers surveyed during a national curriculum survey ACT conducts every three years." Rosalind Rossi

--Grammar Valued More in College than High School Sun Times)

"The Institute for Interactive Journalism helps news organizations use innovative computer technologies to develop new ways for people to engage in critical public policy issues."

--The Institute for Interactive JournalismJ-Lab)

"The one thing that everyone who has studied college education can agree on is that students learn more when they work in groups. Yet colleges don't build infrastructure to support this. A university will spend hundreds of $millions on dormitories, i.e., places for students to drink beer and sleep together. Why is there is no budget for cubicle farms where students in the same major could do their homework together, asking for help from the person at the next desk and, if necessary, raising their hands for help from roving teaching assistants?" Philip Greenspun --Why Do Colleges Build Dormitories? And Teach Half-Time?Philip Greenspun's Weblog)

"The most common password was 'password' (12 per cent) and the most popular category was their own name (16 per cent) followed by their football team (11 per cent) and date of birth (8 per cent)." John Leyden --Office Workers Give Away Passwords for a Cheap PenRegister)

"Investigators now have the strongest evidence yet that the space shuttle Columbia's left wing was critically punctured during liftoff, when falling debris started the fatal chain of events that led to the breakup of the shuttle when it re-entered Earth's atmosphere..."
--Shuttle Doomed at TakeoffABC News)

"King County prosecutors and sheriff's detectives asked the editors at the Eastside Journal, now called the King County Journal, to run a fake story about a staged arson to make Sherer believe an accomplice had carried out his plans. The newspaper complied."

--Ethics of Paper's Fake Arson Story Debated Seattle Times)

"Retail employees who sell violent video games to minors would face a $500 fine under a bill passed by the Washington state Senate."

--Peddle a Violent Game [to Minors], Pay a Fine Wired)

"Although bell curve distribution is still considered normal, a surprising number of economic and social phenomena now seem to follow a different arc. Instead of being high in the center and low on the sides, this new distribution is low in the center and high on the sides. Call it the well curve." Daniel H. Pink --The Shape of Things to ComeWired)

"Usability has two roles: to set the direction for the design and to check that the design works. The second has gotten the most attention since it is the simplest: just run a user test of any Web site and you will quickly have a long list of things that must be changed to make the site easier to use. But it would be better if we didn't get these problems in the first place, and that's why usability also needs to set the direction for the design. Before any design has been done, a development project should conduct a series of user research to discover users' needs and the types of designs that work well or that cause problems for users." From an interview with Jakob Niesen --Jakob Nielsen, Author & Web Site Usability GuruPublish)

"The arctic rodents called Lemmings are well known for their periodic mass suicides by collectively swimming into the sea and drowning, or at least the Norway lemmings do. This is probably caused by environmental pressures usually from over population..."

--Mass SuicideHolology)

"American troops in Saudi Arabia have been listening with amusement to Baghdad Betty, Iraq's version of Tokyo Rose, who tries to demoralize them with her radio broadcasts. In one monologue, she warned them that their wives back home were sleeping with 'famous movie stars,' including Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and even Bart Simpson...." David Ellis

--Flashback: Have A Cow, G.I.!Time, 1991)

The above article is from the Time.com archive, which shows you the above 53-word blurb and then offers to sell you the full article, which, the page informs me, is 53 words long. So, what will I get for my $2.50? Not much, I guess.

Far more annoying is the fact that, when you hit the "go back" button, you get a pop-up window that reads, "Don't pass up on this opportunity to sign up for the TIME archive and read the article you selected." How many people, after already signaling their lack of interest in purchasing the article by clicking "go back", are going to change their minds because the "go back" button spawns a pop-up?

"Over their keyboards, lonely souls submit questions into the ether, praying that answers lie somewhere in the vast network - and, if not resolution, then at least succor." Michael S. Malone

--Inside the Soul of the Web: 24 hours watching the world look for answers at Google.Wired)

"Good evening, I'm Andy Card -- Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush. I welcome you to the inaugural 'Ask the White House' online discussion. I am pleased to be here tonight to answer your questions. The Internet is an important communications medium. We have witnessed, especially during Operation Iraqi Freedom, a substantial increase in the amount of traffic to Internet sites as more and more people -- worldwide -- are relying on the internet for information. | We see the 'Ask the White House' series as another way for our citizens to interact with the White House. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and answering your questions during tonight's online discussion. | With that, I'm happy to begin . . . " Andy Card

--Ask the White HouseWhite House)

"Until earlier this afternoon, a CNN server housed mock-ups of web pages announcing the yet-to-happen deaths. The CNN pages, which were discovered by the intrepid folks at fark.com, were yanked about 20 minutes after being exposed... In addition to Cheney and Reagan, CNN also prepped online farewells to Fidel Castro, Bob Hope, Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, and Gerald Ford." --Not Dead Yet! CNN Obituary Mock-UpsThe Smoking Gun)

"Many people who were classified as feebleminded would now be called mildly retarded, learning disabled, or simply underachievers. Although the eugenicists saw the Buck family as a pedigree of degeneracy, many would now say that they had few problems a bit of money, education, and opportunity would not have solved. Their only sin was to have been born poor women in the impoverished South....Carrie Buck was sterilized because it was thought that she carried a gene that condemned her and her offspring to substandard intelligence and immoral behavior. Hers was deemed a worthless lineage to be snuffed out."

--None Without Hope: Buck vs. Bell at 75 (Dolan DNA Learning Center)

"For years, games have been racing to catch up to the visual standards of animated films. Before long, Carmack says, game graphics will rival Monsters, Inc. in their detail. When that happens, technical advances in games will proceed at Hollywood's more measured pace - incrementally instead of in great, creative leaps. Innovators will focus on optimizing existing code, and major revisions will happen less frequently. In effect, Carmack will be obsolete. 'There's a real chance that the next-generation rendering engine will be a stable, mature technology that lasts in more or less its basic form for a long time,' he says. 'Programmers will move from being engine coders to being technical directors in the Pixar style.'" David Kushner

--Prepare to Meet Thy DoomWired)

"I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first 'live shot' on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. '[CNN President] Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera,' he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by [Iraqi] Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan.... The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein's propaganda." Peter Collins

--Corruption at CNNWashTimes)

"In spite of denials from congressional leaders, the rash of job cuts has some legislators worried that Congress will be fully mechanized within 10 years.|'The House and Senate will always need people,' Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said. 'These machines are a valuable tool, but there's still no substitute for the wisdom and experience of an actual human congressman. Everything that happens in Congress requires, to some extent, the human touch. Except maybe drafting legislation. That can pretty much be done by machine.'" --45 More Legislators Lose Jobs to Increased Congressional AutomationThe Onion)

"Never, ever pick a fight with a surrealist. Not unless you are packing a kipper yourself, and are prepared to use it. That much I now know. But at lunchtime on Monday, when I tried to slip through the surrealist blockade of the André Breton auction at the Hôtel Drouot, I assumed a black polo neck was protection enough against accusations that I was a bourgeois lackey bent on picking the bones of the great man." Fiachra Gibbons --I Don't Have Any Cash. Do you Take Mackerel? (Guardian)

Perhaps it was the sight of Captain James T Kirk scribbling away on his executive starship tablet. Maybe it's the recurring dream of reducing computing to its simplest, starkest elements -- a screen, an input device, perhaps some sound. It could even be the thought that with the technology now just about able to do it, a wireless PC screen is a really cool idea. Whatever the thinking behind Microsoft's Smart Display technology -- a battery-powered notebook screen without a notebook, linked to a PC by wireless networking and taking stylus input -- it doesn't seem to have included what users actually want....Tablet is the wrong medicinal analogy: suppository more adequately describes the Smart Display experience. Most of this is due to the failures of Microsoft's basic idea, although ViewSonic must bear some of the blame for not really trying to ease the pain. Rupert Goodwins --ViewSonic Airpanel V150 [Review] (ZDNet)

The bottom-feeding 419 scammers are exploiting the Iraq war now, according to this Spam I just received: "First let me use this medium to introduce myself , I am Mohammed MARGAI from KONO district north of Baghdad IRAQ from the family of late Alhaji Mustafa MARGAI THE FORMAL MINISTER OF PETROLEUM AND NATURAL RESOURCES."SPAM Scammers Capitalizing on Iraq WarLiteracy Weblog)

"Are you out there Dennis Jerz? Are you reading this? Are you keeping track of me? I kind of hope not...it's weird to know that my anonymous readers aren't so anonymous. But if you are, that's OK too." [Anonymous Blogger]

anonymous readers aren't so anonymous

On a related note, Jill sparked a recent run of blog posts on the personal nature of blogging... Steve does a good job blogging some of the reaction.

Update, 21 June 2006. The blogger who had blogged about how I recognized her in person just contacted me and asked me to remove her name and the link to her blog. I've done so. (I didn't check to see whether she removed the blog entry she wrote about me.)

At End Of Road You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. >how did I get here? That doesn't matter. You're here now. >but this isn't where I want to be I'm not concerned with what you want. Now pay attention: At End Of Road You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. >can I go home now?

--AdventureOne Pot Meal)

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

"I started an e-mail network almost spontaneously several years ago, when my next-door neighbor was mugged walking home from the bus stop at 6:30 p.m. Outraged, I sent out an e-mail to perhaps 20 neighbors, and within 24 hours, a dozen of them had volunteered for neighborhood patrols. | With that, our e-mail network was born." Jim Buie --Neighborhood Networks Recreate Village AtmosphereNat'l Neighborhood News)

"If you like Interactive Fiction at all, I would like to draw your attention to Ad Verbum, a marvellous game written in 2000 by Nick Montfort. When I first downloaded this, I really didn't expect it to be any fun at all -- I prefer IF that is more a story than a game, and I generally detest puzzle-heavy games because they tend to get me stuck early. As Graham Nelson puts it, an adventure game is a narrative at war with a crossword puzzle; in this game, the narrative doesn't really put up much of a fight at all. And I love it! Because the puzzles in Ad Verbum are really good puzzles." Arnt Richard Johnson

--Ad Verbum: A Successful IF ExperimentARJ)

Completely unrelated query. The quote I took from Johnson's website included a passage that reads "any fun at all &emdash; I prefer". I changed the "&emdash;" to "--", which was surely the author's intention. But I feel somehow that I may have violated the Blogger's Code by changing a quotation. Oh, well. Nick's site seems to be down for the moment... here's the ELO 2002 gallery page for Ad Verbum.

"Usability insights also help later in the project, and there is value in fine-tuning user interface details, but late-stage changes impact the final user experience less than fundamental changes early in the design. It's a rough estimate, but I would say that the benefits from early usability data are at least ten times greater than those from late usability data..... The most common estimate is that it's 100 times cheaper to make a change before any code has been written than it is to wait until after the implementation is complete." Jakob Nielsen reviews Carolyn Snyder's book

--Paper PrototypesAlert Box)

Last week, Elwyn Jenkins provided a good rebuttal to Orloswki's "second superpower" complaint. When I recently noticed that the good microdoc resorted to an ad hominem argument against Orloswki, I was a bit put off. Can't we all get along without name-calling?

But then I read Orlowski's rant against the PageRank of his "googlewashing" article. As Elwyn and Madman have pointed out, and as any of my undergraduate students who read my handout on out-of-context page titles might notice, the TITLE tags of all articles on The Register's site simply read "The Register," which might skew the PageRank of the whole site. I wonder whether Orlowsky Googled for alternatives such as "googlewashing" or "googlewash" instead of just "googlewashed".

In all fairness, Orlowsky probably doesn't have any control over the way his articles appear on The Register's website. The many bloggers whose shorter, more recent blurbs ranked above Orlowsky's original article probably do have that control. Orlowsky's article will probably float to the top as the blog postings age. All this adds up to another lesson for the increasing number of people whose professional reputation depends upon their Google ranking. I think the world needs its critics of Google, but making shrill accusations is not the way to earn the respect of your readers.Googlewashing OrlowskyLiteracy Weblog)

"I've collected hundreds of rejection slips from agents, producers, and studios. Recently, all this changed. I wrote an article last year called "Hacking Las Vegas" (Wired 10.09), and the next thing I know I'm being approached to turn it into a movie starring Spacey.... But I've heard rumors that have made me question my confidence - whispers of a dirty little industry practice that has brought me here to Utah on a mission both personal and journalistic.|I've been tipped to the network of semisecret cyberhallways, called tracking boards, that are open only to the most elite power players in the industry....They may seem innocuous at first glance, but the boards are where a writer meets his fate." Ben Mezrich --To Live and Die in LAWired)

"Only a few years ago professors rarely encountered marketing in the Ivory Tower. When we did, the marketing had substance -- book dealers with free review copies of books, office-supply vendors with reorder requests, discounts on scientific or literary publications, and the like.|Now we're deluged with ploys that have little to do with our academic interests or lifestyles, simply because we visited an Internet site or ill-advisedly clicked. We're list-served, spammed, flamed, taunted and, occasionally, tempted. But mostly we're desensitized by hundreds of unsolicited pop-up offers transmitted daily via dozens of gadgets at home and at work." Michael Bugeja

--The Seven Digital SinsChronicle)

"The Sims Online married a hot concept -- multiplayer online gaming -- to The Sims, the best-selling PC game series of all time. In addition, it was designed in part by Will Wright, one of the game industry'smost renowned developers. All of this combined into a rich maelstrom of hype: The Sims Online was featured on the cover of the Nov. 25, 2002, issue of Newsweek and GameSpot posted a 13-page behind-the-scenes feature. Mainstream press and hardcore game publications touted The Sims Online as the first mass-market online game. | Then the reviews came out." --Ethics in Videogame JournalismOnline Journalism Review)

I've come across two websites that use news photos to tell very different stories. A Tale of Two Cities contrasts photos of anti-war protests in San Francisco with photos of Iraqi citizens kissing US soldiers and celebrating in Baghdad. But "A Tale of Two Photos" shows a wide-angle shot of the site of statue torn down by Iraqis, where it appears the square is nearly empty, surrounded by US tanks. The absence of huge crowds of Iraqis suggests that the statue incident was staged.

But consider this editorial in the NY Times, "The News We Kept to Ourselves", written by a CNN employee: "I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us."

It will be a long time before the full truth really emerges.Does the Camera Lie?Literacy Weblog)

"With the burgeoning Sars epidemic spreading fear among travellers worldwide, the Hong Kong tourist board must be ruing the day it commissioned a series of magazine ads telling readers a visit to the city will 'take your breath away'. Shortness of breath is one of the main symptoms of Sars - severe acute respiratory syndrome..." Jason Deans

--Hong Kong in Hot Flush over Ad BlunderGuardian)

"The Matrin County School Board has a new way of post a student’s grades online for a parent to check. Pinnacle is the name of the program, a simple java applet. Not only does Pinnacle log student’s grades, but also attendance and conduct. The way grades are accessed are by inputting the first 6 digits of your social security number and the first 5 letters of your last name. With a logon system as simple as this, one has to question the security and privacy of the students. This has been making my life a living hell for the past 2 months, every night my parents go on and check to see if i have any homework and won't let me do anything till it's done"

--Pinnacle, Online Grades, Skipping School, and MoreSlashdot)

Why is such a high-tech nation eschewing texting? | The short answer is that, in America, talk is cheap. Because local calls on land lines are usually free, wireless operators have to offer big 'bundles' of minutes?up to 5,000 minutes per month?as part of their monthly pricing plans to persuade subscribers to use mobile phones instead. Texting first took off in other parts of the world among cost-conscious teenagers who found that it was cheaper to text than to call..." --No Text Please, We're AmericanEconomist)

"A team of cold-hearted, killjoy scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory callously announced Monday that the likelihood of complex life on Mars is 'extraordinarily low,' dashing the hopes of the public just like that." --Mean Scientists Dash Hopes for Life on MarsThe Onion)

"Although it had no sound, no color (black-and-white), and no animations, it did have one feature that would make it part of computer gaming history -- graphics. Mystery House was the first computer game to ever contain graphics (70 simple 2D pictures drawn by Roberta Williams). Before then, all computer games were text-based. Due to its newfangled graphics, Mystery House quickly became a best-seller..."

--Mystery House (Roberta Williams, 1980)Sierra Planet)

"Saying they are appalled by the way the United States and Britain defied the will of the United Nations and attacked Iraq, the four [German] professors declared war on borrowed English terms in German such as 'okay,' 'T-shirt' and 'party.' They have devised French-language alternatives: 'd'accord,' 'tricot' and 'fete.'" --German Professors Declare War on English TermsReuters)

...So I Became an Asshole.

My Parents Said I Could Be Anything I Wanted...Serendipity)

"Fleishman posted the book online in PDF format last month. He expected a few hundred downloads. Instead, it was grabbed about 10,000 times in just 36 hours.|It took Fleishman a couple of days to realize how much traffic the book was attracting. But by the time he pulled the file offline, he was on the hook for downloads of about 250 GB of data. Fleishman estimated the charges for incremental bandwidth would set him back $15,000 or more."

--Download Fiasco a Downer No MoreWired)

"Peter Arnett, recently fired from NBC for giving an interview to Iraqi TV, has provided a lesson in media relations in today's global society.... We live in a celebrity age. Arnett had turned himself into a controversial celebrity. As such, anything he says is fair game. The Dixie Chicks just learned this when lead singer, Natalie Maines told the audience at a performance, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." Within hours, that comment was being replayed, and fans made it clear they were ashamed of the Chicks. Despite an apology from the group, stations and fans around the country are boycotting their songs. One of the perverse aspects of celebrity is that missteps can ultimately bring more celebrity. Arnett was hired within hours by one of London's leading tabloids. Other journalists may sniff that he is lowering his journalistic standards, but he certainly raised his market value." Merrie Spaeth

--Words Matter: Arnett's Baghdad Boo-BooUPI)

What does the above title make you think? It's a quote from an article in the Chicago Daily Herald., which reports that in a particular precinct, a worker registered 127 residents of a treatment center for sex offenders; 120 residents of that facility later submitted absentee ballots. "In the clerk's race, 229 voters were cast in that precinct. So sex offenders made up more than half the vote.| Voots, the Republican, received 42 votes in the precinct. May, the Democrat, received 187."

The reporter notes that the Republican (who ended up winning after all had "championed the 1998 state law responsible for [sex offenders] being detained for treatment, perhaps for life, rather than freed." Thus, this particular group of offenders would have had a motive to vote for the Democratic opponent. The statistic provided in the news article applies only to a particular precinct that happens to contain a sexual assault facility; but by taking that quote slightly out of context, I can create the impression that the news article is making a statement about all Democrats (or all sex offenders). The moral of the story: be skeptical when you read a startling statistic (or any statistic, for that matter)."Child Molesters, Rapists and Other Sexual Deviants Overwhelmingly Supported Democrats"Literacy Weblog)

"Bidding on the auction site eBay ended Friday after a month on the Internet auction site with no offers reaching the minimum reserve price. Amboy, with seven residents, has a listed value of $1.9 million, but the top bid reached only $995,900.|Amboy has a post office, motel, cafe, gas station, church, gift shop and two landing strips."

--California Town Fails to Sell on eBayAP/Seattle Post)

I found this quote on Megnut: "59% of all Americans believe that what is written in the Bible's Book of Revelations will come to pass." She was citing a BBC article about Bush and religion. My question is this... what, specifically, does the study say 59% of Americans believe about Revelations? Conservative evangelical churches can't agree whether "The Rapture" will be pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, or post-tribulation, and Catholics have a completely different understanding of the meaning of the Book of Revelation (few Catholics believe the Church is the Whore of Babylon, for instance, and I recently heard a radio interview with a theologian who argues that Revelations is actually a highly poetic description of what goes on during the Mass -- thus from a certain point of view, it is not a distant prophecy but something that most Catholics see every week). My point is not simply to raise a theological question, but rather to note that the BBC could have added a web link so that the curious could find out more about this intriguing statistic. (A few minutes with Google led to me to a blogger who credited a Time poll, but I didn't get any farther than that.)Apocalypse StatisticsLiteracy Weblog)

"Former astronaut Sally Ride says before Columbia exploded, the U.S. space agency may have gotten too used to foam breaking off the fuel tanks and striking the shuttle's thermal protection system. | Investigators believe hard foam insulation falling from the external fuel tank during launch may have damaged the shuttle's wing. The spacecraft broke apart upon re-entry into the earth's atmosphere on February 1. Ms. Ride also says before the 1986 Challenger accident, NASA accepted problems related to the O-rings that connect the shuttle's solid-fuel rockets with its external fuel tanks."

--NASA Complacency Cited In Both Shuttle AccidentsVoice of America)

"Fourth-graders in the United States score better in reading than many of their peers around the world, but poor and minority U.S. students still lag behind other U.S. learners, a new international study shows. | Students in U.S. public schools outperformed 23 of 34 other countries in the project, known as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study of 2001."

--Rating U.S. Kids' Reading SkillsCBS News)

"It is bound to go down as one of the great moments in PR history. | With US tanks rolling into Baghdad and the sound of artillery fire reverberating around the city, Iraq's ever jovial information minister popped up yesterday to declare that the 'infidels' were facing 'slaughter'.... Standing on the roof of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, Mr [Mohammed Saeed al-]Sahaf ignored the sight of Iraqi troops running for cover on the other side of the Tigris river to declare: 'Baghdad is safe. The battle is still going on. Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Don't believe those liars.'"

--'Baghdad is Safe, the Infidels are Committing Suicide'Guardian)

After I dubbed Yahoo's new search engine "Yahoogle", Clancy Ratliff wrote (in a KairosNews discussion thread):

You know, I love the name "Yahoogle." I wish it were called that and not "Yahoo Search." We could also have "Lycoogle," "AltaVoogle," "NoogleLight," "Dooglepile," "AskJoogle," etc.

Instead of "Dooglepile," I suggest "DogPoogle." Actually, somebody has already registered "Yahoogle.com," but as far as I can see, the name is the best thing about that site. The website www.everythinghurts.com/yahoogle offers a simple toggle between Yahoo and Google search results, which isn't too impressive, but the logo is cute. --Yahoo Search == "Yahoogle"Dennis G. Jerz)

"Cecile de Brunhoff, the inspiration for Babar, the enchanting little elephant whose adventures captivated generations of children, has died in Paris. She was 99."

--Inspiration for 'Babar the Elephant' DiesAP)

A chart comparing newspaper references to the terms "weblog" and "blog". Not only is usage of both terms on the rise, "blog" is overcoming "weblog". Via Torill Mortensen --"Weblog" vs. "Blog"Eszter's Blog)

"Be pro-active, not reactive. Tell stories that provide background and context FIRST. We've tried to avoid two traps some media organizations, including The Bee, have fallen into:

• The 'minority of the week' story (writing about minorities for the sake of writing about minorities, i.e., 'Here are our Latinos!').
• The 'minority bad news story of the week' (writing about people of color whenever there's a problem, i.e., violence in minority neighborhoods). Those certainly are stories, but they go down a lot easier when you've provided context, and written stories emphasizing other aspects of minority life.

One big-picture story is worth 20 briefs. It lays a positive foundation, so when it comes time to write a critical story (i.e., the high welfare rate among Hmong and Iu Mien), you've got sources, they trust you, and they realize you've been fair to them." Stephen Magagnini of The Sacramento Bee

--Tips on Covering Race & EthnicityPenn State U)

"It is very puzzling that in a country where a 12-year-old knows baseball statistics, adults don't know the simplest statistics about tests, diseases, and the consequences that may cause them serious damage. Why is this? One reason, of course, is that the cost benefit computations for doctors are not the same as for patients. One cannot simply accuse doctors of knowing things or not caring about patients, but a doctor has to face the possibility that if he or she doesn't advise someone to participate in the PSA test and that person gets prostate cancer, then the patient may turn up at his doorstep with a lawyer." Gird Gigerenzer --Smart HeuristicsThe Edge)

"The government is not a grotesquely inefficient and expensive IT customer by accident; it's GI&E by design. It is in the best interests of proprietary vendors for the government to be painful to deal with precisely because it sets up barriers of entry to innovation and entrepreneurship.|If the government truly was a 'better' customer, it would be able to negotiate better terms and introduce better IT innovations faster into its infrastructures. The fact that the government is, on average, a mismanaged IT laggard is an unambiguous market signal that success has little to do with technical excellence or performance and more to do with the ability to cope with all the costs that serving this kind of client imposes." Michael Schrage --The Awful CustomerTechnology Marketing)

"Detective Smith -- who calls himself a 'Starbucks, Barnes & Noble kind of guy' -- has become something of an expert in early teenagedom, and he has done so without the benefit of having offspring of the appropriate age. He ventures into cyberspace under some 30 different screen names, mostly as girls, each with her own personality, looks and even bra size..." Shaila K. Dewan

--Who's 14, 'Kewl' and Flirty Online? A 39-Year-Old DetectiveNY Times)

"The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today. | They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again - but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages. | The timing of the end of the Little Ice Age is especially significant, as it implies that the records used by climate scientists date from a time when the Earth was relatively cold, thereby exaggerating the significance of today's temperature rise." Robert Matthews

--Middle Ages Were Warmer Than Today, Say ScientistsTelegraph)

"Kelley's insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC's Nightly News, Newsweek Online and National Public Radio.| The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized -- lifted word-for-word from a paid news service put out by Austin, Texas, commercial intelligence company Stratfor. |'You got me, I admit it.... I made a mistake,' Kelley said. 'It was stupid.'" Daniel Forbes --Noted War Blogger Cops to CopyingWired)

"University officials say once file traders are notified they're breaking the law, they don't tend to repeat the offense. | But some believe the recording industry is so fed up with the continuing problem of illegal file swapping that it's trying to send a message to administrators and students."

--RIAA Hits Students Where It HurtsWired)

"Recent recruits who grew up on popular commercial games like Half-Life, Counterstrike and Quake 3 have a natural affinity for the training games, many of which are adapted by the military from the retail versions. Some military officials are enthusiastic about the benefits of running troops through the exercises at minimal expense.|But as video war games gain popularity throughout the armed forces, some military trainers worry that the more the games seem like war, the more war may start to seem like a game. As the technology gets better, they say, it becomes a more powerful tool and a more dangerous one."

--More Than Just a Game, but How Close to Reality?NY Times)

"Today's web sites, particularly e-commerce sites, can be more complex than standard software products that often confine users to a very limited set of activities. Web tasks are also vastly more complex than those users have with most software applications. For example, our tests asked users to complete shopping tasks. No two users looked for the same product and no two users approached the site in the same way. The tasks were dependent on individual user characteristics and interests. Because of the increased complexity of web sites, it's understandable that more users are needed to detect the majority of usability problems." Christine Perfetti and Lori Landesman

--Eight is Not EnoughUser Interface Engineering)

"Just as Old Testament prophets called for conversion and repentance, doctors have to 'convert' patients away from smoking, obesity, stress, alcohol and other indulgences... As prognosticators, doctors foretell what is going to happen if patients don't change their way of life. The prophet role provides power over people. Some doctors consciously avoid it. They encourage patients to be self-reliant rather than dependent, but in doing so they may fail to meet important emotional needs. Quacks, on the other hand, revel in, encourage, and exploit this power." One of several reasons compiled by William T. Jarvis. --Why Health Professionals Become QuacksQuackWatch)

"Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a 'Second Superpower', it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank? to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.|Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing that the phrase 'Second Superpower' ever meant anything else. To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased....And this Googlewash took just 42 days." Andrew Orlowski

--Anti-war Slogan Coined, Repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 DaysThe Register)

"The Hassans decided to make the journey after an American helicopter dropped fliers over their farming village that showed a drawing of a family sitting at a table, eating and smiling, with a message written in Arabic. | Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Furbush, an Army intelligence analyst, said the message read: 'To be safe, stay put.' | But Hassan said he and his father thought it just said, 'Be safe.' To them, that meant getting away from the helicopters firing rockets and missiles. | 'A miscommunication with civilians,' said an Army report written Monday night."

--A Miscommunication with CiviliansMSNBC)

"A gentle waterfall pours from the cliff into a large aqua pool. The rocks are molded concrete and the pool reeks of chlorine. Under clear resin, our tabletop bears a colorful design of the Mayan alphabet and calendar. Down one level to the right is an area with carpeted steps and a large video screen playing cartoons -- a sideshow for children not sufficiently captivated by robotic iguanas.... Can someone who knows only censored and stylized depictions of the natural world -- Disneyland, PBS, The Nature Company -- ever love and understand the wonderfully complex original?" Julia Corbett --Robotic IguanasOrion Online)

"Often the best reports were those that were carefully written and edited. Some were essentially radio reporting on TV. Technology made some reports stand out but got in the way when it was used for its own sake. Too often the rush to get information on air live created confusion, errors and even led journalists to play the game of 'Telephone,' in which partial accounts become distorted and exaggerated in the retelling."

--Embedded Reporters: What Are Americans Getting?Project for Excellence in Journalism)

"Children don't go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the 'traditional' past-times of children and replaced them with television [first - pre 1985] and games [second - post 1985]. And we (the older community) have made little to no effort to understand games, only shoved our children in front of them and said 'don't bother me'. Is it any wonder that there are now mini-vans with game consoles built into the back seat? I haven't seen a solid response as to what, exactly, our children are supposed to be doing, just 'not those games'." Andy Phelps

--In Defense of PlayGot Game?)

"Because McLuhan saw the media as extensions of the human body -- printed books as extensions of eyes, radios as extensions of ears -- he believed that each new technological advance would reshape humanity and traumatize it, too. 'We shape our tools and our tools shape us.'.... The tanks rolling into Iraq from the south were not just tanks but extensions of marching legs and protective skin. The night vision goggles were extensions of eyes. And what about those television cameras attached to the tanks? They were harder to classify.....Are the television cameras the witnesses to war, or are they part of the weaponry?" Sarah Boxer

--McLuhan's Messages, Echoing in Iraq CoverageNY Times)

I haven't had cable TV at home for six or eight years, but I spent the first week of the war in a guest house with cable. I usually get my news from GoogleNews, but I didn't have web access. I felt trapped and hemmed in by the TV coverage -- I couldn't accelerate the story when the anchor was repeating stuff I already knew, and I couldn't click on the reporter's face to see what else he/she had written. I found it all terribly frustrating.

But I suppose this could be explained by observing that McLuhan's "hot" and "cold" categories are relative. I remember as a kid doing an experiment where you put one hand in ice water and another hand in very warm water, and then put both hands into a container of room temperature water. One hand feels warm, and the other hand feels cold, even though you are holding hands with yourself. A very odd experience.

A student writes: "I'm not quite sure how I could make the topic of 'digital divide' into something controversial that allows the reader to form their own opinion." Digital Divide: Looking for ControversyLiteracy Weblog)

After my 1:00 class today I saw a colleague at the other end of a hall, struggling with a load of books that was about to drop. I momentarily interrupted a conversation with a student to try to pick up the items my colleague was dropping. The colleague looked at me with that familiar "I've-got-the-flu-please-kill-me-now" expression, and stumbled along his way. Later I got this e-mail:

"I was seriously ill this afternoon, and you took the time to help me. I wanted to thank you. You might not think that it's much, but it means a lot to someone who is in distress, as I was. I've heard that you've found employment elsewhere. I'm glad for you, but I know we're losing a good person, and for that, I'm sad. I wish you the best. Thanks again for your kindness. Thanks for being a good human being."

That made my day. So, what are you waiting for? Go on... be nice to somebody. -- DGJRandom Act of GratitudeLiteracy Weblog)

"On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph that had been altered in violation of Times policy. The primary subject of the photo was a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from Iraqi fire on the outskirts of Basra. After publication, it was noticed that several civilians in the background appear twice. The photographer, Brian Walski, reached by telephone in southern Iraq, acknowledged that he had used his computer to combine elements of two photographs, taken moments apart, in order to improve the composition."

--LA Photographer Fired for Digitally Altering News PhotoLA Times)

Technology may solve problems, but it also spawns new technology to solve the new problems caused by recently-spawned technology. While one group of upright entrepreneurs works to protect the privacy of victims targets of clothing-penetrating 3D holographic body scans (marketed for airport security), a group of hackers works just as hard to remove the digital clothing from animated bimbos in a beach volleyball computer game.Cybernudity -- Now You Don't See It, Now You DoLiteracy Weblog)

"A teenager's website hoax about a killer virus that is sweeping Hong Kong sparked panicked food buying and hit financial markets on Tuesday, forcing the government to deny it would isolate the entire territory." --Website Hoax Fans Virus Panic Wired)

"The academic institutionalization of New Media Studies is happening in several disciplines simultaneously - you’ll find it in fine arts programs, communications programs, computer science programs, rhetoric programs, journalism programs, literature programs, and perhaps (finally) even creative writing programs. One of the milestones of the past year was Brown University’s announcement of a graduate fellowship in electronic writing, a long-awaited acknowledgement of the importance of the work that Robert Coover and Robert Arellano have been doing in their electronic writing workshops for the past decade. And while, a decade ago, it would have been possible to study and create new media at only a handful of institutions, many more options are available today, not only in the Ivy League, and not only in flagship institutions such as the University of Colorado, the University of Iowa, and the University of California-Los Angeles, but even in such out-of-the-way locations as Baltimore, southern New Jersey, and Turku, Finland." *Scott Rettberg* --New Media StudiesElectronic Book Review)

"I have painted with their on-line robot a few times and like to check the gallery to see what others have paining with it. I sent an email suggestion to possibly improve the interface and complimented them on their site. It is sad to think that folks who put so much time and effort into a website/web-presence don't get much feedback. I am glad if I brightened his day a bit with my email." Rosemary Frezza --Telerobotic Painting: "Thanks PumaPaint!"E-Mail)

"Last week, writer Glenn Fleishman offered his book, Real World Adobe GoLive 6, as a free download. | But instead of the few hundred downloads Fleishman expected, the book was downloaded about 10,000 times in just 36 hours. And because he's charged incrementally for bandwidth, Fleishman estimates he could be billed $15,000 at the end of the month -- possibly a lot more....Fleishman decided to offer the book as a free download after reading an editorial by technical publisher Tim O'Reilly that argued that obscurity is a far greater menace to authors than electronic piracy." Leander Kahney

--When a Free Download Isn't Free Wired)

"Dubbed NewCode, the [programming] language promises to revolutionise software development, as the language makes it impossible to express a security vulnerability in a program's source code. 'We were inspired by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which there is a language called NewSpeak which made it impossible to express political dissent,' says the group's leader, Julia Jones.... 'The compiler is itself programmed in NewCode,' says Jones. 'It made it difficult to explain to the compiler itself exactly what a security vulnerability was.'" Tim Ebringer

--Language Inspired by Orwell set to Fool HackersSydney Morning Herald)

"Today's on-the-go workers are sending e-mails and instant messages containing derogatory comments and jokes, risqué images or sensitive information in droves -- to the wrong people.... One woman bad-mouthed a recent job candidate as a 'suck up' in an e-mail she then accidentally sent to that prospective employee. He was hired to be her boss. Another person jokingly signed an important document with her manager's name and the tag 'who sits on her ass and does nothing all day.' When she mistakenly forwarded the note to her boss, she was fired." Christopher Null --Misfired Messages Roil BusinessesWired)