October 2003 Archive Page

This Vampire Killing Kit complete with a wooden stake and 10 silver bullets sold for $12,000 as part of Sotheby's sale of 19th century furniture and decorative works of art in New York, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003. The kit, a walnut box that also contained a crucifix, a pistol, a rosary and vessels for garlic powder and various serums, was bought by an anonymous phone bidder. (AP Photo/Sotheby's)
--19thC Vampire-killing Kit (Yahoo/AP)

The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find "the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon" or "where to find the best airfare to Cuba" by using Amazon's search feature instead. --Monica Soto Ouchi --Amazon's inside look irks authors: Search function previews any page  (Seattle Times)

Once adopted, the credit hour became a driving force in higher education. | It presented students with a specific time frame in which they were expected to complete course work, usually one semester.... But Wellman and Ehrlich, a senior scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argue in their book that using time to measure 21st century learning is ineffective. --Steve Geigerich --Academics Make Case to End Credit Hour (AP/Newsday)

--Canstruction

Please -- Never Do This!E-Mail)

By my count, this single message consumed 20MB of storage space on computers across Seton Hill University. A better alternative would have been a plain text list, or posting the file online and inviting people to download it if they want it.

On the other hand, it also motivated me to learn how to use the "pixellation" feature on my image editor.

I know this is probably a very uncool and politically incorrect thing to say these days, but I am going to brave it anyway. | I have wondered why, with all the briliant people writing in the different group blogs, am I not toally enchanted with them? --Torill --No Personal Touch (Thinking with My Fingers)

Because I am trying to participate as actively as I can on about 30 student blogs this term, I find I really have to pick and choose which posts to get involved in in GrandTextAuto or KairosNews... and last week for the first time Slashdot gave me some moderator points that I felt too virtuous to waste. While I used to blog only for myself, now part of my blogging is "work," and that has changed how I spend my blogging time. I've been conscious that I'm blogging much more than I really "want" to.

The butterfly effect has, until now, been cited only as an illustration, but Professor Jim Spanners of the Pennsylvania Institute for Making Stuff Up takes it seriously, and believes that butterflies are directly responsible for most of the world's major problems. --Butterfly (The University of the Bleeding Obvious)

--Sounds of History

How Amazon can make money from books you already own.

We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of "find me something I've never seen before." But real-life search is often different: You're looking for something you have seen before, but you've somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution's impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it's in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can't remember which one. | "Search inside" could be the perfect solution to this common problem. --Steven Johnson --The Best Search Idea Since Google (Slate)

Recent years have seen an explosion in electronic media marketed directly at the very youngest children in our society, yet very little is known about how these changes have played out in young people's lives. In order to help understand the implications, the Foundation conducted a national study of more than 1,000 parents of children ages six months through six years. The findings are published in the report Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers. --Children and Electronic Media (Kaiser Family Foundation)

For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google's database, say people close to the discussions. | How that content would be presented is not clear, but it would likely not be provided in excerpted passages to customers, as it is on Amazon. Instead, the material would go into a database that Google spiders would comb, then turning up relevant links. If a user clicks through, they would be sent to a separate page that contains a book abstract and the opportunity to buy the title. Who would actually be responsible for the sale would be a decision presumably left to the publisher. --Steven Zeitchik --Google Studies Creation of Book Database (Publishers Weekly)

P.S. A breaking new story by Steven Zeitchick? Really? ("Zeit" = German for "time," as in "Zeitgeist".)

"Diamond retailers contend a little bling is just the thing to declare your independence this fall,'' wrote Houston Chronicle reporter Liz Embry a few weeks ago. Her story was illustrated with a photo of Ms. Sarah Jess flashing the hottest new trend in the jewelry industry: the right-hand ring. | The rings have recently been spotted on the famous right hands of Madonna and Beyonce Knowles. A national advertising campaign popped up in the September issues of Vogue, Vanity Fair and People, declaring, ``Your left hand rocks the cradle. Your right hand rules the world.'' --Celebrate Singlehood with the Gift of a Right-Hand-Ring (Tampa Tribune)

That strategy also discouraged people from selling used diamonds (since, of course, "a diamond is forever"). Since diamonds don't wear out, and since every year more diamonds are mined and put on the market, the diamond industry has to keep demand for their product high, or else supply will outpace demand and the price of rocks will drop.

In the wake of a lot of new coverage about how singlehood seems to be outpacing marriages in American life, we see the diamond industry creating a new tradition -- women purchasing diamonds for themselves, as a sign of independence. Obviously the diamond industry would prefer that women purchase a singlehood ring for themselves first and then add an engagement ring at a later date. I do find it interesting to think that they will be able to associate the same rock with two very different concepts, just by changing its location on the body. It really exposes just how artificial the "traditional" meaning of diamonds was.

And by the way, yes, I did buy a diamond engagement ring when I dropped to my knee and proposed... I made sure it was more expensive than the last computer I had bought, but at the time I had a decent job and lived like a student (in the days before student culture demanded portable phones and cable TV), so I had few real expenses.

Update: This will cheer up my wife: "Motherhood not only makes females smarter, it makes them calmer under pressure and more courageous, a U.S. researcher said on Tuesday." Of course, the test was on rats, but the researcher tells the reporter the findings probably apply to humans, too.

He never imagined just how unenthusiastic his research sponsors -- and others with a financial stake in atrazine -- would be about his discovery. | Six frustrating years later, Mr. Hayes and his defenders say they know only too well the lengths to which those companies will go to undermine his findings that atrazine may be harmful. --Goldie Blumenstyk --The Price of Research (Chronicle)

P.S. Goldie Blumenstyk? Really?

Once again, Halloween season is upon us, and with it, the wonderful anticipation of dressing up and trick-or-treating for delicious Brach's candy. With that in mind, it's important to remember all the ways that you can make your Halloween safer and more fun. It won't put a damper on anyone's holiday spirits to wear high-visibility costumes when going from house to house, to have kids trick-or-treat with an adult, and to inspect all candy for tampering. Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that eating just a single kernel of candy corn manufactured by a company other than Brach's Confections will give you a deadly case of full-blown AIDS. --"Patrick Carlin CEO, Brach's Confections" --Generic Candy Corn will Give You AIDS (Onion)

Edgar Allan Poe's most popular poem, "The Raven," tells the story of a man who gets a late-night visit from a mysterious bird that speaks only one word: "Nevermore." | Sounds like a pretty simple story, right? | Guess again! --Knowing Poe [Annotated Version of 'The Raven']Maryland Public Television)

The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters -- peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit -- who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people's electronic mailboxes comes not only from the sewers but also from the office towers of the biggest and most well-known corporations. --Saul Hansell

--Big Companies Add to Spam (NY Times)

It begins to creep in, almost unnoticed. The levels are further apart. You begin to notice that newly acquired skills are carbon copies of the old ones, with a different coloured icon and a two percent damage increase.... You try out all the little distractions the developers have put in the game to make things 'deep', only to find they're broken, bugged or plain pointless. But you're a trooper. You stiffen that upper lip and press on, certain that if you can only hang in there the good times will arrive and the game will be FUN again. | It is at precisely this point, that me and others like me will part ways with our more determined MMORPG brethren. I, you see, am a quitter. --The Trouble with MMORPGs (Ferrago)

Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature -- old and new, from every culture -- as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? --Thomas H. Benton --College and the Fall (Chronicle)

[B]ooks at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of some willing colleagues, could print out the entire texts of books in the program. --Authors GuildAuthor's Guild Question Amazon's Full-text Search FeatureThe Imprtance Of)

Workers remodeling a 19th-century rehearsal hall at the Peabody Institute have found 10 dusty jugs of moonshine in an unlocked closet, where they apparently sat for nearly 60 years. Faded labels on the bottles suggest that the hooch was the handiwork of Gustav Strube, the first conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. --Heather Dewar --Maestro's moonshine found (Sunspot)

A high school freshman expelled for writing a fictional account of a student who falls asleep in class and dreams of killing a teacher can return to school Monday while officials reconsider the disciplinary action.... "It was a story about a girl who falls asleep in class, dreams she kills her math teacher, then wakes up and nothing happens," she said. --Girl expelled for writing story about killing teacher (CNN)

Microsoft's menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it's especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th "Inside PCMag.com" newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it's still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was the last time you saved a file on a floppy? --Lance Ulanoff --Icon See It Now (PC Mag)

In critiquing the "cut" and "paste" icons, Ulanoff says "What a clipboard and a document have to do with pasting is beyond me." It sounds almost like Ulanoff doesn't know that "cut" and "paste" are references to actually taking a pair of scissors (or a razorblade knife) and clipping a chunk of text off of one page and actually sticking it on top of another page. When I was working for the (sadly defunct) University Journal as an undergrad, we would re-use graphics and logos, and while I don't recall whether we actually kept them on a clipboard, I think we kept them in the front cover of a notebook. So the clipboard icon makes sense to me. Ulanoff's point is, of course, that these images come from the print world -- a world that is more and more remote, and more and more metaphorical, to users of electronic text.

One of my classmates saw my wedding ring and asked if I was married. I said, yes, and she asked, "Happily?" Another student sneered, "Wow, married ... how retro-hetero-normative." Others snickered in approval. And so the seven-year assault on my values began. To avoid harassment, I learned to conceal who I was: my faith, my working-class origins, most of my core beliefs. I had to smile and nod in support of "tolerant" people who openly hated the world that produced me -- and who were abetted by the "profession" in doing so. --"Thomas H. Benton" --Leaving the Big City for Small-Town College Life (Chronicle)

As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I found things were much easier for me when I concealed my American identity. When spelling out my last name, I learned to say "Jay Eee Are Zed," which seemed to associate me with the Queen's English and upperclass culture (which translates as more or less religiously anti-American). One student, pondering why a particular Canadian author would use a particularly offensive racial epithet, noticed that this author had lived in a city near an American military base, and concluded that this author must have picked up the term from American servicemen. That was quite amusing -- and when I chose that moment to identify myself as American, I think at least some of the people in the room were embarassed by their casual anti-American bigotry.

All in all, I think I benefitted from studying American literature in an essentially anti-American culture. One student from Germany all but called me a racist when I told him that, based on the speech patterns of the characters in a particular story, I could tell which characters were white and which were black. The fact that one mother called her son "n----- boy" was a pretty strong clue, if you ask me.

Link found on The Couch, which also has an amusing comment on the lightning which recently struck the actor playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's much-talked-about religous movie.

--'The other phone's a little...' (No Media Kings)

And where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak? --Glenn Reynolds --Glenn Reynolds on Rumsfeld Memo and Plame Affair (Instapundit)

She singled out a campaign by Disney - "Remember the magic" - which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers. | She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many of those who had seen the advert "remembered" meeting Bugs on childhood visits to the theme park, a feat that would have been impossible, given that the cartoon is a Warner Brothers character. Loftus said: "This brings forth ethical considerations. Is it OK for marketers to knowingly manipulate consumers' pasts?" --David Benady --Selling You a New Past (Independent)

It's poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It's failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A's clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental reflexes of Overly Essentialized Reader B. It may be sheer incompetence at nouns, verbs, and adjectives. --Carlin Romano --Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me? (Chronicle)

Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it's still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books. --Gary Wolf --The Great Library of Amazonia  (Wired)

Superintendent Wilfredo T. Laboy finally passed the Communication and Literacy Skills Test, reportedly with flying colors. --Lawrence schools boss passes language skills test  (Boston Herald)

Brewster Kahle wants the world to know that old software is an important part of our cultural history and -- like books, films and other media -- should be preserved. --Daniel Terdiman --Fighting to Preserve Old Programs

..the most evocative and atmospheric experiences were conveyed entirely through text. Text adventures, with their terse locations, thrived on the role of objects, which were there to be discovered, smashed, used, examined and combined: you find the lamp, but now you need the oil to fill it and the match to light it. Only then will the dark room become illuminated. --In the early days of computer gaming... (Things Magazine)

Update, 25 Oct: Torill picks up on this blog entry and offers far more thoughtful comments than I did.

At one prestigious university, a sophomore imported 30 biology books from England this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit. Next semester, if all goes well, he plans to expand the operation. | "The only difference is that they say `international edition' in little print on the cover," said the student, who added that he was not certain whether his project raised any legal issues, and therefore asked that neither he nor his college be identified. --Tamar Lewin --Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas (NY Times (Reg; expires))

A professor agrees to review a manuscript that is under consideration for publication at a journal. He has promised to keep the paper and its contents absolutely confidential. When he reads it, however, he realizes that his student's experiments will never work; the paper shows that they are futile. Does he keep mum, or does he break the confidentiality rule and tell his student what he just learned? --Ethics 101: A Course About the Pitfalls (NYT (Registration; link will expire))

The author of one of the books I blogged wrote me an interesting reply, but sent it via e-mail. Can I place her comment in my blog comments without violating some written or unwritten code? --John SpurlockBlogging E-Mailed CommentsE-Mail)

John's situation is more complex. As I understand it, he has written a traditional print review of a book, but posted a longer version of that review on his blog ("The Blue Monkey Review"). The author could have commented directly on John's blog (indeed, another author has done exactly that). Instead, the author chose to send an e-mail.

I think the context is very important here.

I presume that the audience for my own blog is net savvy enough to know one shouldn't e-mail anything that one wouldn't want to become public. (Though how often we all follow that guidline is open to question.)

Since John is asking the question about an e-mail sent to him by a book author (that is, someone who makes a living by writing), and since the academic subject of their correspondence is presumably not cyberculture or online writing conventions, I'd say I wouldn't think twice about mentioning the e-mail, paraphrasing it in order to write a response, or even quoting a sections for the purpose of defending/explaining/rebutting/continuing the intelletual discourse in another blog entry. It's possible the author simply wasn't familiar with the convention of posting comments in a weblog. Since the author didn't actually type it there, I'd do what I did here -- create a separate blog entry to introduce the e-mail, and link back to the original discussion. Still, before I'd post the whole thing, I'd ask the author's permission. And I'd start blogging my rebuttal while awaiting the reply. If the author doesn't reply after a few days and a telephone follow-up (if possible), I'd paraphrase the e-mail and/or quote selective, and post my response anyway (after briefly explaining my attempts to contact the author).

(And by the way, I did ask John's permission to post his inquriy and blog my response.)

Convincing medical school faculties that a professional actor can teach empathy to doctors might sound like a losing battle. However, the directors of many residency programs are starting to acknowledge that they need help in this area. New national requirements, recently set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), list interpersonal and communication skills as one of six areas of core competency in which programs must educate physicians as part of their training. --Susan Okie --An Act of Empathy (WashPost (registration, will expire))

On the surface, it is hard to tell that the story labeled "Study: Fellatio may significantly decrease the risk of breast cancer in women," isn't real. The original Web version has the CNN.com banner along the top of the page, the stock CNN medical graphic along the right side of the article and credits N.C. State University with the study. --Michelle DeCamp --Student fools international newspapers with spoof story (Technician Online)

On a similar note, Forbes is running 'Is Sex Necessary?,' an article that begins by introducing "one of the most credible studies correlating overall health with sexual frequency" but immediately follows it with a bulleted list of items taken from "Other studies (some rigorous, some less so)." Buried in the article is the observation that some of the connection are associative, rather than causal. For instance, people who are sick in the hospital probably don't have much opportunity to meet sexual partners; thus, healthy people will tend to have more sex than sick people. Older people whose life-long partners have died will probably have less sex than younger people whose parters are still around; and those older people are also probably likely to have more health problems than the younger ones. Did the more frequent sex cause the health in the younger people? Of course not. (A good scientific study would, of course, account for age differenes, and would try to compare two groups that are as similar as possible.)

You have now entered the Stephen Kings' home page... a place for the many of us whose daily lives are defined by who we are not. --Oh the Horror! Being Stephen King

1.) Weblogs deal in the golden rule, modified to read: link unto others as you would have them link unto you.

6.) The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments (virtues) like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly. And as Roy Peter Clark says, if you?re telling a story and there'sa dog, get the name of the dog. --Ten Things Conservative about the Weblog Form in Journalism (PressThink)

Together these articles are a tremendously well-written (and well-linked) introduction to weblogs in the world of journalism (or journalism in the blogosphere).

Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless. --Bob Blaisdell reviews Todd Oppenheimer' s The Flickering Mind --Why Computers Have Not Saved the Classroom (CS Monitor)

I can say with certainty that all the technology in the world won't help if the teachers don't have the training to use it; and that translates to giving them time to learn for themselves what the technology can do for them. Many teachers who think of a curricular website as a photocopying machine (just stick the handouts up there so students can download them and print them out) will never reall understand how the Internet has changed the process of researching a paper.

[A]ttractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. --Gabriela Montell --Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations? (Chronicle)

Parents have been advised to consider making their own babyfood after the discovery of a toxin linked to cancer in jars of manufactured food sold all over the world.... The European agency said that the toxin was getting into food through the plastic gaskets used to seal glass jars with metal twist-off lids, although experts could not say how much. --Valerie Elliott --Mothers told: 'Make your own babyfood' in cancer alert (Times Online)

Over the next few weeks I will be reading Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel'sWars by Yaacov Lozowick. This book was published last year in Israel and this year, by Doubleday, in the U.S. My plan is to provide not exactly a review of the book but a reflection on it as I read. | But before I begin, I have to say a few things about myself. Like any historian, like any good scholar, I strive to recognize my own prejudices and preconceptions, my own point of view (p.o.v.). This book, dealing with the Zionist movement and the struggle for survival of the state of Israel, draws on my own long connection, in imagination at least, with Israel and Judaism, and it also makes me confront my ideas and ideals about the world I live in. --John Spurlock --Right to Exist (Review) (Blue Monkey Review)

[W]hen the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he'd taken for granted. Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian -- and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood to qualify. --Erin Aubry Kaplan --Black Like I Thought I Was (Alternet)

Feeling Cheated by Rule Changes in Final Level of 'Neverwinter Nights'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I don't mind a difficult battle, since an easy game is no fun. But on the final level, the teleportation stone doesn't work. Likewise, on every other level, you can rest to restore your hit points and spells -- but not on the final level. The designers made no attempt to provide an in-game explanation for the change in the game rules.

It wouldn't have been hard at all to provide that in-game explanation. The game had already established that the chief villain is a lizard queen who can speak to people, and eventually possess them, through their dreams. So, if, when I tried to sleep on the final level, a cut scene played in which the lizard queen comes and possesses me, then I'd blame the queen, not the game designers. And if some event within the game disabled the stone, I would easily accept it if the game made me feel like I sacrificed that ability for a higher good. For example, if I traded the stone for a key that would get me into the final battle.

I have been a good citizen of this virtual world -- I've painstakingly learned the rules, willingly suspended my disbelief. Again, I don't expect the final battle to be easy, but I don't expect the difficulty of that final battle to arise from a change in the rules at this late stage in the game. Yes, the designers are in charge of their world and ought to be able to do whatever they want. And yes, I suppose I could go online and look for cheat codes and hacks, but that wouldn't help my desire to suspend my disbelief and enter into a story.

I personally like a fast-moving endgame that wraps up a lot of plot threads, showing you the consequences of your earlier actions. But Neverwinter Nights is a monster-bashing role-playing game -- the story is grafted onto the basic "move around, kill things and find stuff" scenario. Of course, it's a very good monster-bashing role-playing game -- but since its strength was the RPG part, the final change in gameplay pretty much kills my desire to finish.

Knowing that the story is pretty much over at this point means I know I won't be rewarded with more context as the battle continues to rage. Oh, well. Having a family and a demanding job (I always bring work home with me, whether it is grading, reading, or planning for next term) means that my game-playing time is limited. I got my money's worth out of this game, but bleah -- I feel that after investing so much time to learn the intricacies of this game world and its interface, I shouldn't be expected to finish the game in a completely different environment.

Now that I think about it, there are a few doors that I passed on the way to the lizard queen's lair, and someone gave me an artifact that I haven't yet figured out how to use (I think I have to advance another level yet). But quite frankly the change in rules, without even the slightest attempt to use the storyline to explain the change, has really sapped my interest in seeing this story to its resolution.

1.) The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.

4.) In the weblog world every reader is actually a writer, and you write not so much for “the reader” but for other writers. So every reader is a writer, yes, but every writer is also a reader of other weblog writers—or better be.

--Jay Rosen --Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism (PressThink)

Still, here I am, giving away my thoughts "for free," instead of carefully hoarding them and compressing them into a conference paper that I intend to read out loud to an audience of ten or twenty people, at a cost to my university of up to $1000 (for conference fees, airfare, hotel), and a cost to my family of two or three days of my absence.

I'm grading student blogging portfolios. The students were asked to include about four of their best blog entries, and samples of comments that they made on other students' weblogs. Some students reported feeling disappointed that their best blog entries didn't generate a lot of comments from readers. They can "gift" each other by posting comments on each others blogs, of course. But since it's probably fair to say that even the most enthusiastic bloggers are blogging more than they really want to (since I do give "forced blogging" topics), their experience as student bloggers doesn't really mesh too well with the gift economy.

From 1860 to 1940, Earth's surface warmed about 0.4ºC. Then Earth's surface cooled about 0.1ºC in the first four decades after 1940 and warmed about 0.3ºC in the next two. For those two most recent decades, temperature measurements of the atmosphere have also been available, and, while these measurements are subject to significant uncertainty, they indicate that the atmosphere's temperature has remained essentially unchanged. Thus, the actual temperature record does not support the claims widely found in environmental literature and the media that Earth has been steadily warming over the past century. --Jack M. Hollander --Rushing to Judgment [The Media and Global Warming] (Wilson Quarterly)

But of particular interest to me is the debate carried out in the comments appended to the article. One reader posts a full-length opposing paper into his comment; I guess that's one way to be published... but answering one block of text with another block of text is not terribly efficient. Fisking (copying great chunks from another soure and adding your own contrarian comments in between the lines) would be a more efficient way to challenge premises, critique evidence, and offer alternative conclusions.

Update: "Warmest September on Record, Experts Say." This AP story presents the facts, but downplays the global warming scenario, only making a brief reference in the final paragraph. Kudos to AP writer Randolph E. Schmid, who doesn't conjure up a scary disaster scenario in order to make his story more interesting. Those who doubt the global warming scenario don't deny that certain measurements of temperatures are rising, but they do question the hasty assumption that the rising temperature is the result of human activity.

Increased security on airlines has been a significant issue since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. In those attacks, 19 terrorists are believed to have snuck box cutters onto four commerical airplanes. --Feds Searching All Commercial Airplanes (FOX News)

Update: I was also amused by this paragraph from the story:

U.S. officials told Fox News that the note said that while the TSA was doing a "great" job, security was still not "tight" enough. The word "great" was underlined.

What does one do when the book is wrong? Should the book's authority outweigh the professor's? In the mind of the student, the book is usually the "law" of the class, in many ways, and the teacher the lawyer. Obviously, I can't hold the student accountable for missing a question when the book mislead her -- and I did later give her full credit for her answer -- but now I see another way in which grading is revision... not of the test, but of the textbook! --Mike Arnzen --When the Book is Wrong (PEDABLOGUE)

Would today's tykes tolerate the classic games you grew up with? Kids do say the darndest things... --Kids Play (EGM)

The article is annoyingly laid out without a table of contents, so you have to click blindly through chaining "next" links... so...

• Pong
• Donkey Kong, Football, Tetris
• Super Mario Bros, E.T., Space Invaders

In the generic new remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," five kids -- two girls, three boys -- hop into a '70s-era van and head to Dallas for a Lynyrd Skynyrd show. On the way, they stop to pick up a traumatized stranger, who promptly shoots herself in the head. With time still to make the show, the kids try to find a telephone so they can alert the authorities, only to wind up running (although jogging is what it looks like) for their lives from a houseful of maniac hillbillies. As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever. --Wesley Morris --This new 'Chainsaw' doesn't cut it (Boston Globe)

To be a Christian doesn't mean to be cuddly. This is not a cuddly pope, either. What he says and writes -- though always elegantly -- has been irking millions. He, who was instrumental in toppling socialism, is an inveterate preacher of justice and peace, and a critic of the modern "Me First" variety of capitalism -- but his admonitions are not rooted in Marxism-Leninism; they are based in the Gospel. Thus he is only doing his job as supreme pontiff. --Uwe Siemon-Netto --Commentary: Everybody's pope UPI)

Is there such a thing as 'bad genes'?

If there are bad genes, then there must also be good genes. It is perhaps unfair to bring up Nazi Germany's aryan supremacy theories every time such a question comes up, but if we want to talk about good and bad genes, we have to talk about who decides which genes are good and which are bad. In the 1947 Arthur Miller play "All My Sons," a character who lost a son in WWII ponders idly that a doctor who invented a way to bring baby boys into the world without trigger fingers would be a millionaire; parents who did not want their sons to be drafted to fight in wars could rest assured that their boys wouldn't be physically capable of firing a rifle.

James Watson, of the famous duo Watson and Crick credited with the discovery of DNA (though let's not forget Barbara McClintock, upon whose early work Watson and Crick built), recently gave a BBC interview in which he says people who score in the lower 10% of achievement tests probably have a gentic disease, and that he feels it is society's duty to screen for stupidity. He downplays the impact of poverty (an environmental concern). He also advocates breeding women to be prettier.

Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.

"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

I didn't see the interview in question so I can't comment on the context -- maybe Watson was joking when he talked about scientifically breeding women to look pretty. But the dark side of that is, who decides? Because Watson is talking about "helping" that lower 10%, I presume he means coming up with some way to fix their genetic problem, rather than, for instance, sterilizing all people who fail a certain test, or using abortion or contraception to "breed a race of thoroughbreds" -- which was at one point the slogan of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood).

Side note: Sanger is on record as stating that the woman, not the state, should make decisions about childbearing, but and many of her contemporaries did support programs that encouraged the sterilization of illiterates, the "feebleminded", etc. A 1927 Supreme Court case upheld the forced sterilization of certain classes of people, so her eugenic beliefs were not that far from the mainstream at the time. Naturally, pro-life activists want to play up Sanger's involvement in the eugenics movement, and pro-choice activists want to distance themselves from Sanger's more controversial statements.

Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not?

I've only seen the first two movies, so I can't really comment on the technical details as presented in the books (where I imagine they are presented in more detail). I hope I don't get asked this question. But a few minutes with Google yields the following:

• According to the BBC, a grove of plants that are survivors from the Jurassic age was found in Australia about 10 years ago, and cuttings from those plants will be marketed to gardners in 2005. But those plants weren't re-constructed -- they simply happened to survive all that time.
• Dolly the sheep was in fact cloned from a parent, but she started off as a living cell. And she was recently put to sleep because she aged prematurely -- suggesting that science has to progress a lot further to make a successful cloning even with live tissue.
• IN 2002, Japanese scientists announced a plan to clone a mammoth from frozen tissue samples. Somebody thinks this is possible, or they wouldn't be trying it. But the mammoth sample is about 25,000 years old. Success with a 25,000 year-old mammoth wouldn't necessarily indicate progress towards cloning an animal extinct for 65-million-years.
• I gather that fossilization is a lot more destructive than freezing. I don't know much about the digestion of prehistoric mosquitos, but I don't imagine that being in the stomach of an insect would be the best environment to preserve a blood sample.

Will the human genome diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life?

We've had the human genome all along; its been here all along, just like gravity existed before Newton. What's new is the Human Genome Project -- is a vast scientific effort to identify and catalogue all 3 billion DNA subunits that describe our genetic blueprint. Techniques for creating "designer babies," if legal, will be available only for the rich and the elite.

The ancients who were curious about the stars and the planets but couldn't comprehend them resorted to their imagination, telling each other stories about gods. Science has more recently turned those heavenly bodies into planets and solar systems, but we still managed to tell each other science-fiction stories about aliens and computers and robots. Now that computers and robots are part of our daily lives, and now that immigration and global communication has brought us into increasigly close contact with "alien" cultures in other parts of the world, our science-fiction has in recent decates been filled with stories of cyberspace and robot-human hybrids. Because I wear glasses and have a filled tooth, I am in some sense part machine; I am a cyborg. In very recent years, we've seen a rise in fantasy/mythology -- a return to magic and a retreat from technology. Are we going full circle? Probably not.

My point is that we are soo good at imagining that I don't think we will run out of unexplainable things that bother us. Case in point -- the rise in conspiracy theories, or reports of crop circles, alien abductions, tabloid sightings of Elvis and JFK, auctions of Beatles memorabilia, people who collect PEZ or structure their whole life around Disney theme parks.

The worst-case scenarious that have long been part of the science-fiction scene will increasingly penetrate to philosophers, who will write densely footnoted tomes, and somebody will write an incomprehensible postmodern epic interpreting the genome, which will be the subject of countless academic conferences and English Lit dissertations. But for the rest of us, making babies the old fashioned way will still be fun, and the information gained from the sequencing project will probably help more of those babies lead long and healthy lives.

What are the potential injustices or misuses of DNA information?

According to the Human Genome Project's website on genetic legislation, no laws have yet been passed regarding the use of genetic information in healthcare, employment, and so forth.

Already, insurance companies collect all sorts of statistical data about life expectancy and risky lifestyles. A smoker who gets a lot of speeding tickets and is a member of a skydiving club is a bad insurance risk -- but all of those risks are rootted in chosen behavior. Is it ethical for an insurance company to charge higher rates to a person whose genes might indicate an increased risk for, say, heart disease, or sickle-cell anemia? As it happens, heart disease and sickle-cell anemia are both conditions that affect people of African descent at a higher rate than other populations -- so if you permit companies to set different rates based on genetic information, that opens up a can of worms. Who determines which genes are desireable, and which are not? (My answer to this one spills over into my answer for "Are there such a thing as 'bad genes'?")

Is our fate in our genes or in our stars?

I'll take "in our stars" as a metaphor for something like "determined by the cosmos," rather than a literal reference to astrology.

I don't think the average person has any real understanding of what genes do or how they affect us; Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" notes that the function of a gene is to replicate itself, and goes so far as to say that our bodies are simply machines that our genes use to replicate ourselves. My genes don't really care whether I personally live or die -- they don't have a will of their own, of course, but they spread when they happen to inhabit machines whose behavior leads to the production of a lot of genes; this offers a genetic explanation of why I personally work hard to support my family, and why I wouldn't hesitate to hurl my body in front of an oncoming car if I thought that doing so would save my children, or to kill with my bare hands, if necessary, order to protect my children. Doing so wouldn't be an act of free will on my part -- it would be instinctive.

Since genes are part of the cosmos (that is, they are part of the physical reality in which we live), a choice between "genes" and "stars" is a bit of a tautology.

I'd personally rather address the question that this prompt begs -- namely, what role does fate play in human lives? Christian theology positions God outside of time -- all our decisions and actions are known beforehand by God. But Christian theology also places a premium on the value of free will -- God's foreknowledge does not affect our free will; without free will, we deserve neither a reward or punishment for our actions. If God does know how our lives will turn out, it is because he knows in advance all the effects of each of our free-will choices will be. Even if all the actions in my life will take me to a single pre-determined end, every action that I take to get there is, from my perspective, free.

Genes certainly determine some important things... I was tall at an early age, and my build is such that I might have made a fair basketball player. My genes probably had very little to do with the fact that I preferred reading to athletics, had little patience for practicing free-throws, and basically never bothered to learn the rules of the game -- so while I have a physical frame that might have made me athletic, I didn't have the will.

There are enough studies that suggest that identical twins, when separated, differ from each other sufficiently that genetics alone do not account for all or even most of our personality and identity. I recall reading even that the spots that form on cloned animals are different from their parent; so even genetically identical individuals don't follow the same physical path.

Weather forecasting involves such complex mathematics that, for all practical purposes, it is impossible to gather enough data to usefully predict beyond a few days, what a given weather pattern will do. Over the years, however, we have gotten so much better at forecasting weather that where used to predict just a few days in advance, now we can predict a week or so in advance; and with more accurate satellite data and better computer models, we can remove much of the guesswork and increase the accuracy of our forecasts.

My guess is that as our technology develops, we will be able to isolate more and more genetic influences on our behavior, but unless some future totalitarian state (or maybe an HMO) starts using genetic information to control the environment of certain individuals, genes won't have nearly as much influence over our lives as the scary sci-fi scenarios suggest.

On average, internet users spend three and a half hours a day on the internet compared with 2.8 hours a day watching television. | The research, which is the first to suggest the internet has overtaken the television as the most popular medium among people who have both, will provide further grist to the mill of those who argue the web will eventually spell the end of linear television. --Owen Gibson --Surfers switch off TV for PCs  (Guardian)

I have translated into rough Latin an extensive fragment of a much longer popular song. While providing a literal interlinear translation back into English for the benefit of Latin-less readers, I have, regrettably, made no attempt at rhyme or meter; alert readers will also notice that by avoiding translating the entire song, I have not only allowed myself more time for other work, but I have also neatly skipped several lines in the second half which are not easily susceptible to translation....

o consortes (quid est?) o consortes (quid est?)
(O colleagues [What is it?] O colleagues [What is it?])
habent amicae vestrae magnas clunes? (certe habent!)
(Do your girlfriends have large buttocks? [They certainly have!])
hortamini igitur ut eas quatiant (ut quatiant!)
(Encourage them therefore to shake them! [To shake them!])
ut quatiant! (ut quatiant!)
(To shake them! [To shake them!)
ut quatiant illas clunes sanas!
(To shake those healthy buttocks!)
--Quislibet (and "Mixaloti Equitis") --De clunibus magnis amandis oratio (Quislibet)

China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, 38, was hurled into outer space by Shenzhou-5 spacecraft at 9 a.m. Wednesday from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu Province. --Xinhaunet --Shenzhou-5 launch successful (China View)

Now soliciting proposals for projected philosophical anthology on any aspect of The Onion, America's leading satirical newspaper. Brief, informal proposals are welcome at this stage. Submit to Graham Harman at toolbeing@yahoo.com (deadline for initial proposals is October 31, 2003) --Philosophy and The Onion (APA)

Via Crooked Timber, which offers it under a title Mike Arnzen won't want to miss: "God is Undead."

Some 1,500 PEZ dispensers, all nestled in creative landscapes, fill the museum. | Disney PEZ sit in a 10-foot-high castle. Halloween-themed PEZ are displayed in a haunted house. And psychedelic PEZ are set beside a real Volkswagen Beetle that appears to be crashing through the wall. --PEZ museum pops up in Pennsylvania (CNN/AP)

Just as a shark must swim to breathe, a hard drive must be in motion to receive or return data. This air bearing technology, as it is called (pioneered at IBM in the 1950s), explains why dust and other contaminants must be kept out of the drive casing at all costs. If the heads touch the surface of the drive while it is in motion the result is what is known as a head crash: the head, which it must be remembered is moving at speeds upward of one hundred miles per hour, will plow a furrow across the platter, and data is almost impossible to recover. Thus, a key aspect of the hard drive'smateriality as an agent of digital inscription is quite literally created out of thin air. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms: Grammatology of the Hard Drive (MGK)

I was at a zoo today and suddenly realized that the term "fledgling" has an orinthological origin -- it's not a metaphor to apply the term to birds. It's amazing that I've been using that word for decades and it never occurred to me. Thanks for similarly making me understand the term "hard drive crash".

A post on netwoman reads:

Dale Spender and Helen Fallon (1998) also assert that terminology such as 'abort', 'chaining', 'thrashing', 'execute', 'head crash', and 'kill' portray negative images of sex and violence to women, creating an uncomfortable and unfamiliar terrain. http://www.netwomen.ca/Blog/2003_09_01_archive.html#106427418616569858

I haven't read the specific article referenced, but I wonder if your description of the technology of computers as a physical environment (on the micro level) would place the percieved violence of computer terminology into another context.

I'll be going to an academic setting in order to become a game programmer. What's interesting is that just as there are film degrees (one of which I currently own) that combine the fields of literature and art with a variety of other disciplines, including physics among others, there are degrees in game creation. Places that do not seek to be known as giving out "degrees in playing games" as my aunt and uncle sometimes derisively refer to it call their degrees things like "Human-Computer Interaction" which, to be fair, can cover more than just games. Things like biofeedback for medical purposes are also examined. While gaming in education has yet to pan out, these people are doing some amazing things. As a part of the curricula, students also examine the historical place that gaming holds. In addition, they also examine how to integrate filmic and literary concepts into interactive computing. --Dade --Gaming in Education (Switchbox)

Missed your daily dose of Panda Cam? Don't have the time to watch our pandas sleep? Boss expects you to do work? | Well, we have the solution right here. Our newest feature, the Daily Panda, lets you recap the daily escapades of Hua Mei, Bai Yun and Gao Gao thanks to our Panda Cam time lapse video. So go ahead, get some work done? we'll keep track of the pandas for you.
--Panda Cam Live from the San Diego Zoo (San Diego Zoo)

Here's a suggestion that has worked for me: After leaving an employer, send your former boss and some co-workers very polite and thankful e-mails. Mention how much you enjoyed being there, knowing them, how much you learned and so forth. | Most of the time, you will get a reply. Bingo! There's your letter of reference, header and all, indicating where it came from. | Print it and place it into your portfolio. --K.K., writing in to Joyce Lain Kennedy's career advice column --Use E-Mail Notes as References[?] (Job Center, Dallas Morning News)

Most people who use e-mail professionally do understand that e-mail is anything but private, but asking permission before reusing somebody else's words in another context is at the very least a matter of common courtesy. (In fact, some companies, including my own university, require employees to append to every message legalese that explicitly prohibits the forwarding or sharing of e-mail upon which K.K.'s suggestion depends.)

Were I to learn -- from a potential employer, perhaps -- that a student had not even offered me the opportunity to revise a personal note for a more formal audience, I would wonder why the student felt it necessary to trick me into writing a letter of reference. My doubts would affect the enthusiasm I would be able to muster when called out of the blue to assess the skills and attributes of a student I might not have seen in years.

On the other hand, I would be pleased and flattered if the student who receives an informal e-mail of praise from me were to foward my own words back to me, with an enthusiastic note saying something like, "Thank you so much for these kind words. I know you are very busy, and probably get requests for letters of recommendation all the time... but would you mind if I used this e-mail as a letter of reference?"

Such a request -- particularly if it were accompanied by a subtle bulleted list reminding me of the student's accomplishments and updating me on his or her activities since our last contact -- would probably motivate me to block out a bit of extra time and reach for the official letterhead.

The student who demonstrates professionalism and a mastery of communication skills -- especially when making polite, subtle requests for recommendations -- will get a much better letter from me.

At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap. | But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book. --Paul Majendie --Bubble bursts for electronic books (SignOnSanDiego)

"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says. | But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues. --Jo Twist --Web guru fights info pollution (BBC)

Many people, especially secular liberals, misunderstand the nature of religion in politics—which is, to be fair, ever shifting. To them, if it's not about Jerry Falwell or Joe Lieberman, it's kind of a blur. So, just in time for another religion-packed election, here is a guide to sorting through some common myths about God and American politics. --Steven Waldman --How Prayers Poll: Debunking myths about the religious right. (Slate)

--Facing and Fessing Up to Old Age (MetaFilter)

Monkeys can control a robot arm as naturally as their own limbs using only brain signals, a pioneering experiment has shown. The macaque monkeys could reach and grasp with the same precision as their own hand. --Duncan Graham-Rowe --Monkey's brain signals control 'third arm' (New Scientist)

Without getting into the politics (other than to say I find Sept 12 to be a useful, thought-provoking piece, and exciting new genre for games), I'm not sure why Greg and some of his commenters are so vitriolically opposed to calling Sept 12 a simulation. --Simulation Aggravation (GrandTextAuto)

At any rate, I enjoy reading (and sometimes participating in) the meaty debates that go on in the comments on GrandTextAuto -- it's like making a short, free visit to a really good academic conference, where you don't have to sit through pompous 40-minute presentations, but can instead get right to the Q & A with intelligent, articulate, and opinionated people.

Letters from hometown soldiers describing their successes rebuilding Iraq have been appearing in newspapers across the country as U.S. public opinion on the mission sours. | And all the letters are the same....Sgt. Christopher Shelton, who signed a letter that ran in the Snohomish Herald, said Friday that his platoon sergeant had distributed the letter and asked soldiers for the names of their hometown newspapers. Soldiers were asked to sign the letter if they agreed with it, said Shelton, whose shoulder was wounded during an ambush earlier this year. --Many soldiers, same letter  (The Olympian)

These are your panel questions. You will be asked some of them, not necessarily in this order:

1. Is our fate in our genes or in our stars? Explain.
2. What are the potential injustices or misuses of DNA information?
3. Will the human genome diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life?
4. Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not?
5. Is there such a thing as "bad genes"? Explain.

Please be sure to tell your students about this. I think it will be interesting and entertaining for everyone. I look forward to it.

Thanks,

Marcy



Marcia Pietrala

Reference and Public Services

Reeves Memorial Library

Seton Hill UniversityDNA Ethics Panel QuestionsE-Mail)

In a Few Hours, My TV Will Care Less About MeLiteracy Weblog)

Order and Respect in the ClassroomLitreracy Weblog)

On his PEDABLOGUE, Mike Arnzen confesses he raised his voice at his students today, because they were rustling papers and preparing a portfolio to be collected at the end of the period, rather than paying attention to his lecture. I also had a lot of students submitting work today, but I specifically asked them not to use binders -- just a staple or a clip was fine. I admire my colleague for trying to get some serious teaching in the day before a vacation -- I just used the day to preview some upcoming assignments and grade part of a quiz in-class, and let them go about 5 minutes early.

Due to the power differential in a classroom, I try to be very careful about raising my voice or getting mad. I try to smile almost all the time; I've felt since high school that, when I listen to recordings of my own voice, I often sound annoyed or angry. [And sometimes, I let students get away with behavior that would offend me if I were a fellow student. I was already pondering this issue when I learned that...] According to Stuart Twemlow, there's a problem in schools -- teachers are bullying their students. See the article responding to Twemlow, on "Irascible Professor."

Twemlow (with his associates) has a few academic articles on his website, www.backoffbully.com, but as you can guess from the name that website markets videos and a curriculum to school systems. Of the articles posted on his site, one -- "Feeling Safe in School (PDF)" is identified as having been published elsewhere in a shorter form; when it was peer-reviewed, apparently parts of it were cut. The bibliography for that paper mentions at least four articles by the same researchers (in varying combinations of names) that hadn't yet been published.

So... researcher makes claims about a problem. Researcher also happens to sell videos and other materials to solve that problem.

I trust that the academic peer-review process will do its job and ensure the accuracy of Tremlow's published works and the validity of his research methods. There's nothing wrong with making an honest buck, but this is a potential conflict of interest. A good journalist should notice and be skeptical. There's a difference between cynics and skeptics, of course -- I don't want to exaggerate the issue. Nevertheless... keep an open mind, but double-check publicity information coming from somebody with a product to sell (something the TV reporter duped by the "Hunting for Bambi" hoax didn't do).

In a statement, SunnComm Technologies Inc. said it would sue Alex Halderman over the paper, which said SunnComm's MediaMax CD-3 software could be blocked by holding down the "Shift" key on a computer keyboard as a CD using the software was inserted into a disc drive. --Ben Berkiwitz --Princeton Student Sued Over Paper on CD Copying (WashPost/Reuters)

On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. "I still see my hands coming off the railing," he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable--except for having just jumped." --Tad Friend
--Letters from California: Jumpers (New Yorker)

--Muppet Terror Alert (Geek and Proud)

Barriers are being destoyed at the same time as bridges are being built within the literary community just as in almost every other field affected by the almighty computer. Arguments fly on all sides especially as to what constitutes art. Progress constantly changes the determination--even when it may be that it is a subjective view, after all. Time and experimentation move things beyond the established (to date) criteria and may improve, but certainly expand the categories. Homo's red handprint on the cave wall can not remain the standard forever. --Susan --Interactive FictionSpinning)

It must be that time of the semester (no, no, Michelle, not that time): people are talking about grading student papers. --Ron Vitia --Grading Papers (Vitia)

A note from C.M. Worth reminds me to blog that Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death died this weekend. --Neil Postman, Mass Media Critic, Dies (NY Times)

Once the system is in place, patrons will be asked to stand in front of a camera to have their picture taken and will then swipe their drivers' licence, or possibly show some other form of identification, that will automatically give the establishment the patron's name and age and show if he or she has caused trouble at any other bar on the network. --Lori Cuthbert and Amy O'Brian --High-tech targets bad bar customers (Canada.com/Vancouver Sun)

Raelians have made fun of the media that gave such extensive coverage to their cloning story. --Brigitte McCann --Rael's Clones a Hoax? (Calgary Sun)

A self-taught bear expert who once called Alaska's brown bears harmless party animals was one of two people fatally mauled in a bear attack in Katmai National Park and Preserve - the first known bear killings in the 4.7-million-acre park. --Rachel D'Oro --Bear enthusiast, companion fatally mauled in Katmai National Park (Ancorage Daily News)

Forty-five percent of Americans believe the news media in this country are too liberal, while only 14% say the news media are too conservative. These perceptions of liberal inclination have not changed over the last three years. A majority of Americans who describe their political views as conservative perceive liberal leanings in the media, while only about a third of self-described liberals perceive conservative leanings. --Are the News Media Too Liberal? (Gallup)

A very outgoing young man in my class ("Troy") keeps a blog (Internet diary) about his schoolwork, partying, and politics. As I read his entries, including his grousing about my class, I tell myself that I am not eavesdropping, and that he is entitled to write whatever he likes in a public forum. Yet his field is public-school teaching, for which I think his openness about his life might hamper his chances of getting a job. Should I advise him or let it go? -- Letter posted to "Ms. Mentor" advice column --Keeping a Lid on Your Blog (Chronicle)

[T]he recipients of higher education (along with the parents whose experience is 30 years out-of-date if they had one) do not know in advance what they need. If they did, they wouldn't need it, and what they often want, at least at the outset, is an education that will tax their energies as little as possible. | Should we give it to them? Absolutely not. Should we settle curricular matters -- questions of what subjects should be studied, what courses should be required, how large classes should be -- by surveying student preferences or polling their parents or asking Representatives Boehner and McKeon? --Stanley Fish --Grading Congress (Chronicle)

A study carried out by USA Today and seven other newspapers in 2001 concluded that faulty design, not punch-card machines, was responsible for voters' confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000. Despite this finding, states have focused their election-reform energies on upgrading old punch-card machines to optical-scan systems or on implementing electronic voting. They have dismissed or ignored the butterfly layout's problematic design as an aberration—a stupid mistake on the part of local officials. --Jessie Scanlon --Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot (Slate)

A person's mental ability as a child could well be an indicator of their chances of surviving to a ripe old age, according to a landmark study which has followed up on surveys carried out in the first half of the last century. --David Salt --Mental Ability Linked To Survival Age (Discovery)

Defendants will distribute the Net Settlement Fund by providing a discount at the cash registers of all KB Toys, KB Toy Works, KB Toy Outlet, Toy Liquidator and KB Toys Express stores nationwide, including Guam and Puerto Rico, equal to 30% off all qualifying purchases of $30 or more during October 8-14, 2003. This distribution (the "In-store Distribution") will be done without requiring a request of any store customer and will be separate and apart from, and in addition to, any previously planned promotional events for 2003. --Class Action Suit Settlment: 30% off Everything at KB Toys? (KB Toys)

News makers have always had ways of getting their news and views before the public. Often with the help of public-relations professionals, they've held press conferences, issued statements, offered interviews. In the past decade, they've created Web sites, though those pages have usually contained public-relations puffery, not candid communications.|Recently, a few forward-thinking news makers have seen the power of creating their own messages. --Dan Gillmor --Blog has become former actor's portal into new career (Mercury News)

Dear Dennis:

Rosemary asked me to pass on the following passage from J.P. Mallory's "In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology and Myth" (which is actually a good book).

"Our review of Proto-Indo-European culture omits volumes that have been written about the reconstructed vocabulary, since much falls under the category of predictable phenomena or else items not readily retrievable by the prehistorian from any other source other than language. Day, night, earth, sky, clouds, sun, moon and star can all be found in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary. We may be confident that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were physically similar to us and that many of their anatomical parts are linguistically retrievable through the comparison of Indo-European languages. Indeed, it is bizarre recompense to the scholar struggling to determine whether Proto-Indo-Europeans were acquainted with some extremely diagnostic item of material culture only to find that they were far more obliging in passing on to us no less than two words for 'breaking wind'. English dictionaries may occasionally shrink from including such vulgar terms as 'fart' but the word gains status when set within the series: Sanskrit pardate, Greek perdo, Lithuanian perdzu, Russian perdet', Albanian pjerdh 'to fart loudly' (distinguished from Proto-Indo-European *pezd- 'to break wind softly')."

Ciao,
RobertProto-Indo-European CultureE-Mail)

--Movie Posters Redone in Lego

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). --The Blogging Iceberg (Perseus)

KairosNews points to Oliver Wrede's reaction to the Perseus survey; Wrede notes that the survey was skewed towards the personal blog, and didn't seem to include users of the power-user weblog tools such as MovableType.

My trawling of BlogDex reveals "Deflating the Blog Bubble," which sensibly suggests that -- gasp -- blogs might not be the solution to all the world's problems. (That article suggests that blogs are mostly of interest to upperclass white men, which is interesting in light of Orlowski's assertion that most blogs are written by teenage girls.)

Noticed that you had written about our site, The World Rock Paper Scissors Society (www.worldrps.com) on your blog before and thought you may be interested in the upcoming 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International World Championships taking place on October 25th.

Couple notes about the Championships:

- We have built a new Championship specific site at www.rpschamps.com
- We expect to have about 1000 of the World's best players competing
this year and have athletes registered from the UK, 6 US States and Canada.
- Winner will receive $5000.00 (CDN) and more importantly will be able to claim the title of RPS Champion of the World (2nd place $1500.00, 3rd $500)
- We have some various video clips in Quicktime format that can be Viewed here: http://www.rpschamps.com/videos.html

Graham Walker
World RPS Society
gwalker@worldrps.com --Rock Paper Scissors ChampionshipsE-Mail)

Surely not all the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials concede, but given the expectations of students who have grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete as an eight-track cassette.

"These are not frills," said Daniel M. Fogel, president of the University of Vermont. "They are absolute necessities."

The University of Vermont plans to spend up to $70 million on a new student center, a colossal complex with a pub, a ballroom, a theater, an artificial pond for wintertime skating and views of the mountains and Lake Champlain. --Greg Winter (registration; will expire) --Jacuzzi U.? A Battle of Perks to Lure Students  (NY Times)

What does it look like at exactly 25 degrees N, 8 degrees E? What about the other places on the globe where latitutde and longitude lines intersect? Find out at Confluences. --Degree Confluence Project (Orbitals)

Listeners who have come to hate the labels believe their favorite artists no longer need the labels. If only that were true. Maybe Prince can afford to cast his label aside and go directly to the fans. But he did so only after becoming a household name. The vast majority of musicians will never find an audience large enough to let them quit their day jobs without a staff of marketing and promotions people who know how to book a tour, make a video and get their CDs into stores... --Jeff Howe --Listen, It Isn't the Labels, It's the Law (WashPost)

Google is engaged in a battle royale with rivals Overture -acquired by Yahoo - and Sprinks for the lucrative classified text ad business. Initially welcomed as the potential savior of small websites, including blogs, Adwords payments have trickled away in recent weeks, webloggers note. --Andrew Orlowski --Google shafts blogger, adds gagging clause to Adsense (Register)

--Senators butt heads over Iraq funding (Yezbick)

Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi's search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws were. All this, while his pages remained well ranked on Google. "I lost a quarter of my traffic," says Spooner. --Ben Elgin --Web Searches: The Fix Is In  (Business Week)

Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game -- a seemingly curious concept -- is not truly oxymoronic. It may be that certain literary games, including works of interactive fiction, derive their power from the play between their literary aspects and their nature as games... Nick Montfort --Literary Games (Poems That Go)

It is not surprising that the feminization of the television industry would give female characters more prominence, but it is a little disconcerting to see how men have waned in the process. Suddenly, sensitive shows are dealing with men as an oppressed minority group. Television writers who once focused on women's dilemmas are now exploring the emotional difficulty of being a man in today's world. --Alessandra Stanley --On TV, Men Are the New Women (NY Times)

A while ago, I lamented that, when copying and pasting from an online source, it's a pain to have to re-create the links and other HTML embedded in the text. DrWeb sent me this e-mail, and gave me permission to post it here:

Just a note.. saw your post on the Kaironews site, and decided to write since I am not registered there to post or comment.. Re: http://kairosnews.org/node/view/3352

I found this pretty neat plug-in for Web Developers that works, from, um, Microsoft site, and it allows your wish for IE5.x versions. I tried it out tonight, and it works. You highlight text you want to blog and cite, and right-click, and on the menu, you pick "view partial source." It grabs the links and text in that partial source code --viola!

I found the answer via Blogzilla, see http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/ie_phantom_pain.html

and the small downloadable script/code is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/webaccess/webdevaccess.asp for View Selection [Partial] Source and a DOM tree.

Best,
DrWeb

--
P. Michael McCulley aka DrWeb
mailto:drweb@earthlink.net
San Diego, CA
http://drweb.typepad.com/

Quote of the Moment:
This tagline only to be removed by the consumer.

View Source add-in IE (to help in blogging)...E-Mail)

"We now have a greater understanding of why biscuits develop cracks shortly after being baked." -- PhD student Qasim Saleem, quoted in an article by Christine McGourty --Broken Biscuit Breakthrough (BBC)

[M]ore than 1,000 fans [were] turned away from turnstiles for up to 1-1/2 hours over a bizarre ticket snafu.|The fans - many of them season ticket holders - were forced to wait on line until as late as the fourth inning to get replacement tickets after accidentally tearing their ducats out of ticket books without the stubs. --Stuck at the Gate  (NY Daily News)

In other words, a White House leaker is leaking to the Washington Post about Novak's White House leakers, but the leaker to the Post draws short of dribbling out the identities of who leaked to Novak and whom else they tried to leak to. The Post source does, however, pass stern judgment on Novak's leakers, saying the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility." --Jack Shafer --The Plame Game (Slate)

Lower standards and grade inflation make campuses safe for students who have little hunger for knowledge, little love of learning, and almost no appetite for hard work. Although students have many reasons for going to college, a very large number--71.3 percent of the entering class of 1995--do so not to enrich their minds but their pocketbooks. "The only reason most of us are going to school is society says, 'this is your meal ticket'" (Sacks 139). --Paul Trout --Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University (The Montana Professor)

I teach a wide range of students, including some that fit the description above. In my first year of full-time teaching, I made a passing reference to "when you used to do homework in high school," and the class burst out into laughter. I had to ask them why, and at least half of them said that they never did any homework in high school at all.

If you happen to be one of my students, and you're offended by what Trout wrote, then chances are you aren't one of the students he's complaining about. Besides, I doubt an anti-intellectual student would bother reading my weblog -- after all, it won't be on the test.

'Finding out the name of Joe Wilson's wife' (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The controversy involves the charge that someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of CIA operative (undercover agent currently serving in a hostile country? desk-bound Beltway analyst?) Valerie Plame, as revenge against her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, who discredited reports on Iraq's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction (thus undercutting Bush's strongest arguments for launching the assault on Saddam Hussein).

On CNN, when anchor Bill Hemmer introduces a clip, he says:

This is Bob Novak on 'CROSSFIRE' explaining, in part anyway, how he went about finding out the name of Joe Wilson's wife and how he then went about printing it in mid July.

Schumer said the disclosure of the wife's name and CIA relationship "was part of an apparent attempt to impugn Wilson's credibility and to intimidate others from speaking out against the administration." He called for the FBI to investigate Novak's source, because intentionally identifying a covert CIA officer is a crime.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether Wilson's CIA wife was an undercover agent or an analyst, and thus whether revealing her name was a serious security breach, an inconvenience, or trivial... someone on Fark posted a link to the biography of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV on the Middle East Institute's website. The page is dated 2002, and it was in The Wayback Machine when I checked it earlier. Anyway, at the bottom of the bio, we read: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters."

If it's true that Novak is the first person who identified Wilson's wife as a CIA employee, then the problem isn't that Novak mentioned her name, but rather that Novak mentioned her job.

Update: It's early in the AM now, and I just noticed Novak's column for 01 Oct 2003.

Blogger sleuthing at its finest... way back in July, Dust in the Light put together the pieces I just assembled above. Note particularly the Newsday quote

Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's employment, said the release to the press of her relationship to him and even her maiden name was an attempt to intimidate others like him from talking about Bush administration intelligence failures.

Good grief... if you Google "Joseph Wilson biography", the first hit is the 2002 web page that names his wife.

I'm just wondering whether mainstream reporters will be able to address the "finding out the name of Joe Wilson's wife" meme. Or is that up to bloggin' fools like me, who read other blogs until the wee hours of the morning?

I'm going to bed now.

A new Brookings Institution report debunks the popular notion that U.S. schoolchildren suffer from a growing homework load, and do not have enough time to play and just be kids. According to data analyzed by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings, the great majority of students at all grade levels now spend less than one hour studying on a typical day?an amount that has not changed substantially in at least twenty years. The research suggests that rather than having too much homework, children are not doing enough?a cause for concern because homework is correlated with school success. --Homework: An Easy Load? (Brookings Institution)

For the last nine years, the readers of the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for newcomers to the genre, the competition is a chance to enjoy some of the best short adventure games available anywhere. --9th Annual Interactive Fiction CompetitionIFcomp.org)

You can download the games for free and vote. What's that you say -- what is interactive fiction? Should you feel the need, I'd be happy to provide a much drier and stuffier version of that information.

Curse my job for consuming so many of my waking hours! Curse the light fixture that fell and smashed in my daughter's room a few hours ago, curse the toilet for plugging, curse the little knob in my wife's car that came off, curse all the little chores and errands and stuff I have to do, like shaving, and taking out the trash, and mowing the lawn (not that I've done that lately, I confess). Curse my body for requiring sleep! Curse the germs that made me sick this weekend!

Uh... sorry about that. I think what got me started on that rant was the feeling that I know I won't have time to play as many of these games as I'd like. The judging period runs until Nov 15, after which the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction will be bursting with reviews, commentary, bug reports, and all that good stuff. In the meanwhile, everyone is supposed to keep their opinions about individual games to themselves, to keep the playing field level.