Humanities: November 2003 Archive Page

If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others' ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered. --Jamie McKenzie --The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery in an Electronic Age (From Now On)

This article, from 1998, was prophetic. It argues that the "find out about X" assignments that used to require a lot of reading and persistence are today so trivial, and so many of these answers are already posted online, that we do our students a disservice and encourage them to cheat. If they realize it's busywork, and that their teachers themselves couldn't be bothered to come up with a challenging assignment, then how can we possibly expect them to become intellectually invested in it?

I try to impress upon my freshmen the fact that in high school, they were often rewarded for producing, on demand, the answers that were already printed in the back of the book or in the teacher's guides. (I always contextualize my statements about high school by observing that high school teachers have to teach a lot more students, and that they have more disciplinary problems, so I don't want to sound as if I'm slamming high school teachers.) But one day, they may have to speak at a city council meeting and present a reasoned argument for why a new road bypass should take route A (the one that does not destroy their house) instead of route B; or, one day their spouse might convert to a religion that they personally find morally reprehensible; or, they might be told that, due to a budget cut, they will have to write up a report that recommends which one of their three equally-competent assistants should be fired. A liberal arts degree is supposed to give students practice exposing themselves to new ideas and making sense of the world through multiple and varied viewpoints.

Even in upper-level courses, I find students -- some of whom are in the ed school -- asking me, "What do you want me to write?" as if I already have memorized the one and only correct answer to "Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?" or "How Personally Culpable was Torvald for Nora's Plight?"

There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, "just blow us away." We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different ways to make up new words; that is, to demonstrate evidence for segmentation. He babbles at dusk, producing strings like "green, cheen, bean, keen", so we have some evidence for this behavior, but we need more solid data....He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh." --'That Damn Bird' (Edge)

Polly wanna freak you out! **Awk!**

Dear Professor Jerz,

Associate Vice-President Rodd Webb has forwarded me your concerns about the reproduction of your work on a York based website without proper citation. I am writing first of all to apologize for York's delay in responding to your concerns.

The essay has now been removed from the website, and the issue of plagiarism will be pursued according to the Faculty of Arts' quite stringent regulations and procedures governing academic integrity. I will inform you of the outcome in due course.

I am sorry indeed that York should be in any way complicit in the improper reproduction of your work, and I apologize without reservation.

Sincerely,

Heather Campbell
Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts
Associate Professor, Department of English
S928 Ross Building
York University Plagiarized EssayE-Mail)

I complained publicly, so now it's only fair to publicly prolcaim my appreciation that York U is taking the situation seriously. The e-mails from York just keep coming... and I'm sure that the York faculty and administrators will end up investing a hundred times more energy than the students in question saved by not bothering to cite my work properly.

My son wants a plastic pie for Christmas.Literacy Weblog)

Our toy kitchen has one plastic pie, but my son Peter wants another one, so that he and I can pretend to have a pie fight like the one in The Great Race. He has asked Santa on two different occasions (once at church, once in the shopping mall). It's an odd request, but since it involves me, very sweet. (Ugh... I didn't plan that pun. Sorry.)

Peter noticed that the second Santa had a different face, voice, costume, and beard than the first one. I've let Leigh handle all the Santa questions. Since I was the youngest of three siblings, I don't really remember ever seriously believing in Santa Claus; since Leigh was the oldest of three, she remembers trying to keep the secret for the benefit of her brothers.

It's a peculiarity of scholarly life that everyone is expected to be able to deliver a lecture well, but almost no one is trained to do it....If you put your bulleted ideas up on slides, your audience will look at the slides, not at you. You'll also be teaching them that What You Have to Say Can Be Summarized in a Few Words. Can it? --William Germano --The Scholarly Lecture: How to Stand and Deliver  (Chronicle)

Here's one of my suggestions for organizing oral presentations... plan in advance what you will cut if you run short of time. I've attended far too many lectures in which the speaker has prepared three examples, but the whole audience got the speaker's point after the second example. Save time for the conclusion, and if your first or second example runs long, cut it out altoghether. And don't announce, "I'm going to cut my third example," just don't mention it, and launch right into your conclusion.

Hugh Kenner, the literary critic who died on Monday aged 80, wrote on subjects as diverse as geodesic mathematics, the cartoons of Chuck Jones (creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd) and the effect of modern technology on literary imagery; he was best known, however, as a leading authority on American and Irish modernist writers, in particular Ezra Pound and James Joyce. --Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) (Telegraph)

Kenner's book The Mechanic Muse was an important influence on my own dissertation. I never met the man, and I only quoted him a few times in my thesis, but when I first read an example of his technique for critiquing the technological images in literature, it was love at first sight. He hobnobbed with Marshal McCluhan, visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum.

Wow. What a blogger he would have made.

In one of the most secretive presidential trips in American history, George W. Bush flew to Baghdad under intense security on Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with United States troops and to thank them for standing up against the "band of thugs and assassins" they are fighting in Iraq. --Elizabeth Bumiller --On Secret Iraq Trip, Bush Pays Holiday Visit to G.I.'s (NY Times)

This was a genius PR stunt on a slow news day. I tried using the NY Times link generator, which supposedly creates a permanent link for use by bloggers, but it didn't work. Anyone else have better luck?

INTJ - "Mastermind". Introverted intellectual with a preference for finding certainty. A builder of systems and the applier of theoretical models. 2.1% of total population.

Take Free Myers-Briggs Personality Test

INTJ: Mastermind

I think the Myers-Briggs Personality Test is copyrighted material, so I wonder about the legality of this online version. Found via Kate Cielinski (who is also an INTJ).

Whenver I take this test, I score on the introvert/extrovert borderline; professionally I'm an extrovert, and I'm an extrovert with my family, but socially I'm an introvert. This time I did come down slightly on the "I" side.

Thanksgiving and Spring 2004 PreviewLiteracy Weblog)

Tomorrow (Thursday) will be Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S. -- a time for turkey feasts and family gatherings. I'll probably blog a bit when I get the chance, but I'm also preparing syllabi for next semester.

I'll be teaching the second half of "Seminar in Thinking in Writing," a course in "Media Aesthetics" (the focus will be on new media, naturally), "Introduction to Literary Studies" (a Whitman's Sampler for the creative writing, literature, and new media journalism majors), and American lit from 1915 to the present. I'll also continue my supervision of the student paper.

As long as I'm downloading current events, I just heard that my proposal for a conference presentation on students' emotional investment in their academic weblogs has been accepted at the CCCC computer connection, so I'll be in San Antonio for a weekend in March. Yippie tye ye yay!

--Miss Pennsylvania Pageant (Sugarpacket)

My student Karissa Kilgore is participating in the Miss Pennsylvania pageant this weekend. She had hoped to use her weblog as a way to keep her family informed, but alas since MT won't let us post comments, she's missing an opportunity to let her friends and family cheer her on.

If anybody would like to leave messages for Karissa, please feel free to leave them here. Update, 28 Nov: Our blog software seems to be working again... knock on electrons.

--done! (dr jill/txt)

Congratulations to Jill Walker, whose Ph.D. defence was closely watched in certain parts of the blogosphere.

Untenured radical flirts
attend MLA meetings in skirts,
feathers, tassels and suits,
with leatherette boots
Rendered wholly from Savile Row shirts

--Kieran Healy (see first comment) --Like Circus Ponies? (Invisible Adjuct)

Doctors say Mrs Roberts, who was born and bred in Indiana, has a condition called foreign accent syndrome. | This rare condition occurs when part of the brain becomes damaged. This can follow a stroke or head injury. There have only been a few documented cases. --Stroke Gives Woman British Accent (BBC)

This article conflates the meaning of "accent" with "dialect," but so do plenty of other people, so I'm being terribly pedandic by pointing it out. In other news, muppets everywhere are turning Swedish. (That's a joke from an old "The Muppet Show" skit, which I sadly can't find any significant reference to online. I believe it was in 1979 and the guest star was Jonathan Winters. Bork bork bork!)

He was giving away Zippos for answering a survey.... So, even though I don't smoke, I took the survey. He asked what I smoked, and I answered "Marlboro Lights." Divine inspiration. Then he asked the tough question. "Hard or soft?" Well, I had no idea cigarettes could hard or soft. I was pretty sure they were one consistency -- rolled up stuff.... I'm a horrible story-maker-upper. He gave me the lighter anyway, even though I am a fake. --Julie Young --Buy 3 & $ave (Work in Progress)

Yet another reason why you shouldn't trust surveys. Fakers like Julie lie for trinkets, and the results are published somewhere in a magazine.

Most newspapers have traditionally not made room for online producers and editors in their newsrooms, shuffling them off instead to a different floor, or to a different building entirely.|But in the past few years, many newspapers have decided that having two newsrooms -- one for print and one for online -- doesn't make much sense. One by one, papers are moving their online editorial staff into the main newsroom. --Jane Ellen Stevens

--Moving Online into the Newsroom (ORJ)

"We intend to try our case in the courtroom, not in the public or the media." --Michael Jackson, on a website devoted to trying his case in public and in the media. --Michael Jackson (The Official Press Room)

I don't actually blame the guy for wanting to have his say, but it's a bit hypocritical to criticize what you are doing while you are doing it. Having said that, the website is minimalist and restrained; Jackson's PR forces are carefully controlling the message in a manner that they weren't able to do when he gave his famous baby-dangling interview.

Walt Disney has pulled out of the new $140 million film version of Peter Pan after refusing to give a share of its profits to a children's hospital in London... Barrie transferred the copyright of his famous creations to the hospital in his will. The hospital has full control over all productions of the play and is supposed to benefit financially from each subsequent adaptation. --Disney quits Peter Pan film after row over Gt Ormond St  (Telegraph)

More evidence that Disney is evil.

Think blogs are useless? Donna, while applying for jobs, got a email back from Central Pa Magazine. They happened to have read her blog and asked her to write a column on food/health for them. Let's all cross our fingers for her that they ask her to be a regular columnist. | Woo Hoo Donna. You give good hope to future journalists that blogs are an extension of a résumé. --Brian McCollum

--Think Blogs are Useless? (BAM SE)

Very interesting in light of the ongoing discussion of Dvorak's anti-blogging column. Neither Brian nor Donna are in any of my classes -- in fact, Donna graduated before I started at Seton Hill. But both are regulars on the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University website. Congratulations, Donna!

Everyone knows that some very good people leave teaching because it pays so poorly. Some experts estimate that there is one well-qualified teacher not teaching for every one now in the classroom. Under my Leave No Teacher Behind Act, some of these people would surely return and others stay. That would increase the pool of teachers, giving school districts greater choice in whom they hire and retain. --Richard Cohen --Leave No Teacher Behind (Washingto Post -- Will Expire)

Via Arnzen's Pedablogue.

Even now, surveys show that fewer than 50 per cent of Americans believe there was just one gunman. | One of the effects of this is that an entire industry has grown up surrounding the death of JFK, who was shot twice as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza... --The Assassination Industry (NZ Herald)

Hmm... I wonder whether the surveys are really a sign of historical ignorance, rather than a belief in conspiracy. The JFK assassination was 40 years ago, so it's probably true that there are more Americans now who don't remember where they were or what they were doing that day than there are who do. If the survey question is "Do you believe that one gunman killed JFK," I bet that many will say "I don't know" simply because they have no idea, not because they want to believe in a conspiracy. But then again, news stories like this one keep putting the consipracy theories in the public eye, and thus contribute to a willingness to believe in conspiracy. Having said that, this article does offer some good analysis into the reaons why Americans want the death of a popular leader, the leader of the free world, to have more meaning than it would if JFK really had been taken out by a lone nut.

--Lileks vs. Salam Roundup (Instapundit)

Glenn Reynolds has a good collection of links covering Minnesota blogger and fisker extraordinaire James Lileks's angry reaction to Iraqi blogger Salam Pax's criticism of the US-led occupation.

It's no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome, albeit insincere.|Unfortunately, at some point, people will realize they've been used. --John C. Dvorak
--Co-opting the Future (PC Magazine)

This article seems to presume that many (if not most) bloggers are trying to blog for profit.For a person who has Internet access, the cost of producing a blog is minimal or nil; likewise, reading a blog costs nothing. One reason I bloog, and give away my ideas for free, is because I know that I benefit so much from the freely-given ideas I have read on other people's blogs. I hope there will always be professional writers, but I also rejoice that so much amateur content is being produced, shared, enjoyed, and put to use in the world. The vast majority of bloggers aren't in it for the money.

"Writing is tiresome. Why anyone would do it voluntarily on a blog mystifies a lot of professional writers," he says. But that presumes that professional writers don't write voluntarily. Yes, writing is tiresome, and except for a few superstars, writing doesn't pay very well, so many professional writers have made economic sacrifices to feed a compulsion that drives them to write. I recall a conversation I had with a struggling young actor who finally announced her decision to stop taking acting roles that were good opportunities but that didn't pay anything -- yes, they looked great on her resume and yes, she learned a lot, but all the time she was spending rehearsing or auditioning for free wsa time that she couldn't spend looking for paid work. I feel the same way about my blogging, but quite frankly I've been fortunate enough that, while I don't get paid directly for my blogging, as a new media teacher I feel that I need to blog in order to participate in the cyberculture I am teaching and studying.

Most academics don't get paid for the academic articles they write, and get paid only very little for the books they write. When I give a talk at a conference, my university will pay my way (up to a point). Of course, this wasn't true when I was a grad student -- since there is very little research money in the humanities, I had to pay my own way to conferences, while students in engineering (for instance) had travel budgets from the corporations bankrolling their professors' research. While grad students in the sciences thought of their research as a job, we in the humanities often didn't even earn enough money to pay our tuition, so we ended up paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of marking stacks of papers and teaching lower-level classes. It came with the territory.

There are professional speech-givers who wouldn't dream of giving a speech and getting reimbursed only for travel expenses, but as an academic, I'm expected to deliver papers at conferences. Yes, it's a bother, but it comes with the territory.

I feel the same way about blogging... on a Saturday night after the kids are in bed, what am I doing? Blogging. A few years ago I might have been watching Saturday Night Live; now, rather than sit still and absorb media produced by someone else, I am spending a half hour or so creating someting of my own, and posting it for whoever finds it.

Dvorak cites the statistic that most blogs have a readership of 12. So what? If they are the right 12 people, and the blogger gets sufficient satisfaction, what's the problem? Traditional diaries theoretically have a readership of one, but that shouldn't devalue their importance in the culture of literacy. I think most professional writers do understand concepts such as self-expression and personal discovery. If each of a blogger's 12 readers also has a blog, and each of those reader-bloggers is read by an overlapping but not identical group of 12, then the dynamics of producer and consumer, author and reader, authority and readership are completely re-written. This is part of the whole paradigm shift in new media.

Believe me, I'm all for the well-placed bit of flatulence, but this is Dr. Seuss, for Pete's sake, and the onslaught of burps, farts, pee, puke, and almost-bad words is stunningly miscalculated. --Ty Burr --Kitty Litter: Coarse `Cat in the Hat' is another case of Seuss abuse (Boston.com)

This movie sounds awful, but I haven't read more entertaining reviews in a long time. Here's another priceless quote: "If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more."

Here's my take on it:

I will not watch it on TV.
I will not watch on DVD.
I will not watch it on the screen.
I will not watch with tot or teen.

[Nothing to quote -- which is ironic, considering the page is about literacy.] --America's Most Literate Cities (U Wisconsin, Whitewater)

An interesting find, from my student Julie Young. The website itself is an abomination -- all these words are images, so you can't copy and paste, a search engine won't be able to find it because search engines don't read images, and a blind person will get no useful information by sending this page through a screen reader. The full paper is available, but only as a PDF. A sad example of print design that misunderstands the power of the Internet. Use text, people.

Not completely yes.

• First: most obviously, the Memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital technology. (As you watch the animation, you can hear the machanical operation sound, that sound would be a proof to believe that it is not digital media)
• Second, the operation of the memex is tied to the physical presence of texts - a stack of densely-printed microfilms, which can be sorted and displayed quickly, but which must first be printed and distributed to a paying researcher.
• Bush was fixated on the human mind. All of his initial machines and visions were analog devices. Furthermore, he frequently used the analogy of electricity to the human brain. In doing so, he believed that he could improve on the imperfect biological processes that existed.

--Chen LiuKe and Xia Li

--Is Memex a digital media? (York University CS Department)

The Memex is Vannevar Bush's hypothetical microfilm-based document storage and retrieval system, proposed in the 1940s but never built.

The above excerpt is the conclusion to a computer science paper posted to Peter Roosen-Runge's curricular website. The first two points in this list are plagiarized from an article I wrote earlier this year. See for yourself:

Seeing the memex as the direct precursor to the WWW is attractive, but problematic for several reasons. First, and most obviously, the memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital, technology. Second, the operation of the memex is tied to the physical presence of texts - a stack of densely-printed microfilms, which can be sorted and displayed quickly, but which must first be printed and distributed to a paying researcher. Third, the memex is only additive - the scholar can duplicate pages, but cannot synthesize (by copying and pasting chunks) or inserting or rearranging words in a stream. "On the Trail of the Memex," Dichtung Digital

I e-mailed Roosen-Runge two weeks ago, and got no response. I e-mailed Roosen-Runge and his department chair a week later, and still got no response.

The paper in question does include my article in its "Reference" section, but there aren't quotation marks around the passage lifted from my work. I'm appalled at the lack of response I have received from the instructor.

While I'm at it, I don't really think that Chen LiuKe and Xia Li know what they are talking about -- the Memex is an analog storage system, which involves taking pictures on microfilm. It's a chemical and mechanical process -- it's analog, not digital. The only answer the three bulleted points supports would be "Not in any way, no." I see nothing that convinces me the Memex should be considered "a digital media" [sic].

We live in the dark ages of digital media. We fantasize about the infinite possibilities and revolutionary potential of the Web, about how free information wants to be, about uploading our brain to a hard drive -- but we actually know less about the creative computing that happened in our lifetimes than some people know about incunabular broadsides and Babylonian school tablets. Forget about Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad -- we can't even run MacPaint. Forget about Vannevar Bush's trails -- we can't even run The Oregon Trail. It's as if we have some sort of cultural, corporate, and academic attention deficit disorder and mommy has sold our supply of Ritalin to Rush Limbaugh. --Nick Montfort --Condemned to Reload It: Forgetting New Media (nickm.com)

I love this guy!

I recently had a brief conversation with our university archivists.

At the moment, their strategy for archiving electronic information is -- you guessed it -- printing it all out and preserving the pages. They're paying a small fortune in printing, since the university is generating so much in terms of e-mail and other electronic data.

I asked whether they had plans to preserve the university website as it develops, or all the material curricular currently archived in the proprietary course-management software (J-Web). And with that question, I probably marked myself for future committee work.

A Picture is Worth...

As an academic, I try to keep an open mind... but in my humble opinion, this very talented man is really, really disturbing. I assume the mugshot, which I found on Drudge, is the same one that won't show up when I try to download it from The Smoking Gun. I'm sure the entrepreneurs are making their T-shirts already.

Nick Montfort's Twisty Little PassagesLiteracy Weblog)

I just ordered my copy of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction -- Nick Montfort's study of riddles, Adventure, Zork, and beyond.

James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now.... Like its publishing arm, DCI's business is to influence elite opinion in Washington. But instead of publishing articles, DCI specializes in what's known as "corporate-financed grass-roots organizing," such as setting up front groups to agitate for a client's position, placing letters to the editor with key newspapers, and using phone banks to generate calls to politicians. TCS, for its part, includes a disclaimer on its site noting that "the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily those of any corporation or other organization." But it is startling how often the opinions of TCS's writers and sponsors converge. --Nicholas Confessore

--Meet the Press: How James Glassman reinvented journalism--as lobbying.  (Washington Monthly)

Thanks Jess, SHU's webmaster, for sending this one my way. I have complex feelings about it.

Glassman is the libertarian-conservative economist who is probably most famous for insisting that in the months before the dot-com crash, the stock market was wildly undervalued. Needless to say, he was very wrong. The gist of the article (see a brief discussion on Ars Technica) is that James Glassman's opinion columns tend to match extremely closely views advocated by the sponsors of his "Tech Central Station" magazine, which isn't really a magazine at all but rather a mouthpiece for the think tank that publishes it. The mission of TCS, according to its detractors, is to use corporate funding to generate grass-roots movements that support the funders' positions (a term appropriately enough called 'Astroturfing').

There's nothing wrong with publishing a magazine around the views of a particular entity (Oprah Winfrey or Rosie O'Donnell, or onion farmers, for instance), but the content of those lifestyle and trade magazines isn't presented as scholarly research. And as far as using donated money to generate grass-roots activity, there is little difference between Microsoft donating a boatload of money and Barbara Streisand or Paul Newman using their celebrity status to attract attention to a cause. Which side of the political spectrum is the "Rock the Vote" campaign designed to reach, anyway? Still, nobody will mistake a pop music performance or the donated proceeds from a bottle of salad dressing for unbiased research and scholarly opinion.

On the other hand, in a free economy, why shouldn't Publisher X be permitted to buy the rights to Author Y's article, and base that decision on whether the viewpoint expressed by Author Y is consistent with the expectations of Publisher X's audience and advertisers? I mean, you wouldn't fault Rolling Stone for not publishing an article that all pop stars and the people who listen to their music are going to hell, would you? The subtitle of TCS is "Where Free Markets Meet Technology," which is a pretty obvious way of identifying a pro-business profile. Still and all, I'm not sure whether there is any real moral difference between the corporate way of manipulating the opinion of the public or the Hollywood way of doing the same thing. In general, most people are too apathetic to bother thinking critically about important issues; it's human nature that we believe in the people we like and trust, which is why actors, pop stars, and TV journalists have such an impact on our society, and why people with money who want to make even more money work hard for access to and control of these cultural forces.

For me, the solution is not to denounce TCS, but rather to redouble my resolve to teach my students to look beneath the glossy package of the message (whether that comes from Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, or academia).

Update, 20 Nov: Corrected a few typos.

"In order to maintain airspeed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings forty-three times every second, right?"

Actually, wrong. By comparing the European Swallow with bird species of similar body mass, we can estimate that the swallow beats its wings 18 times a second with an amplitude of 18 cm... Jonathan Corum --Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow (Style)

This pop-cult reference is, of course, to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Yesterday was the 140th anniversary of Lincoln's famous address. There is only one known photograph of President Lincoln at Gettysburg (here's the detail view if you're having a hard time spotting him). The Library of Congress website explains that the image sat for more than half a century in the National Archives before anyone recognized President Lincoln in it.
--Fourscore and Seven Years Ago... (Metafilter)

I have a special fondness for that speech, in part because I played the mayor in a high school production of The Music Man. An extended joke in an early scene is that the mayor is trying to deliver a rendition of that speech at a patriotic gathering, but he keeps getting interrupted.

I knew full well that on the night before the play opened, when traditionally people would play tricks on each other, that Bryan Louiselle (who played Harold Hill) wouldn't interrupt me when he was supposed to. So I memorized the whole speech (which wasn't in the script; back in the pre-WWW days, I actually had to look it up in a book). When Bryan didn't interrupt me, I just sailed ahead with the speech, and Bryan made his entrance after I finished. (Confession: I only got through about half of it before I stumbled, but then I skipped to the end, and I'm pretty sure nobody else on stage or in the audience knew the speech better than I did, so everyone probably thought I gave the whole speech.)

Their one-star bombs were nasty and relentless?landing at a rate of five a day. My characters were undeveloped, my structure sloppy, my prose trite. There were complaints of money and time wasted and of friends never again to be trusted. Some hated the book so much they were forced to put it down. One argued that Christopher was, in fact, "too dull to hate." And each review was headlined in bold capital letters?things like "SUCH A DISAPPOINTMENT" and "YAWN!" And, to make matters worse, above each bad review was a landslide of endorsements: "18 of 18 people found the following review helpful." And above the old, positive reviews the numbers had changed overnight: "20 of 68 people found the following review helpful." Within a few days Christopher's review average had fallen to a mediocre three stars. --Allison Burnett --I Was Stalked on Amazon.com (Media Bistro)

It sure looks like one nasty person sank the sales of a book that 20 other people thought was five-star good. But sending out e-mail to 200 people to log onto Amazon.com and correct an opinion that you don't agree with is a bit risky. Why not be content that 20 out of 21 reviews were glowing? And who really has 200 friends? Apparently about 198 of them treated the request as Spam.

Phone Pranks and Gender on CampusLiteracy Weblog)

I'm at my desk, working late. The phone rings. An unfamiliar female voice says, "What's your favorite scary movie?"

I tell her I don't have one.

"That's a very nice blue shirt you are wearing," the voice continues. "It goes well with your red tie."

I look out my window, but the buildings I can see from here are all dark. It's a little creepy, but only a little. The student tells me her name, tells me she's calling from a darkened classroom in the admin building, and tells someone else in the room to turn on the light. I recognize at least one of the students she is with; they all wave cheerfully, and I get back to work. Later, a colleague of mine is rather annoyed to learn of the incident, saying that even if the students had no malicous intent, they were too old for prank calls. But I can't really get myself worked up about it; I did plenty of silly stuff when I was 20, and I don't think it harmed anyone.

As a male working at a historically female school -- one which is actively recruiting more males -- I see some interesting gender dynamics at this school. Some of the upperclass female students are very unhappy about having to share their power with the male students in the sophomore and freshman classes.

Had I been a female, working alone at night, and had a group of male students called me up, made a reference to a movie that features the terrorization and murder of a woman, and made comments about my clothing, would I have felt differently? Food for thought.

--News-Images.com

Pretty self-explanatory -- like Google News but for people who don't want to read. Found on Slashdot.

Reading the news on a computer may soon be passe. Internet-enabled mobile phones and hybrid devices are fueling the next wave of change, and journalists need to know how to deliver content to these devices. --Vivek Shankar --Reporters, readers get new ways to publish and readOnline News Association)

This is some light, friendly PR-style coverage of a conference on online journalism. The sidebar has short summaries of other panels that looked interesting, including Andrew Sullivan on the blog replacing the op-ed and convergence.

How can both neuroscience and literature bear on the question of what makes writers not only able, but want, even need, to write? How can we understand the outpouring of authors like Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King? Why does John Updike see a blank sheet of paper as radiant, the sun rising in the morning? (As William Pritchard said of him, "He must have had an unpublished thought, but you couldn't tell it.") This seems -- and is -- an unbelievably complex psychological trait. --Alice Weaver Flaherty --Writing Like Crazy: a Word on the Brain (Chronicle)

It's hard to tell from the title, but this article examines the writing urge and writer's block (whoops -- I typed "blog") as physiological as well as psychological phenomena, such as suggesting that the November/December creativity slump may be casued by a latent hibernation instinct brought about by shorter days. The article also refers casually to Freud in a way that I find maddening... Freud may be extremely useful as we attempt to understand the modern mindeset, but I think it is naive to refer to him now, when we have so many more scientifically accurate models for describing and affecting human behavior. (But see Mike Arnzen's defense of Freud [in the comments].)

High schools no longer prepare most students to express ideas coherently or follow accepted English, let alone carry on serious intellectual work..... The task falls to me -- in courses ostensibly about specified topics, not composition -- to patch up these leaky vessels.... I hold that a university education ought to include a significant writing component, that student writing deserves substantial professorial comment, that every student can become a better writer with practice, and that this is the last effective chance for them to get practice and feedback. If not us, who? --Max Clio

--Grading on My Nerves (Chronicle)

Robert Mendler, Holocaust SurviorLiteracy Weblog)

I recently heard Holocaust survivor Robert Mendler, a resident of nearby Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who spent six or seven years in 10 different concentration camps. Mr. Mendler is a regular speaker here at Seton Hill and in the region; I attended his visit to a youth group at Our Lady of Grace church this past Sunday.

I had met Mr. Mendler and his charming wife a week or so ago, when Yaacov Lozovic came to campus last week to speak on his book, Right to Exist. (I took extensive notes on that speech and have been meaning to blog it for some time, but that will have to wait.) I had originally planned to go to the SHU trip to The Mattress Factory (an art museum) instead, but my wife really wanted to see Mr. Mendler. His presentation was low-key, I think because he was speaking to teens and kids, but it was still extremely powerful. Out of a family of 70 relatives, he was the only one who survived. To think that Israel today is the home of about 6 million, but that another 6 million were killed by Hitler's forces... shocking. As a young boy, Mendler was first sent to work as unpaid slave labor; he was sent home to his family one day a week, but this was before the Nazis started moving so aggressively against Jews.

As it happened, he he worked in the home of the S.S. chief in his village. And six or ten years later (I was walking my one-year-old in the lobby outside the meeting hall for most of the speech, so I missed quite a bit), after Allied forces had liberated the concentration camps and saved the lives of those who weren't already dead or dying, Mendler emigrated to the U.S. Who do you suppose he saw on the boat but the same man who had been local chief of the S.S., who was trying to emigrate to the U.S. to escape his war crimes. Mendler's testimony, along with that of another man on the boat, brought this man to justice. It was a very dramatic and unexpected turn to his speech. He says that after so many years in concentration camps he had given up on God, but when he helped capture the man who had brutalized him so as a young boy, he says he knew there was a God.

I do wish I could have heard more of his story, but I did get to speak to him before and afterwards, and I'm sure I'll see more of him at Seton Hill. His grandson Max was with him, and although Max was a few years older than my son Peter, the two of them seemed to get along well.

Angela's AshesLiteracy Weblog)

I'm reading Frank McCort's Angela's Ashes. I recently showed a video, "People Like Us," to my Seminar in Thinking and Writing students. In the video, a talking head says that everyone with class aspirations has a copy of Angela's Ashes, but that nobody has read it. Kind of like the opposite of The Bridges of Madison County, which people with class apsirations tried to hide.

Anyway, my parents passed on their copy of AA to me, and there it was, sitting on the shelf, so I started reading it. I think one or two of the short stories in James Joyce's The Dubliners does a better job of capturing the misearable and pathetic state of the Irish destitue, though the motion of the family from America back to Ireland offers an interesting twist; the McCort children are taunted for being Yanks.

I'm about half way through the book and the narrator is still only about five or six years old. He does a great job jerking your heart around, as when the drunken lout of a father eases his baby's raspy breathing by sucking the snot out of his nose -- not exactly a classy thing to do, but his wife looks at him adoringly for it. Then, after a long bout of unemployment, the father finally lands a job, drinks his wages on Friday night (again), is so drunk he misses work the next day, and loses his job.

Pathetic.

It's supposed to be a memoir, which means that it all really happened that way and I can't fault the narrator for unrealistic plot twists or maudlin attempts at melodrama. Most of the time, the childish eyes of the narrator can't see clearly enough to criticize. The effect is similar to that of Benjy's chapter in The Sound and the Fury -- Benjy is an objective reporter who offers no sense of awareness outside himself (except for the final few lines, where he indicates that he trusts Caddy when she tells him he has been dreaming).

But in the tale of the father losing his job, I felt myself resisting the narrator's attempt to pull my heartstrings. Am I a bad person because I roll my eyes at the predicability of the plot? Am I not quite able to enter into the young narrator's world? Am I too reluctant to give up my romantic view of the Irish side of my family (on my mother's mother's side)?

While driving Torill Mortensen to the airport after her visit to Seton Hill, I learned a very enligthenting discussion about the way Europeans feel about their distant American relations who return to the villages of their ancestors after two or three generations of no contact with their roots. It's certainly not the fault of these travellers that their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents never came back to their ancestral villages, and I can certainly see it is ridiculous to suggest that people should drop what they are doing to throw a prade for distant relations who wish to play detective in the cemeteries and church record offices. Torill mentioned that, to those who stayed, the Americans who come back are the decendents of people who left. America wouldn't be what it is today if it had not been for the passion and drive of generations of people who left their homelands in search of building a better life for themselves.

Maybe the book will change eventually, but when I read Angela's Ashes, I can't help but think to myself, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." And I don't like thinking that way, mostly because it's not exactly fashionable for Americans to show their patriotism in international circles these days.

This isn't a very intellectual blog entry, but I'm gonna submit it anyway.

Disney started producing films for a new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, in 1927. | Mickey Mouse was conceived the next year during a cross-country train ride, according to the "official" company history. Walt Disney had just been forced to give up the Oswald rights to his ruthless New York distributor, who had exercised copyright control over the character. | On the ride back home to Los Angeles, Disney conjured up a little mouse named Mortimer. His wife, Lillian, thought the name too pompous and suggested Mickey. --Disney's Mickey Mouse Set to Turn 75 (Yahoo!/AP)

On Tuesday, the Mickey Mouse character turns 75, which means that, had it not been for some recent legal changes in the implementation of copyright, the Mickey Mouse character would have entered the public domain, and the corporation would lose the rights to market him (just as today anybody can use characters such as Huckleberry Finn or Ebeneezer Scrooge).

When I started my Ph.D., I chose the time span of 1920-1950, becuase I thought that during my academic career, one by one all of the literary works that were created during that period would start falling out of copyright, which would mean that I could publish my own online editions of these works. But thanks to Disney, that's not going to happen -- Disney's laywers managed to get the copyright laws extended for another 25 years. A few works that I studied did fall out of copyright before Sonny Bono (formerly of Sonny and Cher, and also the U.S. House of representatives) did his groovy legalistic magic.

Some may not like the US President, but we should all appreciate what America has done for the world ....
I don't want the Americans to go home. In fact I am terrified of what would happen if they did. Their going home in the past has often meant suffering for others. Sure, I want them to change. I want more consistency. I want Bush to stop tolerating the nastystans of Central Asia, to tell Ariel where to get off, to treat allies with more respect, to dump the hubristic neo-cons, to sign up to Kyoto, to reverse 'he who is not with me is against me' to 'he who is not against me is with me'. I would like acknowledgment of the mistakes and crimes of the past. I would quite like Bush to become Wesley Clark. | But our enemy is not America. --David Aaronovitch --Why I say welcome  (Observer/Guardian)

This essay is popular in the blogosphere right now, as a sort of antidote to the protest coverage surrounding Bush's visit to the UK.

Aviva, Diageo, Corus... the trend for rebranding companies with "nonsense" names has led to some notable additions to the corporate lexicon. | But a stunt designed to ridicule the tendency has come back to haunt its creators after several spoof names were registered for real. --Spoof brand names snapped up for real (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

A large number of my patients ascribe their current unhappiness to the fact that they were not offered counselling at the time of an unpleasant occurrence, such as a surgical operation or the death of a friend or relative. Every form of human suffering, it seems, is susceptible to the magical powers of therapy. It is the superstition of our age. --Theodore Dalyrmple reviews Therapy Culture by Frank Furedi

--We need to pull ourselves together  (Telegraph)

Dalyrmple notes that, while Furedi is critical of therapy as a catch-all, "many people may nevertheless benefit personally from the sympathetic ear and disinterested advice of third parties when they have no one else suitable to turn to."

What began as the ultimate outsider activity -- a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information -- is turning into the same insider's game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them, the more obvious it is: They've fallen in love with themselves, each other and the beauty of what they're creating. --Jennifer Howard --It's a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere (Washington Post (will expire))

Item! Some Bloggers Love Themselves Too Much! Howard is right, but her realization is sooo 2001.

The good text adventures had more than a series of puzzles to solve; they had as much atmosphere and clever writing as a good novel, and I decided in Grade 8 that I was going to merge my love of writing and computers to become a writer of interactive fiction. I set my sights on getting a job at Infocom, the company that made the best text adventures. | Then graphics came along and ruined everything. --Jim Munroe --Professor Zork (No Media Kings)

I'm warming up for when I can post the results of IF Competition 2003.

As delegates arrived at the meeting, they were handed an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear around their necks. Called an nTag, each delegate's device was pre-programmed with the conference schedule, which could be displayed on a small screen on the front of the tag, as well as with personal information supplied earlier to the organisers. This included the wearer's contact details, employment history, their professional interests and personal hobbies- the kind of information that people often compare to decide whether they have anything in common. The purpose of nTags is to ask all those ice-breaker questions automatically. The tags communicate with each other via an infrared link to find out whether their owners have much in common. When an nTag finds a good match, it does what any good party host would do and alerts its owner to the other person. --Hello, will you be my friend? (EurekAlert)

Amazing. Geeks aren't known for their people skills, and some would rather keep typing in their cubicles than venture forth into the world of "Hello" and "How are you today?"

If I went to a fancy event and was given "an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear" around my neck, I'd feel... well, I'd feel like a geek. But I guess that's the point.

"Americans work more hours by far than any other workers in the [industrialized] world," said Benjamin Balak, who teaches economic history at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. "If you want to be a high-income wage earner, you have to work like a dog. If you want leisure in today's economy, you'll be stuck in a low-income job. It's income or leisure.".... Hourly workers, who must by law be paid time-and-a-half for overtime, tend to work about 40 hours a week, just as they did in the 1970s. It's among the growing number of salaried workers - who aren't eligible for overtime - that the extra hours are largely being worked. Harry Wessel --Consumed by Work (Sunspot)

While I complain about grading papers at home, and students complain about homework, according to this article, anyone involved in professional work is going to have to get used to the extra hours. Sigh.

"What can I tell you?" says New York Times Hollywood correspondent Bernard Weinraub. "I screwed up -- I'm sorry." | Weinraub's apologies, given hurriedly in a very brief telephone conversation, are for lifting a paragraph from another source to use in his Monday, Nov. 11, bylined story about Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano ("Talk of Wiretaps Rattles Hollywood"). Weinraub confesses to having plagiarized the passage, although identifying the precise party he plagiarized isn't simple. --Jack Shafer --The Case of the Pinched Copy: Who, exactly, did the New York Times' Bernard Weinraub plagiarize? (Slate)

If you're caught with big chunks of uncited text from another source in your own article, the faster you apologize, the better. Shame on you, Weinraub, for plagiarizing; but good for you, Weinraub, for apologizing. At least now your readers can think of you as human and flawed, rather than calculating and deceitful.

Freud's granddaughter Sophie reminisces about her famous relative. "In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century." --Freud goes up in smoke (The Star)

Number of times "Freud" appears in scholarly language & literature articles published published in 2002, as indexed by the Modern Language Association International Bibliography: 47.

I suppose you could say that the subhead trend bothers me because I'm a writer and I try desperately to perfect antiquated stuff.

Transitions and Flow

Like transitions and flow, and because I think writing, like most everything else good in life, revolves around flow and rhythm. But the truth is, subheads bug me even more as a reader. Some of the best editors I've ever had have justified subheads to me, explaining that they are necessary "eye candy" and "reader guides" imperative to "reader friendliness."

I'm with Stupid

All I know is that whenever I read a column or story that's been broken up by subheads, especially a syndicated story that appeared somewhere else first without any subheads, my inner reader feels violated.--Jim Walsh

--Commence Skimming: Start reading. Now. Or. Whatever. (City Pages)

Note the way the imaginary copy-editor inserting the subheads starts arguing with the writer.

Great Stuff

This is great stuff, though I shudder to think

what

Amanda

will

say

about

it.

Found on A & L Daily.

2: about the laundering

The wash becomes a finish the evening tomorrow at the front desk until 7 o'clock at night of the day .

(It becomes the evening tomorrow in the morning even if it has.) --About the Laundering (Engrish.com)

Found via happy ging. Disclaimer: If I tried writing in German (the only other language I studied besides Latin), I'm sure I'd make plenty of amusing mistakes. This one reminded me of a cross between William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, and a really bad interactive fiction text parser.

hey there.... i thought you should know about toastrecipes.com. It has some pretty cool stuff. i noticed you had something about Dr. Toast's Amazing World of Toast. Well, I just thought you might like to check out toastrecipes.com. --James N. Mallamacee --Toast RecipiesE-Mail)

Little did I know that when Rosemary sent me a rather giddy e-mail featuring several toast links last year, my blog would become the toast nexus of cyberspace.

Oh, and is that an uncited photo of T. Herman Zweibel, the antiquated and presumed-dead editor of The Onion?

[H]umor is very important in the classroom: it can keep students' attention, it can diffuse tense situations, it can encourage creativity, and it can call attention to absurdity (and sometimes absurdity deserves it, whether its a social phenomena or inherent to a student comment). I even make a number of wisecracks or sarcastic comments, which sometimes -- when I hear what I just said -- make me laugh out loud during lectures (this actually happened in my poetry class today...and the students kept laughing, which made me laugh even longer... you know how that goes). --Mike Arnzen --Make 'em Laugh (Pedablogue)

Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) will offer a Ph.D. in Digital Media, starting fall 2004. The program, one of the first of its kind worldwide, is aimed at educating research-oriented theorist/practitioners who will bring the traditions of the humanities and arts to the design of digital media. Graduates of the program will be prepared to work in industry, public service, and universities, where they will help to shape the emerging digital genres and to expand our understanding and mastery of the representational power of the computer. --PhD in Digital Media (Ga Tech)

Janet Murray is launching this program, which sounds absolutely wonderful. Found on GTA.

Some soldiers got drunk and climbed atop a memorial fountain before being run off politely by the Canadian police. Peter Miller, drafted out of the assembly line of a Procter & Gamble soap factory in Quincy, Massachusetts, found himself in jail in Seattle following a dustup at the bus station. | After a few weeks of this military being and nothingness, the men of C Packet were told to get their wills in order, their teeth fixed, and their dog tags ready because they were being shipped to Vietnam as permanent overseas replacements in the First Infantry Division. Most of them knew what was coming, but some were taken by surprise, and the news provoked a round of concerned calls to the base from relatives, congressmen, and clergy. --David Maranass --Vietnam and America in 1967 (MSNBC)

The above is an excerpt from Maranass's book, which examines in detail an antiwar protest and an ambush on US forces in October, 1967. I wasn't yet born then.

Seton Hill University is hosting a "War and Antiwar Memorabilia" display. In the halls of the admin building, weapons and uniforms from the war are displayed. In a room at one end of the hall are photos of Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) war dead, with rubbings of their names taken from the Vietnam War Memorial. Some facutly were holding a routine meeting in that room when I visited it a little while ago, just as if they weren't in an impromptu shrine to our war dead. At the other end of the hall, in a large, brightly lit room that I had never seen used before, is a display of anti-war newspapers, poster, and slogans.

A cousin of my mother's served in Vietnam, and when he came back sometime in the mid 70s, he started bringing over refugees. At one point, about 30 Vietnamese men and boys were living in our house, sleeping on the cement floor of our basement. We would eat dinner in three shifts. Cousin Jim and his friend Terry started a furniture business -- first buying unfinished chairs and tables, finishing them, and then selling them on street corners.

I have no idea what my parents' politics are on the Vietnam War, but my own youthful experience of seeing so many refugees who were grateful to America for giving them a place to go and start a new life for their families means that I didn't grow up with the the knee-jerk "the war in Vietnam was bad" attitude that much of mainstream America has. And as a college student, I volunteered at a nursing home with a Vietnamese girl who was born in the U.S. of refugees who were grateful to the U.S. for giving them a place to go.

I used to read research papers as one would read comic books, eager to see what comes next, reveling about the subtlety of the artwork and the colors. After getting an insider's view of academe, I recognize that: 1. Now I would rather read comic books than research papers, and 2. The main, most pervasive, and powerful incentive in academe is ... the ego. --Eduardo Zea --Moving Out (Chronicle)

At this stressful time in the year, I found this article was useful as salt to rub into my wounds. I actually feel like I'm having a great semester, but it has taken a while to fall into the rhythms of SHU culture. My TA was depressed today because, when she was announcing the hours she would be available to consult with students before their upcoming oral reports, only one person bothered to write down what she was saying. And, of course the pressure to teach well is affecting my ability to carry through on my research obligations. (Sigh.)

I just used in-class role-playing to introduce my students to the difference between scholarly publishing, publishing on a personal website, and journalism. Poor Nicole spent two and a half years (simulated time) trying to get her article published in an academic journal, and ended up publishing it in Golf Digest. Other students stood in as editors and peer reviewers.

After being rejected by one journal, Nicole submitted her paper to Carl's website, and Carl didn' t have to consult anyone else in order to decide whether to accept it or reject it.

Then Amanda role-played a reporter, and I role-played her editor. Amanda called on the telephone all the students who had been earlier role-playing as academic experts, and I followed her around barking reminders about deadlines, and you could see Amanda step up the pace in an effort to contact enough sources before the time was up.

I had only planned a very brief role-play, but the class took to it so well that I punted my PowerPoint. I had the scenarios all worked out in my head because I have actually been planning a comic-book style presentation of the same subject matter. I have the storyboards roughed out, but I have no delusions about my artistic ability. Anybody out there with drawing talent?

Actor Christopher Lee has said he was mystified to learn that his key scenes have been dropped from the third Lord of the Rings movie. --Rings director cuts wizard scenes (BBC)

Lee plays Sarumon, and in the book he reappears in the climax that brings the Hobbits back to the Shire. So far, I have been very happy with the director's interpretation of the books, but I shudder to think that the movie might end once we learn of the fate of the ring. Frodo's journey started out as a very personal quest, and his encounter with Sarumon in the Shire (where the evil wizard's actions force Frodo to confront the real meaning of the life ethic Gandalf taught him) was a deeply, mind-blowingly personal event.

Forget discriminating people based on their race, religion, gender, or colloquial term for four-square, it'sall about playlistism. That'sright, judging people by their iTunes playlist. Now, I can't take full credit for this idea; playlistism is really the brainchild of Katie ?the iTunes Hatemonger? Brown, but if playlistism ever takes off like the Klu Klux Klan did, I?d be a Grand Wizard. Let me explain the basics. --Stephen Aubrey --Adventures in Higher Education: iPod Envy (Argus)

Whether you're rich, poor or somewhere in between, time probably seems to be in short supply. And when intrusions keep draining away precious moments, you probably feel some combination of annoyance, frustration and anger. --Norman Soloman --The Steady Theft of Our Time (Alternet)

This time of year on college campuses, time is an especially precious resource. (Just ask my student Renee DeFloria.)

I spent most of Monday either at a conference on the teaching of the Holocaust in Catholic schools, or watching my kids so my wife could attend. It was very worthwhile... I'm glad I went, I took good notes, and I plan to blog one of the talks as soon as I get the chance.

But because I got home late, my kids didn't get to bed until late, and here it is past midnight on Tuesday and I'm still doing my cyber-rounds. When I log off, I will sit down with a cup of something with caffeine and a stack of papers and grade until I can't grade any more.

Would you accept a gamble that offers a 10-percent chance to win $95 and a 90-percent chance to lose $5? The great majority of people in the study rejected this proposition as a loser. Yet, a bit later, the same individuals were asked this question: Would you pay $5 to participate in a lottery that offers a 10-percent chance to win $100 and a 90-percent chance to win nothing? --David P. Barash --Unreason's Seductive Charms  (Chronicle)

I was reading a New York Times article on financial aid, and how rich schools like Stanford get more aid money than regular colleges that actually educate average or lower-income students. Then, out of no where, came Seton Hill. --Julie Young spots a quote from SHU's president. --Rich Schools Get More Financial Aid Money (Work in Progress)

--Saturday's Lunar Eclipse (Yahoo/AP)

I didn't actually see this part of the eclipse, but I put off Peter's bath so I could take him out during the totality, and then cut his bath short so I could show him the moon re-emerging. Peter asked whether an eclipse was dangerous, and wanted to hold my hand. Of course I told him nothing bad would happen to the moon...

...as long as he was good.

(Just kidding.)

Some were allowed to play simple Windows games like Solitaire and Minesweeper, while other "control" groups were denied the chance.... The results were measured against how they felt about the work they do and their job. | "The groups that played games showed improvement on both of these measures," says Professor Goldstein. --Games at Work May Be Good For You (BBC)

On the same day she spoke about media panics to my journalism class, Torill Mortensen introduced my "Writing for the Internet" class to hypertext theory. (This is going to be a long post and I'll probably be too lazy to link everything properly, so see Torill's online lecture notes, "Hypertext, class and power.")

She began by asking the class to visualize taking a book and cutting it up, line by line, and gluing the words all together -- you could read the whole thing in one very cumbersome, very long, line. (She corrected herself -- actually, you would need to cut up two books!)

She introduced Vannevar Bush, an American scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, who felt the need to find something constructive for the scientists of the world to do once World War II was over. (This reminded me of the passion of Mr. Antrobus in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.)

She introduced Bush's Memex, and noted that its strength was that it organizes information not according to random order such as alphabetization, but the way our brains function -- by association. Even the most disciplined thinkers don't think according to a relentlessly rational, linear argument. (Here, I thought of a passage in Virgina Wolf's To the Lighthouse, which presents male thought as rational, attempting to progress firmly from A to Z, but shows a male character becoming frustrated because when he tries to move from A to Z by firmly focusing on each letter in his mind's eye, by the time he gets somewhere around Q or R, he finds his mind wandering.)

Torill worked her way through Englebart's "Mother of All Demonstrations," Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and Habermas's didactic philosophy of the media as a democratic conversation (rather than as a one-way flow from the aristocracy downward). She compared sophisticated, painstakingly constructed blogs which "reek of cultural capital" to the "bararian blogs" which have no cultural pretension.

She also shared a few stories from blogging lore, including "Damn the Pacific" -- the joint blog of transoceanic lovers, one of them dying from cancer, who begged for donations to fund plane tickets. Google actually caches at least some of the pages from "Damn the Pacific" -- so the story hasn't completely vanished from cyberspace. (I was rightfully booed by my own class when I asked whether Lane's new boyfriend also has cancer. Sorry about that, everyone.)

The saga of Kaycee Nicole also helped concretize the theory. Kaycee was the imaginary cancer-striken daughter of a blogger who doubly traumatized her audience -- first by killing off her daughter, and second by admitting the daughter never existed. (Here, I thought of Edward Albee's play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which features an imaginary son, created by a childless couple as a means to cope with their psychoses, and also as a weapon to use against each other.)

We also talked about Jill Walker's posts in which she makes oblique references to her breakup with another blogger, and Torill pointed out a current message on Jill's blog that is a coded announcement (for those who can read between the lines) that Jill is seeing someone new and is very happy about it. Jill says that, while her blog may appear to reveal quite a lot about her personal life, she still chooses what to reveal and how. The way I see it, her autobiographical blogging gives her control over the events in her life -- or at least over the way the readers of her blog perceive her life.

After Torill's lecture, I introduced her to Julie Young, whose blog I discovered while I was still competing for my current job. The content of Julie's weblog on "blogs.setonhill.edu" is a little different than her earlier blog, and she has admitted that she also keeps a "secret" blog where she can write juicier gossip than she wants to post on her academic blog.

"Doesn't everybody keep a secret blog?" Torill asked.

I don't have a secret bog... this is it, folks.Torill @ Seton Hill University -- 'Intro to Hypertext Theory'Literacy Weblog)

In my "Practice of Journalism" class yesterday, Torill Mortensen used examples from her native Norway to discuss media panics surrounding the introduction of new technology in society. There has long been a connection between new media, in whatever form it took -- from moving pictures, to TV, to computer games... in the 1970s, Norwegian Parlament had passionate debates over how the introduction of color television would affect the delicate and fragile women in society -- would the increased realism confuse their perception of reality?

Torill described the media circus that surrounded her own doctoral defense. The average Norwegian subscribes to three newspapers, and doctoral defenses are huge ceremonial affairs that stretch out over months. (I just sat in a room with five people for about two hours, avoided saying anything too stupid, and came out a doctor. Torill's dissertation defense included a swordfight. Really!)

Torill observed that, because she was completing a dissertation on computer games, the Norwegian press contacted her for her opinion on computer games. Reporters repeatedly asked her whether computer games were harmful, and wanted to hear her say that games are good for you. She hadn't actually studied that question, so she didn't give the short answer the reporters were searching for. So the reporters quoted her as saying comptuer games are good for you -- something Torill never said. Google found over 300 references to that imaginary quotation. Torill insisted that the journalists who interviewed her aren't stupid. I saw it as a perfect example of the confirmation bias -- and I couldn't resist the opportunity to jump in at that point and deliver a mini-lecture to my students, some of whom have announced that for their term project they will write an investigative journalism piece that proves that people feel X about subject Y. (I asked them to go into their research with an open mind, without thinking of themselves as an advocate for one side.)

We learned the proper way to pronounce "ombudsman," and learned that, while American popular culture is censored in some parts of Europe because of its violent nature, France has in the past poured resources into the funding of French-language popular culture, with the intention of competing with the American imports; and Norway is apparently attempting this strategy as well.

Some quoteworthy statements Torill made:

"If you use violence to solve everyday problems, you will learn more violent actions by imitating violence in media."

"Isolated people believe real life is more violent than it really is."

Torill @ Seton Hill University -- 'Games and Media Panics'Literacy Weblog)

A six-part adaptation of Life, the Universe and Everything will be up first in the spring. This will be followed towards the end of 2004 by an eight-week serialisation combining So Long and Thanks for All the Fish with Mostly Harmless. | The news comes just weeks after confirmation that the planned movie version of the original Hitchhiker's is finally emerging from mothballs. --New radio Hitch-Hiker's  (BBC Cult)

Great, loopy sci-fi comedy. I've never heard any of the radio versions, but I devoured the books in my youth, the way today's kids devour Harry Potter.

It's not hard to imagine the power of millions of people each taking pictures and attaching them to physical places. You're headed into Helsinki, and you want to see what the Esplanade looks like in mid-August. Or you wonder what the inside of the Intercontinental hotel looks like. | There's immense potential for people to keep each other informed, or perhaps, misinformed. We all know the power of a picture to over-select, to crop, to be too specific and miss context important to other people on the scene. Now that potential is being democratized. --Justin Hall --Personal Life Annotation Devices (The Feature)

Via Jill, who has also recently posted links to the Idea Line (a beautiful expandible index to new media art and narrative) and the 100 x 100 Project.

Torill 'thinking with my fingers' Mortensen @ Seton Hill UniversityLiteracy Weblog)

For the past few days, I have been showing Torill's "thinking with my fingers" blog to my new media journalism students. Around the time that our own "New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University" blog was lagging, Torill posted about the lack of personal touch in group blogs. And since many of my students reported, in their midterm blog portfolios, how disappointed they felt when the blog entries they worked hardest on didn't attract comments, I called my student's attention to Torill's position on blog comments (on MGK she has written, "While I can see the value of them, I don't want the hazzle of maintaining and editing a blog where I need to check to see what others may have written into it. I treasure my peaceful little slot on the net.").

It took a bit of effort, but I managed to get some students a little worked up about the things that this Dr. Mortensen was saying. When some students on Monday offered to send her nasty e-mails, I sort of choked for a moment -- I hadn't expected a response that strong. This morning, one student apologized for forgetting to write an e-mail.

At any rate, because Torill and I had agreed to keep her visit a secret, we imagined that she could make a dramatic entrance, so I left her in a computer lab on the floor below, and started class for a few minutes before sending a student to get her.

When I flashed her bio on the screen, Jen recognized her -- "I think I just saw her in the lab downstairs!" Jen knew something was up... maybe Torill Mortensen isn't really a Norwegian blogger -- maybe this exotic foreigner is just imaginary, or maybe I have asked a friend to come into the class and pose as "Dr. Mortensen" in order to make some obscure pedagogical point.

"Would I do that to you?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

I'll blog some more about Torill's presentation later... in one class, she spoke of the technology panic in the Norwegian media, and in the other she gave an excellent, well-paced introduction to hypertext theory.

She's downstaris in the comptuer room, probably blogging away. It's so encouraging to find out that I'm not the only person who's so addicted to the Internet! Anyway, we're going to meet up with my family and have an enjoyable evening (if the kids aren't too rambunctious). Then tomorrow I'll take her to the airport, where she will continue on her US lecture tour.

Kitty Kelly has sold it to CBS. No, just kidding. A tremendous night. It's the beginning of a second media century, Joe, where it's much more of a people-driven media. And I say that not lightly. It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there's never been this kind of pressure applied to one of the big titans, one of the big three. And the pressure went all the way to the top of a super company called Viacom, and the chairman earlier today is my information said, "Listen, let's just get it on cable. Let's do it on Showtime. Let's show it uncut. Everybody will watch." So the word is that CBS will pass on it. It will not air on free television, but the full glory of "The Reagans" will air on Showtime. --CBS Passes on "Reagans" Biography (Drudge Report)

Pressure from the blogosphere and talk radio induced CBS to pass on "The Reagans," which has been described by CBS officials as too biased against Reagan to be fixed through editing. Is this censorship? Note that CBS had already edited the show considerably, to the point that there would have been dead air time because of the number of scenes that had been cut. By admitting the show was biased, not the romantic love story that had been pitched and purchased for airing, CBS gave up on it, but Showtime will air the whole thing uncut. Without the intense pressure from the blogosphere and talk radio, the editied version might have been shown, and nobody would have ever seen the full version (until the "director's cut" DVD came out, that is).

Software which enables e-mail writers to choose the image they want to portray is being developed by a team of Scottish researchers. --How to Become an E-Mail Extrovert (BBC)

Hi!!!! This new software sounds cool! ;) Its supposed to make your writing more cheerful and outgoing!! The article is a bit vauge -- maybe the designers have a little secret to keep (hehehe). I thinka Scottish extrovert is probably somebody who smiles at you before lopping your head off with a Claymore! Hahahaha j/k. Anyway, informal language with lots of exclamation points (!!!) and the word "hi" instead of "hello" helps your writing project an outgoing, upbeat personality!! Wow!!!

So, guys... here's my new, emotionally upbeat and extroverted writing style!! I even threw in a few typos to. Whadaya think!? Huh? Huh????

Now, everything you write will read like just the most annoying spam you've ever gotten!! Woo hoo! ;)

Take care! :-*

"The pirate's life is so deadly that humor is an essential part of what they do. They tell jokes, they make jests, they perform plays. They're hilarious." People are obsessed with pirates, Rediker says, because, while pirates may be "the common enemy of mankind," they're also "the freest people on earth," which makes pirate humor particularly cutting. Because they stand?or sail?apart from the culture, pirates are well suited to make mockery of it. Pirates may have always been funny, but their contemporaries usually found them more terrible than witty. Either way, they found them fascinating. --Jill "Calico Bless Kid" Lepore --Talk of the Past: The Sea in Me Blood (Common-place)

Best insight from this piece, attributed to Dave Barry: "What if Bill Clinton, a fancy-dressed freebooter if there ever was one, had told the American people, 'I did not have sex with that woman, me hearties'?"

Professors today often believe erroneously that they are already teaching critical thinking in their courses and that students are absorbing it... "[College seinors] say, 'Look how open-minded I am.' But when pressed to say, 'What do you think about this? What suggestions would you make and what are they based on?' - that's when the process falls apart. They are unable to reach or defend a conclusion that's most reasonable and consistent with the facts." -- Patricia King, quoted in an article by Mark Clayton --Rethinking Thinking (Christian Science Monitor)