January 2004 Archive Page

I have been enrolled in courses in which my professors used a powerpoint presentation every single day. When required to do a presentation in front of my peers, I also made use of Microsoft Powerpoint in order to present my information. I felt that using such a visual aid was a valuable tool to add multimedia zing to the classroom. Last week, I gave a Chaucer presentation to my Media Aesthetics class. Originally, I wanted to do a powerpoint presentation. However, after I was advised against it by Dr. Jerz, I read "Powerpoint is Evil." When I first read this article, I completely disagreed. However, once I thought about it more, it began to make sense. I'm not saying that powerpoint can never be useful, but it is more appropriate for "corporate sales pitches" (in the words of Dr. Jerz) instead of Chaucer presentations. --Jamee Rice --Learn how to 'learn something new everyday' (Jamee Rice)

Jamee's presentation very cleverly used the Pittsburgh regionalism 'yinz' (for "you") as a way of introducing Chaucer's language. See: Chaucer could have actually related to "Yinzers!"

[I]t is the most common thing in the world for a new English teacher to demand that her students throw out everything they've worked so hard to learn and then start completely from scratch. New semester, new teacher, new rules.

I say we have no right.

I tell my students that, too--we have no right!

How, you might wonder, do I square this conviction with the fact that I explicitly tell my students that they must not write the way a lot of other teachers have taught them to write?

Well, I throw myself on their intellectual mercy, as it were. I appeal to their intelligence as readers. "What sort of writing do you like to read?" I ask them. "What sort of writing do you actually find out there in the real world? Does it look anything like what you were taught to write in your English classes?" -- Tina Blue --AP English Blather (Teacher Blue)

Via Mike Arnzen, whose comments are also well worth reading: "In many cases, AP English writers are also allowed to skip college writing classes...and end up being the very same English teachers that reproduce this problem! Additionally, many composition teachers were skilled enough to 'test out' of composition when they were undergrads, so most of the composition teachers I know NEVER TOOK composition..."

The term 'flash fiction' can be used to describe several genres or modes of writing. Such writing can include traditional or mainstream short-short stories as well as various other types such as American haibun, ghost stories, monologues, epistles, mysteries, myths, tall tales, fables, anti-fables, parables, romance, fairy tales, horror, suspense, science fiction, prose poetry, and more. It can also embrace several "isms" such as magical realism, dadaism, futurism, surrealism, irrealism, and postmodernism. Charles Baxter notes that these short-short stories occupy many thresholds--"they are between poetry and fiction, the story and the sketch, prophecy and reminiscence, the personal and the crowd." --Pamelyn Casto --Dazzled by Flash Fiction (Flashes on the Meridian)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

The men of the Shihuh tribe carried the jerz, a small axe-head on a long stick. They used the implement for many purposes — it chopped the firewood, provided the grip for climbing and came in handy as a walking stick to step over the stones. To complement the jerz they also carried the special khasabi knife called the peshak. There is nothing on record to support the origins of the jerz. | How did the people of this region come to own this finely decorated hatchet? Was it brought to the shores of Musandam by sailors from other lands or was it picked up by the people of Musandam in the course of voyages down the Arabian Gulf and out into the Indian Ocean? Or was it developed by an artistic smith keen to showcase his skills as a good metal worker and an artist? The antecedents of the jerz are covered in mist. --Legend of the Jerz (Sultinate of Oman)

Cool!

[L]et's face facts, she could do your $70,000-a-year job for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey - she won't lose any sleep over your plight. When I ask what her advice is for a beleaguered American programmer afraid of being pulled under by the global tide that she represents, Jairam takes the high road, neither dismissing the concern nor offering soothing happy talk. Instead, she recites a portion of the 2,000-year-old epic poem and Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita: "Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own." | This is a story about the global economy. It's about two countries and one profession - and how weirdly upside down the future has begun to look from opposite sides of the globe. It's about code and the people who write it. But it's also about free markets, new politics, and ancient wisdom - which means it's ultimately about faith. --Daniel H. Pink --The New Face of the Silicon Age (Wired Magazine)

Wired is the idealistic champion of Silicon Valley culture. While the quality of the writing is always top-notch, one rarely finds in the pages of Wired any serious criticism of technology -- and certainly none of the Slashdot "the government is taking control of your lives, datum by datum" variety. Pink writes himself into the story a bit more than I would prefer, but I do appreciate the way he paints himself as the devil's advocate on both sides. I feel a lot of pain for the very good CS majors who are now graduating into a world that is very different than it was in 1999 (or so) when they entered college with a career path in mind.

Still, something lurking in the darker parts of my English major soul remembers the sneers of the "toolies" who, even before they got their diploma, bragged of their $50,000 job offers.

The Africans and Irish and Poles and Italians and Norwegians and everyone else -- including the Indians -- who came to America in search of a better place took the less desirable jobs. This led to inevitable conflict with the working class Americans, but after a generation or two, the newcomers turned into what Archie Bunker might call "regular Americans" who were themselves threatened by the next wave of immigrants. This has been an ongoing part of American history. Just look at the names on America's olympic rosters or the faces of people wearing American military uniforms.

But now, the jobs in question are highly desirable positions, and -- more shocking to America's future -- people don't even have to leave their home country to do it!

I was surprised and pleased to see Wired publishing a lenthy, literary, and insightful examination of the American reaction to this particular side-effect of the new global economy. The U.S. auto industry lost business to Japan in the 80s, which caused a wave of "buy American" protectionism; and in return, Japan became a tremendous consumer of American culture. If I were truly interested in economics, I would of course have listened to the e-school toolies and ditched my English major; but upon reflection, Wired Magazine publishing an article with a sympathetic angle on global outsourcing shouldn't be any real surprise. Because, from the look of things, Wired Magazine has read the writing on the wall, and expects to sell a lot of subscriptions in India.

Media literacy is the buzzword. Already part of the national curriculum in England for older children, the government also wants primary school pupils to have a greater understanding of the hidden depths of TV, films and other media.

More than ever before, children are immersed in a media-saturated world and exposed to television in particular. --Jonathan Duffy --Media studies: The next generation (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I'm Exhausted... Thank You, Students!Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Thursday is a marathon day for me... class at 11, 2, and a 2 1/2 hour marathon at 6pm. My first class is "Seminar in Thinking in Writing," during which I asked the students to work in groups to come up with sample thesis statements. Ordinarily pretty dry stuff, but the subject matter was the myth of the American family, and I and my RTA Michelle Fairbaugh tried to get them to look beyond a surface-level critique of family ideals of the 50s. I pushed a little harder than I have in the past, in my effort to get students to research (and understand) opposing views rather than simply think of a research paper as an exercise in finding support for what you already believe. Of course, because I pushed, that meant some students pushed back -- and I thought the result was very productive.

Even before Intro to Literary Studies met, I saw a flood of postings on NMJ responding to the "Flash Fiction" exercises that I asked them to do. We didn't have any time to talk about flash fiction in class, because the discussion on Bernice Bobs Her Hair simply wouldn't end. I'll let Tiffany Brattina describe it for you. Since some students prefer a more contemplative environment, I'll have to find a way to vary the class structure and make the quiet ones feel like their contributions are valid... but I personally prefer a lively classroom with multiple conversations going on at once. I'd like to keep that energy!

While my evening lit class wasn't all that lively when it came to discussing e.e. cummings (we had one of those horrid three-minute-pauses-that-seem-to-last-for-an-hour when nobody in the class wanted to speak), they may have been tuckered out by the good discussions we had on "A Jury of Her Peers" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (see Melissa Whiteman's blog about poetry reading as a game. This is the first time I've tried a blank slate/new critical approach to teaching poetry, but it seems appropriate for a survey course that is mostly being taken as an area requirement... I'm interested in seeing how it turns out.)

Yesterday we had some excellent presentations on Chaucer in my Advanced Studies in English: Media Aesthetics course. I had actually been dreading the Chaucer days because I thought the discussion would be like pulling teeth, but these advanced English majors are an impressive bunch.

So... I'm exhausted! I'll probably update this with links to more student blogs, but for now, I'm all tuckered out to smithereens.

And so to bed...

Update, 30 Jan:

Some students who posted their responses to reading and/or writing "fifty word fiction" (found via a search for "fiction"): Diana Geleskie, Amy Blake, Gina Burgese, Amanda Cochran, Johanna Dreyfss, Lori Rupert, Stephan Puff, Karissa Kilgore, Tammy Moon, Jason Pugh, Tiffany Brattina, Paul Crossman.

(I should note that I encouraged them -- but didn't require them -- to post their fiction online; I assume that it was the interview with Mike Arnzen that really got many of them inspired to try it.)

Planning for the Deep Impact mission began in 1999. It culminates on July 4, 2005, when a "fly-by" spacecraft will release a smaller "impactor" spacecraft, which will smash into comet Tempel 1 at 37,000 kilometers (22,000 miles) per hour.... The impact is expected to create a crater 100 meters in diameter and up to 30 meters deep. But A'Hearn warns that scientists know so little about comets that the cratering experts can't even agree on what physics are relevant to the impact, and thus can't agree on what exactly will happen. --Stefan Lovgren --Scientists Plan 'Deep Impact' Crash With Comet (National Geographic News)

Trolling is like playing chess - there is a point to the game, and that point is to win. Unlike chess, though, there are various ways of winning for the internet troll. These might include:

• gaining credence for false and invidious ideas
• driving bona fide list members, and/or particular groups, out of the mailing list
• dominating the list with messages/posts that they have generated
• gaining recognition or an award for their trolling from fellow trollers
• getting reprimanded by individuals, list managers or internet authorities
• gaining the confidence, trust and support of bona fide list members
• distracting list members from their own bona fide discussions or objectives.

• gaining attention that they cannot get using their real personalities
  

Sometimes trolls operate alone, and sometimes they operate in groups,
but for all of them trolling is a game.
--Beware the Troll (Team Technology)

One of my first experiences with Usenet involved being baited by a troll. I had just written a paper on some subject that was being discussed on a group, and I posted a general inquiry asking whether it would be appropriate to post a paper of X length on the site. I was probably too timid about mentioning the length, because a troll replied with, "sure," and then promptly attacked me for posting "lengthy bullshit." I was very new to newsgroup culture, and it was years before I realized I had been trolled.

Canterbury Tales: A Quick Link RoundupLiteracy Weblog)

Online Google searches for Chaucer typically point to watered-down "study guides." There is a real need for good online material on Chaucer, and there are good sites online that attempt to more than serve the lowest common denominator.

A student backed out of an oral presentation topic late yesterday, so I'm trying to fill in the gap a little.

• When tackling a new topic, I often start my search in Wikipedia, but the page is loading very slowly...
• I found a good bibliography on the structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and a
• course website on "Chaucer's Narrative Art," but since I wasn't planning a trip to the library, I'll just blog the links for future reference.
• Luminarium has some quality links to Chaucer work (including audio clips)
• Brother Anthony of Taizen's Introduction to The Canterbury Tales
  • (Brother Anthony writes:)At Chaucer's death, the various sections of the Canterbury Tales that he was preparing had not been brought together in a linked whole. His friends seem to have tried as best they could to prepare a coherent edition of what was there, adding some more linkages when they thought it necessary. The resulting manuscripts therefore offer slight differences in the order of tales, and in some of the framework links. The tales are usually found in linked groups known as 'Fragments'. The customary grouping and ordering of the tales is as follows (the commonly accepted abbreviation for each Tale is noted in parentheses):

    Fragment I (A)
       General Prologue (GP), Knight (KnT), Miller (MilT), Reeve (RvT), Cook (CkT).
    Fragment II (B1)
       Man of Law (MLT)
    Fragment III (D)
       Wife of Bath (WBT), Friar (FrT), Summoner (SumT).
    Fragment IV (E)
       Clerk (ClT), Merchant (MerT).
    Fragment V (F)
       Squire (SqT), Franklin (FranT).
    Fragment VI (C)
       Physician (PhyT), Pardoner (PardT).
    Fragment VII (B2)
       Shipman (ShipT), Prioress (PrT), Chaucer: Sir Thopas (Thop), Melibee (Mel), Monk (MkT), Nun's Priest (NPT).
    Fragment VIII (G)
       Second Nun SNT), Canon's Yeoman (CYT).
    Fragment IX (H)
       Manciple (MancT).
    Fragment X (I)
       Parson (ParsT).

    There is great variety in different manuscripts but I and II, VI and VII, IX and X are almost always found in that order while the tales in IV and V are often spread around separately.

  • Brother Anthony critiques the value of taking too literally the "contest" framework of the narrative. "Is this Tale the best Tale? The Host's proposal of a contest invites the reader to judge all the Tales but at the same time requires the reader to reflect on the criteria by which the Tales are to be judged. What is the purpose of tale-telling, indeed of all discourse? Sentence or solas? Wisdom or pleasure? The value of a tale becomes more and more related to the value of life, and the Parson is not simply a kill-joy when he declares: 'Thou getest fable noon ytoold for me' (you get no fable told by me) and instead offers a treatise on sin and salvation. Chaucer leads the reader to the point where the ability of any fictional tale to tell the truth is challenged, though not necessarily as radically denied as the Parson would wish. The Parson himself is a fictional character, after all, a part of a Tale."
  • "Modern editions are usually based on one of two manuscripts, both written by the same scribe: the Hengwrt Manuscript and the Ellesmere Manuscript. The former, in the National Library of Wales, is the oldest of all, probably copied directly from Chaucer's own disordered papers, but it lacks the Canon's Yeoman's Tale and the final pages have been lost. The latter, now preserved in California, is more complete, and beautifully produced with illustrations of the different pilgrims beside their Tales, but it shows the work of an editor who has removed some of the roughness from Chaucer's lines. "
• Brother Anthony of Taizen's Introduction to the General Prologue
  • "More recent criticism has reacted against this approach, claiming that the portraits are indicative of social types, part of a tradition of social satire, "estates satire", and insisting that they should not be read as individualized character portraits like those in a novel. Yet it is sure that Chaucer's capacity of human sympathy, like Shakespeare's, enabled him to go beyond the conventions of his time and create images of individualized human subjects that have been found not merely credible but endearing in every period from his own until now."
  • The title "General Prologue" is a modern invention, although a few manuscripts call it prologus. There are very few major textual differences between the various manuscripts."
  • While I distinctly remember being taught that the pilgrims were introduced in order of their social prominence (see Klein's notes, III B), Brother Anthony notes what had always troubled me -- this order breaks down very rapidly. It won't help us understand medieval society to take this list of pilgrims as an index to social ranking.

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite. I say that the Library is unending. The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible. -- Jorge Luis Borges --The Library of Babel

Julie Young's blog entry about libraries made me think of this short story, which I have occasionally used in my "Writing Electronic Text" course.

Donald sat in the corner of the room, barely illuminated by the dim moonlight filtering through the window. He was trembling badly; the events of the last few hours still storming through his mind. How the hell could he have known? How could he have known? He brought his shaking hands up to his face, and as he hid behind them the smell of fresh gunpowder brought the sickening moment back to him in full force. [Excerpt from a writing sample.]

What you're doing with this kind of opening is: You are forcing us to face the character's raw emotions without giving us any information about the story or any reason to care about the character. It is the opposite of how it has to work. We should not face the emotions until we completely understand the entire situation so that we will feel those emotions ourselves -- and then the character does not have to "tremble badly" and waste our time sitting around while memories "storm" through his mind. --Orson Scott Card --Uncle Orson's Writing Class (Hatrack River)

Orson Scott Card is a science-fiction author whose website includes a wealth of free writing advice. The same lesson also mentions "another common but killer mistake. You are trying to establish his point of view, to see the world through his eyes. However, this description is completely from outside himself -- in fact, it consists of the omniscient viewpoint in which the author talks to the reader, and the character is viewed as through a telescope, from a distance."

I think both issues stem from the tendency of beginning writers to first visualize a scene from a movie, so that their transcription into prose relies too much on external visuals and sounds, rather than on the internal emotions that prose narrative conveys so well.

(Thanks for pointing out the OSC website, Josh.)

A Selection from the Posthumously Published Ernest Hemingway Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, A Very Short Death, c.1959

It was late summer and you were alone in the café. You were sipping vermouth and reading about the war. You liked the way the vermouth tasted good when you drank it with your mouth. The war was going badly.

You tapped your tired fingers on the arm of the wooden chair where you were sitting in the café when it was dark and late. You liked how the chair was made of wood.

"Oh darling, you mustn't talk such rot," she had said. "I'll kill him."

You felt broken and drunk in the cool night and remembered the white boat on the river.

DID YOU?

a. Grit teeth and think about the war.
b. Order a brandy that overflowed and ran down the stem of the glass and think about the war.
c. Notice the electric light hanging over the empty terrace and think about the war.

--The American Canon of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (McSeeeney's)

What's extremely funny about this format is that it's not too different from the reading quizzes I give. Since it's so easy nowadays for students to download plot summaries from the Internet, in order to motivate students to keep up on their literary readings, I will make a multiple-choice test, with questions that list four things that did happen in the reading, and one other event that will sound plausible to someone who has only a basic understanding of the plot, but that didn't really happen.

"I always say that while I can't vote, I can damn sure make a difference," he said. "It doesn't feel odd, it shouldn't feel odd, because all Americans should be doing this. We as a country need to be more involved, especially our youth." --Stephen Yellin --Teen Blogger Heads Online (Wired)

I'm being called away, but I wanted to blog this before I forget it. I immediately thought of Ender's Game, an Orson Scott Card novel that features two teenage supporting characters (siblings of the hero) who affect global politics by participating in online discussion groups.

"The most complicated machine ever built got knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam. I don't know how any of us could have seen that coming. The message that sends me is, we are walking the razor's edge." -- Flight director Paul Hill --Columbia's Final Minutes (Newsday)

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|  |    |  |/  /    |   ____|       /   \     
|  |    |  '  /     |  |__         /  ^  \    
|  |    |    <      |   __|       /  /_\  \   
|  |    |  .  \     |  |____     /  _____  \  
|__|    |__|\__\    |_______|   /__/     \__\ 
                                              
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IKEA WALKTHROUGH v2.3.1
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IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure that allows you to role-play the character of someone who gives a shit about home furnishings. In traversing IKEA, you will experience a meticulously detailed alternate reality filled with garish colors, clear-lacquered birch veneer, and a host of NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS (NPCs) with the glazed looks of the recently anesthetized. --IKEA Walkthrough v2.3.1 (The Morning News)

--'She's a Flight Risk' Resumes

Isabella v has started posting again, after a long hiatus (which I noted in December).

I only learned about it after getting an e-mail from "isagirl@hushmail.com" responding to a blog entry I wrote last year.

We copulate, we procreate, the species thrives. Love and every other emotion that we connect to it are the froth of nature'swildness. But if it is froth, it is wonderful froth. But I think that stepping back and admitting that romantic love is not an entity with a life of its own allows us to recognize that love, even romantic love, takes its likeness and continuity from the stories we tell about it. And as stories change, so does that experience. --John Spurlock --Love and Lovesickness 2 (The Blue Monkey Review)

Richard Dawkins's theory of the "meme" (a cultural unit that spreads, almost like a living virus, from brain to brain) is very useful in deconstructing cultural truths that are powerful because they work extremely well. Have you read the story of the creation of the diamond engagement ring custom? It does a great job deconstructing that particular "timeless" myth. (I recently blogged about diamond engagement rings.)

In this assignment you will be required to read/play and answer questions about a book from the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series of ?gamebooks.? The series was published 1979-1998. Many people assume that electronic literature (interactive fiction, hypertext, what-have-you) is simply a souped up version of CYOA. The purpose of this assignment is to take a closer look at that assumption based on what you know about the history and theory of cybertext. --Matt Kirschenbaum

--Choose Your Own Adventure Assignment (MGK)

Wow. Not only do I love the assignment, I'm in awe of the web environment in which it is presented.

I recently posted a rant against bloated commercial courseware that locks curricular content in a proprietary database; and about seven hours ago I recently posted a comment prompted by a thread I found via Liz Lawley's website, but I didn't know that Lawley is a MoveableType courseware genius.

Torill Mortensen has a post today referencing the ongoing debate about gender balance in the blogosphere. Are there more men, or more women? Are the men or the women more visible? --Liz Lawley --Academic Women and the Blogosphere (Misbehaving)

I found this discussion interesting, especially in light of Andrew Orlowski's sneering dismissal of bloggers as mostly teenage girls.

At our small school, which until recently was all female, social networks are tight. There are about 80 student blogs on our MoveableType installation, of which I'd say about 50 represent students who are currently in my classes (and therefore are forced to blog). One student recently estimated that another 50 students regularly read the blogs of their friends. If this is true, most of them are lurking.

The online social networks typically mirror the offline social networks -- at least, so far as I can tell from my position as a faculty member. The students who regularly comment on each other's blogs tend to sit together in the classroom, although I don't think that group identity correlates with posting frequency. Nevertheless, a critical mass of female students who have been forced to blog for my classes has decided to turn their academic tool into a social one. Some see their roles as welcoming newcomers, answering questions about personalizing the plain-vanilla designs I set them up with, and helping newbies properly interpret comments that come across as snarky or offensive to the uninitiated. And, as we have seen elsewhere in the blogosphere, we have had our share of personal spats that spill over into the blogosphere (though of the two major incidents I can think of, both ended peacefully, with new or renewed friendships).

As a group, the male students who blog for my classes don't participate in this social network. One male student is a bit of a troll, but in the classroom he is personable and cheerful, and those who know him don't find his online persona troubling.

Another three male students who aren't in any of my classes have also requested blogs, and two of these are among the most prolific bloggers on the site. Besides myself, two other male faculty members are blogging as well. Because they are outside the dominant social network, these male bloggers are more likely to post a stand-alone essay on something that the female-dominated social network isn't already discussing. While I have been writing more commentary in my blog in the last year or so, it still leans more towards "professional link log" than "public journal." And because I'm not in a position to give a grade to any of these "outsider" male bloggers, the only way I can encourage/reward/praise their best blog entries is by linking to them. If it is true that men are more likely to blog for professional reasons, and if professional blogs are more likely to have more outbound links, perhaps I am part of a mechanism that inflates the visibility of male professional bloggers.

I don't have any numbers to support my theories, and at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon I'm not about to start looking for any. Time to pack up and head home.

"Not only are we going to New Hampshire ..., we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York! And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we're going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House, Yeeeeeaaaaaah!" --Dean Goes Nuts: Howard Dean's 2004 Iowa Caucus Concession Speech Remixes

Howard Dean's supporters mobilized on the Internet, and so have those who find pleasure in mocking the exuberant cry he uttered while rallying his troops during his Iowa concession speech.

Because I don't watch TV news, and I only listen to the radio during my 15-minute commute, I didn't hear the speech. While I had come across opinions that Dean's concession speech was a bit wild, I didn't take them seriously. My opinion has changed.

This website includes dozens of audio remixes. Fortunately there's not much activity on my floor on Fridays, but I closed the door anyway. I'm listening to "Dean's Going to Kokomo" right now, and I can hardy type from laughing so hard. Next up on my playlist is "Magical Dean Space Out."

Open Source in EducationVarious, via KairosNews)

KairosNews has a few good links to articles about the open source movement. "Open Source and Education: A Sea Change?" is a roundup of links to recent "rumblings" on open-source content. Most exciting is the Chronicle of Higher Ed's report on a multi-million-dollar effort to create an open-source course-management tool.

Charlie's post links to a page that is in the Chronicle's "temp" directory, so I won't repeat it here... you can find it on the KairosNews entry. Charlie notes with amusement the reaction of the chairman of Blackboard (a commercial provider of course-management tools), who uses the standard FUD defense in order to scare potential users away from open-source (and thus protect his revenue stream).

I don't like using commercial course-management tools because I don't like the idea of putting so much work into a database that is only accessible as long as we have subscribed to the service. I understand that Seton Hill has recently churned through two or three of these course management tools, requiring faculty to re-learn a new system each time. We're currently using J-web, but I only use it to post a link to my online syllabus, to post final grades, and to take attendance. But even then I find it limiting... there's no way to differentiate between an excused absence and an unexcused absence. If I cancel class for a day, or want to take attendance at an extra-curricular event, there's no way for me to add or remove columns. If a student comes in late or leaves early, there is no way for me to record a partial absence.

Now, if there were a way that I could use XML to label the various components of my online syllabus, and then run a utility that would slurp up all that data into the standard course management interface that the students are familiar with from their other classes, that would be useful.

"Let me see if I can state what is bothering you. I could tell you before the test what to study, what material you should memorize to do well, but I'm not doing that." She smiles a little and says, "Yes." I continue, "I could do that, I could tell you, exactly, all that you need to know. I could tell you what to memorize. But I don't. And you can't understand why I don't." She smiles more broadly. "Yes. Yes! That's it. Why don't you tell us?"

This illustrates what I believe is an underappreciated and growing problem in higher education: a large number of undergraduates, as well as even some graduate students, believe that the instructor's main function is to tell the students what to memorize. And if the students duly so memorize, they believe they deserve A's. --Craig M. Newmark --No Surprises? (The Irascible Professor)

Thanks Josh (who suggests this in a comment attached to "A Student's Plea: Give Me Something Known").

I just had an hour-long conversation with a high school senior who has been accepted to Seton Hill University in the fall, but is still considering his options. He's being recruited for a sports team, and is also interested in broadcast journalism. SHU doesn't have a broadcast program; there is no TV or radio station, so at first I thought the interview would be pretty short. But this student also seemed attracted to the entrepreneurial focus of our school. The fact that men's athletics are expanding so rapidly here (SHU was only recently converted to an officially coeducational institution) means greater access to leadership positions.

I told him that a big school with an established journalism program would be able to prepare him more efficiently to step into the profession, but a specialized broadcast journalism professor teaches a class of thirty freshmen exactly how to do broadcast journalism would be something of an assembly line education. Of course the large school will have access to more resources, but being a big fish in a small pond has its own benefits.

I hope I was able to tap into this bright young man's entrepreneurial instincts and a love for learning. I told him that multimedia projects involving streaming online video would fit very nicely into the new media journalism program (but that he might think in terms of a series of related documentaries rather than a weekly TV show), and he floated the idea of setting up a live webcast of home sports games. Sounds technologically feasible, but I told him he wouldn't just be able to walk into a studio and flip a switch -- we'd have to talk with the tech guys and create a plan from scratch. Somebody who is willing to do that -- to think beyond the parameters of a pre-packaged lesson plan -- is a student who is ready to learn.

Mars Express, circling high above the surface, made the discovery on the Red Planet's south pole, said agency scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring -- an indication that Mars may once have sustained life. --Europe probe detects Mars water ice (CNN)

Interesting... CNN's European version of the Mars story says "More than 40 years of Mars exploration have yielded inconclusive evidence of whether water was present on the planet," while the American version of the story doesn't interpret the previous finds as inconclusive at all: "NASA's Mars Odyssey, also an orbiter, confirmed water ice at the north pole, along with dry ice -- frozen carbon dioxide -- in 2002."

So who gets credit for the discovery?

A few questions spring out from this. It is generally accepted that giving credit for creation is important; is it the same for ?link discovery credit?? Will (should) the practice of linking to sources of links come to be taken very seriously by bloggers, out of a shared concern to keep things fair and transparent, in a similar manner to standards of citation in academia? Should one link to the immediate source or make an effort to trace links back to the original source? (Is it always clear which is ?the? original source?) --Sebastian Paquet --Link Propagation and 'Discovery Credit' (Many-To-Many)

I don't credit metasites like Google News or Blogdex when I find stories there.

If journalist A publishes a quote from a source, journalist B can try to contact the source directly and get him or her to repeat the statement; if the source cooperates, journalist B doesn't have to cite journalist A as the source.

Obsessing too much about link discovery is something like wanting to give credit to the taxi driver who took you to the library where you found the source you were looking for.

Still, as Jill Walker notes, "The economy of links is not product oriented. It is service oriented, and the service is the link." (Seb's article links to Jill's "Links and Power," a wonderful theoretical piece that was well worth a revisit.)

There are times when I first see link A on site X, but I'm not motivated to blog anything about A until I see commentary on site Y. In that case, site Y is being more than a taxi driver -- blogger Y deserves the credit on my blog, even if blogger X had the link first. Or link A might point to a website where articles soon disappear behind a paid subscription wall; in those cases, I'll often Google up a different link on the same subject.

I will say that a link to the original article/document being discussed is vital... it's not sufficient simply to link to the blog that quotes some off-site document. That blog may go offline one day, or the quote may turn out to be inaccurate or taken out of context.

(Suggested in a comment posted by Susan, who credits J-walk.)

I wanted to tell you that I am scared to death of your class... Give me something known. I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. I don't take hints. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me. I am not good at reading between the lines. I was never taught in school how to do that. I need help in that area. I don't always remember everything I read. When I study for a test... I have to recite things in my head 50 times before I remember it. What I am trying to say is I am going to give this class my 100%. I will do my very best. It just might not be THE BEST compared to everyone else. I will need a lot of help. -- A student in my American literature surveyA Student's Plea: 'Give Me Something Known'E-Mail)

I was touched by the honesty, passion, and determination in in this student's plea (excerpted here with permission). During the first class meeting, I tried to emphasize how a college-level literature course differs from a high school English class; I am not looking for papers that accurately summarize major plot events, or essays that spit back at me my own lecture notes.

In a literature course, I am of course trying to teach content; I'd like students to know who F. Scott Fitzgerald is, to recognize why A Streetcar Named Desire struck the right cords at the right time, to apply the social and spiritual messages in The Secret Life of Bees to their own lives, and to understand some of the major cultural and historical forces that have shaped American culture in the last century (feminism, Freudianism, Marxism, etc.).

In order to have the kind of deep, thoughtful conversations that build communities and lead us to personal revelations, we will of course have to read the darn texts about which we are supposed to be talking. And my student asks a legitimate question... how are we supposed to read literature? Lurking behind that question is a deeper one... why do these authors make their messages so darn hard to decipher? Why don't they just condense their message down to a few sentences, so that we can read it quickly, think about it, and then move on with our lives?

"Give me something known," my student writes.

In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot responds to a very similar statement.

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

The question is, who knows it? And when and where was it known? For a long time, it was "known" that the Earth is flat, that women have inferior intellects, that the Bible sanctifies slavery, etc. Pythagoras and his followers were greatly troubled by their discovery that the square root of 2 is irrational, because it upset what they "knew" about the cultural function of numbers (to bring order to an otherwise chaotic world).

"I don't know how to read something and figure out the unknown conflicts. I believe what someone tells me. If someone wants me to know something they need to tell me."

But what if someone doesn't want you to know something? What if someone is generating lies, using half-truths to influence your mind?

I have written about Michael Moore in the past; he's a brilliant filmmaker and political activist. All documentary films persuade a particular point of view, and Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" is a masterpiece. Everyone "knows" that "Bowling for Columbine" refers to the bowling class that the killers attended shortly before their spree. But did they attend bowling class? When challenged, Moore claimed that the reference to bowling in the title was a silly distraction. Perhaps more telling is this... have you heard that George Bush held up a plastic turkey for the TV cameras during his secret trip to Iraq? The Washington Post reported that it was indeed a real turkey, roasted and decorated just the way Grandma would have done it.

A contractor had roasted and primped the turkey to adorn the buffet line, while the 600 soldiers were served from cafeteria-style steam trays, the officials said. They said the bird was not placed there in anticipation of Bush's stealthy visit, and military sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines.

No reporter ever called the turkey plastic -- it was a real cooked bird, but its purpose was decorative. Look at how Michael Moore introduced the subject.

it turns out that big, beautiful turkey of yours was never eaten by the troops! It wasn't eaten by anyone! That's because it wasn't real! It was a STUNT turkey, brought in to look like a real edible turkey for all those great camera angles.

Nowhere does he call the turkey "plastic," but later he writes that " fake stuffing in the fake bird was just the right symbol for our country" under Bush. While it's defensible to call the turkey a stunt turkey, it was still a real turkey -- not a fake one, just as a stuntman is still a real man. I don't have any information on whether that stunt turkey was eaten or not, and my guess is that neither does Moore.

Moore could simply have written "Bush sucks," but anyone can do that; his method of creating a scene, convincing his readers to become enraged at the scene, and then prompting them to come to a particular conclusion is far more effective than the simple expression my student longs for.

I won't spend any more words writing sweeping romantic generalizations about what literature is, or why the books we study are supposedly great (actually, I choose some that are mediocre; there's even a complete flop on the syllabus). Neither I nor my students has the resources to determine whether George Bush's statement X is a lie, or whether Michael Moore's video clip X is a misrepresentation. We don't have access to the White House or to Moore's cutting room floor.

But we can agree to focus on a particular text that is finite and known; F. Scott Fitzgerald isn't going to write another chapter of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" anytime soon. We can all read this primary text, which is the complete and total authority of all things relating to the world of "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and then practice, in a civil and responsible manner, the skills that permit us to compare our interpretations, to probe our disagreements, and to examine the biases and cultural values that condition us to react a particular way to our shared texts.

I can give some practical tips on how to read literature... write notes in the margins; underline unfamiliar words and look them up; read once to get a basic sense of what's happening, scan looking for patterns and ambiguous areas, and then read again with the intention of testing a thesis. For instance, a few years ago when I re-read Bernice Bobs Her Hair, I noticed a racial thread that was extremely obvious once I started looking for it. (I'll have to leave that for later, since my class is about to begin.)

I'm busy working on the new t-shirt order page and getting the forums back up and running, but I don't think you care. All you want are more emotions. You all are animals! Animals I tell you! --Emo Eric --Eric Conveys an EmotionEmotionEric.com)

From "Happiness" to "Getting a great idea... while falling to your doom," Eric posts pictures of himself expressing emotions requested from his fans. He's no Marcel Marceau, but he's amusing. Via Work in Progress.

Technology in American Drama NewsE-Mail)

I recently received this announcement from my publisher: "I'm pleased to let you know that your book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950, has been named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title."

A little googling reveals that this award is given to about 3% of the 20,000 or so academic works submitted each year to Choice (a library selection journal).

In a related development, my Amazon.com ranking for this book has now rocketed to 1,679,643 -- I'm rapidly gaining on
Distributional ecology and abundance of dung and carrion-feeding beetles (Scarabaeidae) in tropical rain forests in Sarawak, Borneo (1,652,252).

I'd get mic'd up and have a projection screen behind me the size of a drive-in theater, to use for overheads and analyzing film clips. It was like being a rock star or something -- the performative aspect of teaching took on a grandiose dimension. I'd make a silly joke and the room roared. I'd ask questions and have a field of faces to choose on at random. I could see thirty heads nodding in agreement when I made a point. It was a thrill. A daunting experience, but a thrill nonetheless. --Mike Arnzen --Working the Huge Room (Pedablogue)

My colleague discusses the dynamics of teaching a large class. We don't have huge classes at Seton HIll, but when I have on occasion addressed large audiences, the energy I could sense from the room really is palpable. It's important to focus on that energy, and to have a backup plan so that when it starts to fade, you can quickly shift gears and gain their interest again.

Scientists at MIT's Advanced Machine Cognizance Project announced Tuesday that, after seeing the final installment of the Matrix trilogy, they will cease all further work in the field of artificial intelligence.... "I saw Revolutions with my 12-year-old son Eric," Markovitch said. "He saw the look of worry on my face and said, 'Dad, don't be scared. It's only make-believe.' I had to tell him, 'No, son, it's what your father does for a living.'" --Scientists Abandon AI Project After Seeing The Matrix (The Onion)

It's very amusing reading the scientists quoted in the story referring to pop culture such as The Matrix, the Terminator series and Rage Against the Machine. It reminds me of the class discussion that ensues when nobody has done the assigned readings, but plenty of people have recently seen a movie that has some vague connection to the theme the class is supposed to be exploring. (I haven't had one of those classes recently, but when it does happen, the memory sticks around...)

Mary Mary quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

The origins are steeped in history...

The Mary alluded to in this traditional English nursery rhyme is Mary Tudor, or Bloody Mary, who was the daughter of King Henry VIII. Queen Mary was a staunch Catholic and the garden referred to is an allusion to graveyards which were increasing in size with those who dared to continue to adhere to the Protestant faith. The silver bells and cockle shells were colloquialisms for instruments of torture. The 'maids' were a device to behead people similar to the guillotine. --Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary: Origin (Rhymes)

I found this on Circant, where I left the following comment:

The Mary Tudor suggestion sounds like it affirms the adage that history is written by the winners. The history of Protestantism in England wasn't very long during the reign of Henry VIII's daughter, and thus the phrasing "dared to continue to adhere to the Protestant faith" sounds very biased. Henry VIII burned plenty of Lutherans in his day; Microsoft's Encarta characterizes Henry VIII's reforms as chiefly political rather than theological.

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761562628_2/Reformation.html.

Here's a website with several additional interpretations of the rhyme.

http://www.rooneydesign.com/MaryMary.html

And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer,

"Better to be the poor servant of a poor master,"

and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner? -- Plato --The Allegory of the Cave (Exploring Plato's Dialogues)

I've been reading Plato's Allegory of the Cave once again. Plato recognizes that art is powerful and therefore dangerous, and that it should be strictly controlled in order to serve the state. While we're linguistically conditioned to think of the arts as "illuminating" and good artists as "bright," Plato sees art as the shadows on the wall -- shadows cast by puppeteers who are stumbling towards an imperfect representation of reality. While this is hardly a laudable way to interpret artists, Dr. Clowney of Rowan University suggests, "Think 'media', 'propaganda', and Entertainment Tonight, rather than 'fine art', and it is easier to gain some sympathy for Plato's views."

As if Plato needed further confirmation, if you glance at Michael Jackson's trial coverage, you'll see plenty of shadows dancing on Plato's cave walls. In a 1992 article in ANQ, Lance Olson calls Jackson "a pale media-packaged Xerox of a Xerox of the Real Thing." He is so multiply mediated, by plastic, make-up, by masks and umbrellas, by the directions he gives to his own personal videographer (who accompanied his triumphant entry to the courthouse where he entered his plea of not guilty) that he almost ceases to exist. While Olson notes that half a billion people apparently watched the premiere of Jackson's "Black or White" video on MTV, a scant 12 years later, outside of Cali-phoney-a, there wasn't exactly a groundswell of support for Jackson. Steve Gutterman reports that "plans to mount a major show of international support for the pop star failed to hit a high note on their first day Friday, as tiny crowds gathered in a handful of European cities" in gatherings timed to coincide with his arraignment.

Art is powerful and dangerous; at this point, the amount of time, effort, and intellectual energy that the world is investing in contemplating the significance of Michael Jackson's latest antics is enough to make a philosopher weep.

At the turn of the century a Maryland Quaker, Lizzie Magie, was trying to develop a game that would illustrate the inequities of capitalism and promote a popular "single tax" movement led by Henry George. A century ago this month she received a patent for The Land lord's Game; the illustration in the US Patent Gazette is eerily similar to Monopoly. | The Landlord's Game became a Quaker pastime; over the years little improvements and local details were added by players. Eventually it became known as Monopoly, and a version that used the streets of Atlantic City, New Jersey (still used in the US version of Monopoly) was shown to a man named Charles Darrow in 1931. He sold the rights to Parker Brothers games in 1936. The Quakers' 30-year-old instructive little anti-capitalism game became, in other hands, the opposite. --Tim Dowling --I rolled a two - and got a ghetto stash  (Guardian)

Some background supplied on the history of "Monopoly," as part of the reaction to the export of "Ghettopoly" to Britain.

One of the things on my list of "things I remember from my youth that I wish I could find again" was a science-fiction story in which a group of customs officials (I think) are testing products being imported to Earth. One of the products is a suspicious war toy with little robot soldiers that keep disappearing; but that toy turns out to be a distraction -- the real threat is a board game that teaches children to make business decisions that will result in some offworld faction taking over the economy of the solar system. (The customs officials only glanced at the rules, and didn't notice that you get points for losing your empire.) I found this via Crooked Timber.

"The Clark Bar Association"? That name is sure to draw snickers when crunch time arrives. Clark will face mounds of mockery, which may prove to be the kiss of death for his candidacy and, if he's the nominee, ensure the re-election of the jolly rancher now in the White House. If Clark is smart, he'll make sure that whatever staffer thought of this doesn't see another payday. Such a decision could be a lifesaver for the campaign. --James Taranto --Best of the Web Today (Opinion Journal)

For this nutty little essay mocking Wesley Clark's adoption of the Clark candy bar as a campaign tool, Opinion Journal earns a sweet spot on my tootsie blog roll. (Note to self regarding possible career as comedy writer: keep day job.)

Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail. | Refrain from describing anything or anybody as "free." Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like "Hello," and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line. --Michelle Delio --Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad  (Wired)

Spam is evil.

The above article lists some of the new rules of e-mail. I have my e-mail spam filter set to block any message with more than two exclamation marks or the word "sex" in the subject line. (The only person who might ever want to talk to me about sex is my wife, and she doesn't need to use e-mail to get my attention.)

I've stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, adding anti-spam protection to our SHU installation of MoveableType. There were scores of links to viagra, digital camera, and gambling websites tucked away in older blog entries. (The spammers want Google to find links to their sites, thus artificially raising their rankings.)

I've also read that we can expect to start seeing full-screen advertisements that load stealthily in the background while we are surfing a site, and that play after we click away from a website.

I have four different ad-blocking tools installed on the computer I'm using now: Webwasher (which not only blocks ads but closes up the space on the screen where the ad used to be; I sometimes have to shut off because it interferes with my webmail), Google's Toolbar (great for stopping popups; hold down ctrl when clicking if you know you want a popup this time; or, click a button to permanently allow popups on the domain -- very useful), NoFlash (which kills Macromedia Flash ads; I can easily turn it back on if I know I want the flash thingy), and a few minutes ago I just added the unimaginatively-named Mike Skallas's Ad Blocking Host File (a list of ad-serving hosts that your browser will ignore, registering only errors where the ads are supposed to be... not pretty, but effective).

Teens Finding Stupid Ways to DieJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've come across several recent examples of "It's fun until someone gets killed." It's bad enough when a young person dies, but when the family has to grieve over such stupid reasons... ouch, that hurts. My heart goes out to these families.

Avalanche is a great word. Its onomatopoeia is horrific. The very syllables bring to mind a Frenchman tumbling down a mountainside, until he meets his demise in a crunching vortex of snow and rock and ice: "Ahhhh...vahhh...laaaaaaaa...uNNCHHH!" -- Mike Arnzen --Oddly Chilling Thoughts (The Goreletter)

After some good-natured ribbing about his taste in clothing, General Wesley Clark, the Democratic Presidential candidate, has decided to donate his much-famed argyle sweater to charity. --General Wesley Clark's Argyle Sweater (EBay)

I found myself doing a little superior dance, because I just happen to have a read a blog entry about the history of sweaters on the linguistically fascinating flaschenpost, and I am therefore critically equipped to understand the cultural significance of Wesley Clark's Sweater and its presence on E-bay.

I didn't realize that what the English call a "jumper" is the same thing I call a "sweater". To me, a jumper is a long sleeveless dress worn over a shirt; the jumper is typically of a rugged material like denim, and is thus suitable as a play outfit for little girls.

Stealthy? 1995? Please. 100% of teenagers play games today (those who don't are a rounding error)--but I doubt the percentage in, say, 1990, during the SNES/Genesis era, was all that different. And the game industry first made the claim that it was bigger than the movies in 1980 or 81, if I remember correctly--albeit revenues then were largely from the arcade cash-drop, not software sales. The point being that games have been hugely important to our culture--particularly youth culture--for two decades or more. If you want to find the point at which sea-change began, you sure don't start with 1995. You can make an argument for 1972 (when both Bushnell's Pong and Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey appeared); 1962 (Steve Rusell's Space War); 1958 (Willy Higginbotham's Tennis for Two, and also Charles Roberts's Tactics); 1913 (H.G. Wells's Little Wars); 1861 (Milton Bradley's The Checkered Game of Life); or 1780 (The King's Game, by Helwig, Master of Pages to the Duke of Brunswick). 1972 is the traditional date, although I'd argue that you can't understand the digital games revolution without understanding the wargaming, miniature, and kriegspiel traditions that predate it--not to mention classic arcade amusements, of course. --Grek Costikyan --The Times on Games (Games * Design * Art * Culture)

When she got home she found her inbox stuffed with new messages, many of which were junk mail. One message was titled "BBC World service proposal," but Onwueme said she just skipped over it. | The BBC sent a second e-mail, which she also did not take the time to read because it had the same vague title. --Susan MacLaughlin --Professor lands international radio deal (UWEC Spectator)

Tess Onwueme, a playwright from Nigeria, is a former colleague of mine from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The Beeb was trying to ask her if they could broadcast a radio performance of her play, Shakara, The Dancehall Queen.

I always taught one or two of her plays whenever I had a drama class. I would tell the students that we would have a guest lecturer who "is an expert in the plays of Tess Onwueme." When Tess walked in the door, often wearing a bright purple or red turban, I'd tell them who she was. The students always got a kick out of her visits.

She also makes a great plantain dish, the recipe for which my wife has bugged me a few times to request from her.

A student at McGill University has won the right to have his assignments marked without first submitting them to an American, anti-plagiarism website.

--McGill student wins fight over anti-cheating website  (CBC)

As a former resident of Canada, I couldn't repress a smirk at the CBC's need to identify the website as "American" in the lead. (The site is TurnitIn.com.)

The very premise of an online game is that it is uncontrollable - indeed, even the banned players have found ways to sneak back in various disguises. | That, in turn, presents a thorny set of philosophical problems. How do you seek to curb the baser instincts of a community of autonomous players? Is repression the answer? Or do you have to give people incentives to behave better all by themselves? --Andrew Gumbel --Blood on the Virtual Carpet (Independent)

I filed this under "Journalism" because it features a virtual newspaper reporting on the unsavory activities of the virtual residents of a in The Sims.

On this day in 1984, after a year of deliberation, the US supreme court ruled in favour of Sony (makers of the Betamax video-recorder) and against Universal Studios and Disney, who had claimed that viewers recording television programmes were stealing copyrighted material. The counter-argument was that home-tapers were "time-shifting": rescheduling programmes through convenience rather than greed. The acceptance of that argument was decided on a 5-4 vote, meaning that if one justice had been a little crustier, television viewers might now be confined to their homes on the nights of their favourite shows. --Mark Lawson --Going for the Record (Guardian)

I'm sure that many of the record company executives who complain about people stealing music by downloading it have no ethical qualms about videotaping TV shows for their own personal libraries (and I'll be they fast-forward through the commercials, too). Of course, the media titans are also going after TiVo and other tools with commercial-zapping goodies inside them.

Back then, it was technology maker vs. Hollywood. Now, Sony is one of the big media companies (owning both the technological platforms and the creative content for movies, TV, music, and videogames). Sony tried to stem the tide of file-sharing by selling audio gadgets that had security features to prevent Sony from losing money on the files, but users didn't like paying for a clunky gadget that didn't let them do what they really wanted to do with files (namely, get them for free).

I neither buy nor "share" music files, but then I don't buy CDs either, other than occasionally grabbing one out of a $5 bargain bin (and I can't even remember the last time I did that).

Approximately twenty-five years have passed since the production of the first widely-distributed computer games; but the medium still appears malleable and novel, and its criticism remains a new and open field. Much work remains to be done, and many questions have not been asked. What vocabulary will be necessary for a literate engagement with the media of interactive entertainment? What, if any, are the distinctive formal and cultural characteristics of games as distinct from other media? What are, and will be, the standards for critical judgment and interpretation of games? --Form, Culture, and Video Game Criticism | Princeton, March 6, 2004KairosNews/UPenn CFP)

Assuming the SHU powers that be grant my funding request, I'll be attending this conference to present a paper on the history of Will Crowther's original version of what became known as "Colossal Cave Adventure." Crowther's version is presumed to be lost, but I've collected what I can about the version of the game that was found, modified, and re-released by Don Woods.

The paper is part of an article commissioned for the history section of the IF Theorybook, as editor-in-chief Emily Short nicknames it in her e-mails. Maybe Interactive Fiction: History, Craft, and Theory would be a more accurate title. But that would involve a horrid academic colon.

The conference organizes say they don't have a web presence, so I'm just blogging the announcement in KairosNews that prompted me to send in my proposal. The conference is being held by the English Department at Princeton.

In the early days of game publishing, many companies invested great effort not only in the design of their games, but also in the way those games appeared on store shelves and what was included in the box. This article's intention is to describe this lost art of innovative game packaging from the early to mid-1980's, when there seemed to be an abundance of real thought and care behind the customer's experience beyond the software itself. --Bill Loguidice --Game Packaging - A Look to the Past When Treasures Beyond the Game Were Within the Box (Armchair Arcade)

I'm procrastinating a bit after a morning of productive work, so I haven't had time to look through the whole issue. I personally find artificially-paginated articles very hard to read online. Yes, it makes sense to break up a longer article, but I'd prefer the option to see a whole article in a single file (for printing or in-browser full-text searches). I love the site's use of an old, beat-up videogame box as its design theme.

(Update, 17 Jan: Bill told me how to get a printable version. I've changed the URL.)

By the way, a group of interactive fiction enthusiasts has created Feelies.org, where current authors of games typically shared in electronic-only form can produce and sell feelies. From the home page: "We already have posters, pamphlets, coins, maps and CDs from some of the best games of the post-Infocom era."

You find yourself in yon dungeon. Back yonder there is a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.

What wouldst thou deau?
>_ --Strong Bad: Video Games (Homestarrunner.com)

Bobby actually e-mailed me this suggestion a few days ago, and I saw it in a comment on MGK, and on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup, but this was the first week of classes, and I only had the chance to view it just now. At the end, you can actually play the different spoof games.

If you aren't familiar with the Strong Bad character, here's another of my favorites: "A Well Thought-Out English Paper"

Light playing on water drops, dust or ice crystals in the atmosphere produces a host of visual spectacles - rainbows, halos, glories, coronas and many more. Some can be seen almost every day or so, some are once in a lifetime sights. Find out where to see them and how they form. Then seek and enjoy them outdoors. --Les Cowley --Atmospheric Optics

The huge index shows probably hundreds of images. I particularly liked the fogbow and the glory.

[T]he typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers... --New study shatters Internet 'geek' image (CNN)

Too bad that the folks who conducted the research, UCLA's Center for Communication Policy, only published their findings in a MS-Word document and a PowerPoint file. The same page also includes PDF archives. These are all very unfriendly formats for online readers with slow connections. (Okay, I have a good connection at the office, but not at home, where I am now.)

Crucially, Mr Medjahdi said he could see no photographers anyway near the car, despite initial police suspicions that they might have distracted the driver. "I got a complete picture from my side and rear-view mirrors of what was happening beside me. There was no other vehicle in my field of vision. I saw no cars with the Mercedes, no photographers on motorbikes around the car. There was no one," he said. --Diana crash witness speaks (ThisIsLondon.com)

I had occasionally caught myself wondering... if the princess's car were being pursued by paparazzi, where are the photos of the crash? Either they were lousy paparazzi, or the driver had already eluded them. How did the "pursued by paparazzi" meme get started, if the only eyewitness to the crash reports that there were none? It appears simply to be the opinion of Mohamed al-Fayed, father of Dodi Fayed, the princess's companion who was also killed in the crash:

Early eye-witness accounts broadcast on radio and television around the world portrayed a sickening scene in the Alma Tunnel, with paparazzi swarming around the wreck of the Mercedes, taking pictures moments after the crash, giving no thought to calling the emergency services and obstructing people who had come to give help to those inside the car.

A little googling shows me a news CNN report from 1999 that concludes, "there was no evidence they [photographers] were close to the car when the accident occurred, the report found". I confess I'm not that interested in royal politics, but I'm surprised that I didn't know about this alternate story, which isn't as powerful as the "pursued by photographers on motorbikes" meme.

One of the great gifts of the book is the entrée it affords into the contemporary IF scene. Graham Nelson, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, and Andrew Plotkin were all authors who were new to me, but no sooner had I worked through Plotkin’s remarkable “Shade” than I added it to my spring syllabus (which I’ll post soon, btw); and I suspect others will follow suit. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised to find this text canonized amongst a new academic audience because of Montfort’s account of it here. --Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages --Wor(l)d Games (MGK)

As George wrote in a comment to the above entry, "Stuff like this is why I like reading blogs."

I don't know what it is about interactive fiction, but it prompts a lot of autobiographical essays like this one. (See also SPAG newsletter editor Paul O'Brian's review.)

And homestarrunner.com features a text game this week.

I oughta add a new category: geekiness.

I used to date a girl who regularly won trophies for running marathons and playing in tennis tournaments. I told her the only trophy I had ever won was 4th place in a shuffleboard tournament. At the age of nine. So she said, "so of all the nine year olds who turned out that day to play shuffleboard, you were the fourth best." I said, "Yes." She said, "is that the same trophy I saw on your mantle today?" I said, "Yes". She said, "Twenty seven years later and you still display the trophy?" I said, "Yes." -Jon --Letters from Pathetic Geeks (Pathetic Geek Stories)

A great letter from the new home of Maria Schneider's Pathetic Geek Stories, a comic strip formerly featured on The Onion (behind several layers of annoying advertisements, in a popup window that hides the URL so you can't bookmark it directly).

I learned from this interview with Maria Schneider that she was the author of the T. Herman Zwiebel editorials for as long as I had been following them. They were strangely compelling, though the series stopped several years ago.

Private vs. Public

Anyone can read this: professors, classmates

Don't write about your love life or last weekend'sactivities unless you want your professors (or Dr. Gawalek) to read about it

Take caution when complaining about classes or classmates

Also, watch what you write -- don't link to pictures of you doing anything illegal while at Seton Hill. Someone will invariably turn you in.

--Julie Young --Getting the Most Out of Your Academic Weblog (Work in Progress)

Julie also offers sections titled "Academic=Thought", "Foster Discussion", and "The Upside".

"Dr. Gawalek" is Mary Ann Gawelek, the academic vice president here at Seton Hill University.

--History of Computer Game Design: Technology, Culture, Business (Stanford University)

This course website features an excellent bibliography of computer game history and scholarship.

While blogging's earliest advocates operate on the "information wants to be free" principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | "Information is power" is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you're hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there's also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one. --Neil McIntosh --Why blogs could be bad for business (Guardian)

A few months ago, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event. The university president, JoAnne Boyle, was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I was part of a little group of people who were treated to a funny story about a well-known donor who called with some crotchety advice about one of the big topics on campus. When we all finished laughing at the punch line, I asked for the donor's first name again, because I hadn't caught it, and someone kidded me, "So, is this for your blog?" We all chuckled, but JoAnne's face turned white, and she quickly went off to charm someone else.

A little while later, as she was giving an impromptu welcome speech, she noticed who I was sitting with, and said, "The reporter who's the bane of my existence is sitting next to the faculty member who's the bane of my existence!"

Everyone turned around to see me recovering from what was almost a spit-take.

I don't think of my own blog in terms of power... goodness gracious, I'm just trying to teach a few things and enjoy doing what I do. I noticed that Alexa, a website ranking service, has placed jerz.setonhill.edu above www.setonhill.edu, and has recently replaced the screen capture of Seton Hill's home page with a screen capture from my own curricular home page. (My curricular website gets 57% of the traffic to the *.setonhill.edu domain, and the main site gets 29%, at least according to however Alexa measures it. The blogs.setonhill.edu subdomain gets 12%, by the way, which is up from 8% the last time I checked.)

I don't really know what any of this means, but, like businesses, universities also operate with a rigid power structure; administrators know things that faculty members don't need to know; tenured faculty members know things that their nontenured colleagues don't need to know.

Since I know that some of my students read my blog, I've found myself screening my blogging, since I don't want my blog to give away the "big twist" I want to throw into my lecture. And one day last term when I was very sick, a student blogged about how mentally befuddled I was. That student wrote sympathetically, but what if she hadn't?

Many of the students who started blogging for me last semester will be blogging for me again in different classes this term. I've learned a few things about instructional blogging... for one thing, I need to get the students reading each other's blogs more. We spent perhaps too much time counting the number of comments each blog entry generated, and not enough time getting students to link to each other's conversations. I'll be introducing three classes to blogging this week, and I plan to move pretty quickly from the basic "show me that you can post a link" to writing thickly-linked texts, with well-chosen links that not only demonstrate the student is keeping up with other blogs, but that gives readers a map to good reading online. We'll see what happens.

The entrenched business culture may not adopt blogging beyond the basic public relations and customer service approach. But a university's function is to educate -- to pass on skills and knowledge, by giving students the intellectual tools, in a microcosm of the society that awaits them after they graduate. Progressive educational philosophy emphasizes empowering the student. A weblog forces students to come into contact with that outside world a little earlier, which can be a burden. But with that responsibility comes power.

I'd rather the university president not think of me as the bane of her existence because of my blog, but at the same time, it's nice to be noticed.

CSS Not Displaying on My Site?Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've been pulling my hair out for the last 2 hours because something seems to be wrong with the style sheets on my site. Do my pages look the way they usually do? Most of the time, I get no styles whatsoever, then about once out of every 10 times, the page loads properly, but when I reload it, the stylesheet disappears again.

In the past, when I've run into this problem, it doesn't seem to have affected other users.

It figures it would happen on the first day of classes... and my wife is pissed at me because I'm very late coming home. Grr!

Update, Jan 13: OK, thanks all. I guess it was just my machine, then.

Update: I'm blogging this mostly so I remember it... when I have a stylesheet problem, and then post a comment or edit an entry on this blog, for some reason the problem fixes itself. It's happened three times now.

My first scholarly monograph, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, has rocketed to the 1.6 millionth bestseller (up from 1.8 millionth a few weeks ago) on Amazon.com. (Stop presses! -- now it's zoomed up to the 1.49 millionth! Take that, Distributional Ecology and Abundance of Dung and Carrion-Feeding Beetles (Scarabaeidae) in Tropical Rain Forests in Sarawak, Borneo, still mired at a pitiful number 1.596 million.) A big movie deal now seems inevitable. Buy it now and you can say you knew me before I was rich and famous. --Jack Lynch --Jack Lynch's Home Page (Rutgers)

Lynch is the author of one of the great free online writing resources, the "Guide to Grammar and Style and the "Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms."

The Kelley controversy comes at a time of growing public mistrust of the mainstream media. In the past year, critics have questioned: Fox's Geraldo Rivera and NBC's Peter Arnett over their reporting on the Iraq war; The Washington Post for reporting that Jessica Lynch had been shot and stabbed and not correcting the account for 21/2 months; CNN executive Eason Jordan for saying he suppressed stories of Iraqi brutality out of concern for people's safety; Salt Lake Tribune Editor James Shelledy, who resigned after two reporters sold information on the Elizabeth Smart case to the National Enquirer; and CBS's use of a music special to leverage a Michael Jackson interview. --Reporter 'Panicked' In Probe  (Washington Post (will expire))

This article updates the resignation of USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, the latest high-profile reporter whose credibily has come under fire.

"If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished." Beverly Sweeney, middle school teacher involved in the suspension of a student who used a DOS command to send the word "Hey!" to 80 computer stations. --Hey! Where's the problem? (Star-Telegram)

Because, as we all know, proper computer use, and education in general, does not require curiosity, trial-and-error, or innovation.

Having said that, I'd like to look more closely at something Dave Lieber wrote.

But more troubling is the notion that Sweeney does not believe that the rest of us have any right to question the decisions made by public educators.

Ok, fair enough. Lieber continues:

Remember, we pay the salaries of the teachers and staff. We buy the computers.

He's right on both counts, but think about it -- the school has 80 computers that still run DOS? if that's the case, then "we" aren't doing a very good job -- either in supplying funds to purchase good equipment or (apparently) in coming up with salaries that will attract skilled teachers.

The fact that Sweeney's web site includes an animated picture of a caveman smashing a computer with a club, as well as a Java applet that features globes and lights whirling around a distorted portrait, lead one of the MetaFilter posters to ask, in all honesty, whether her page had been hacked.

Several university students said Thursday that they fabricated survey results factored into in a judge's decision to move Scott Peterson's capital murder trial out of Modesto.... [T]hey made up every answer on all the surveys they submitted because they found it difficult to gather legitimate data.

They did it, they said, because they were short on time and money. They were required to participate in the survey for 20 percent of their grade and were given no money for dozens of lengthy long-distance phone calls, they said. --Stapley and Cote --Allegations arise in Peterson trial survey (Modesto Bee)

I'm blogging this as another in a long series of reasons why my students shouldn't trust the results of every survey they encounter. The poll, a student project due last month, has not been identified as having been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Instead, it was submitted to the court by the professor who assigned the poll. The lawyers who objected to its legitimacy had sufficient reason to be suspicious.

Stephen Schoenthaler received an "outstanding professor" award from California State University, Stanislaus in 2002. According to that press release (praising "research as well as teaching accomplishments"), the U.S. Congress had recently appropriated half a million dollars for a large-scale test of his research supporting a link between crime and diet.

Schoenthaler announced the poll assignment two days before Thanksgiving break, which obviously ticked off some of the students; maybe they were even further annoyed when they saw him in the media, taking credit for their work. Schoenthaler doesn't seem to have a curricular web page, so I wasn't able to find the syllabus or a response from Schoenthaler (other than his telling the Bee reporter he was shocked).

According to this article, Schoenthaler "has said he hoped to provide a public service and perhaps save taxpayer money." That's a very noble goal, but requiring his own students to pay for it? Not so noble. Still, these are apparently senior criminal justice students; they should know that two wrongs don't make a right.

In a statement released yesterday, the CSU-Stanislaus president wrote, “This is a very serious matter. We have immediately initiated an inquiry to examine these allegations according to our policies and procedures. We will conduct an extensive review to compile the information necessary to determine exactly what happened and the appropriate course of action. Scientific misconduct and academic dishonesty are serious breaches of professional ethics and research standards that are not tolerated at this university.”

For almost all important social and political issues, a view of the past is essential, and the most powerful analyses of issues requires a historical framework that reflects all the complexity and ambiguity of the past. Yet, for most people, it seems that their concept of history settled into a fixed evaluation (usually a negative one) based on a class taken long before college. Every time someone asks me what I teach, I brace for their inevitable reaction. They usually tell me something like, ?I was horrible at history,? or, ?I hated history.? Since these tend to be new acquaintances I have no knowledge of their lives, but I am probably correct 90% of the time when I respond in turn, ?You had the wrong history teacher.? --John Spurlock --The Uses of History (The Blue Monkey Review)

John has announced his New Year's Resolution to post something on his site every week. "If you are out there and read this," he says, "add grit to my resolve by sending along your comments. "

Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?

Consider these questions:

• What have you created that you'd like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What's on your wish list?

--George H. Williams --Sharing Teaching Resources (George H. Williams)

It was December 1968. An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a "mouse." --The Click Heard Round The World (Wired)

Interesting tidbits:

• Engelbart credits Vannevar Bush with inventing the concept of links: "I'd read that article 17 years before I wrote about links using computers and honestly do not remember if I took the idea from Bush deliberately or only went back to his article later."
• "We also did a lot of experiments to see how many buttons the mouse should have. We tried as many as five. We settled on three. That's all we could fit. Now the three-button mouse has become standard, except for the Mac. Steve Jobs insisted on only one button. We haven't spoken much since then."
• What we call the cursor, Engelbart originally called the "bug". If that term had stuck, the etymology of the word would be even more... uh... buggy.

Today, 30 years into feminism, we have models who look not just weak and unsophisticated, but also dumb and victimized. Academic feminists haven't complained because the models are supposedly playing a subversive role and subversion is inherently politically correct. Moreover, many of the young photographers are female. But now we?ve moved into ?fashion vérité? and the models still look stupid. Is this how women in fashion see themselves? --Karen Lehrman --The Decline of Fashion Photography (Slate)

I don't find the subject of fashion photography terribly gripping, but I did enjoy the form of this essay, and found this particular query worth making.

A good man-eating plant needs a deep root structure to anchor it in place when the man it's eating flails and fights for its life. So the deeper the seed, the stronger the root system. This is why you need so much blood meal. The man-eating plant doesn't care where it gets its blood. Whether in the hellish depths of earth or in the burning shine of the sun, it only thirsts -- at this point -- for blood protein. --Michael A. Arnzen --How to grow a man-eating plant (Eternal Night)

Mike is my next-door neighbor here on The Hill. I can't remember... does he have any plants in his office?

According to Mike, this story made the Top 10 "Best Horror Stories of 2003" in an online poll, and voting is still open through 21 Jan. Check out his humbly-worded entry in The Goreletter.

Matt Hoy writes:

They sell rare earth magnets. Incredibly strong and small. I ordered a bunch of them. These would be useful for creating the "hard drive killer" door frame [Neal] Stephenson mentions in "Cryptonomicon". They sell one monster with over 350 lbs of force. I'm afraid I had to buy smaller ones, since I don't like the idea of breaking a finger when I get it caught between the magnet and a piece of steel.

--Neodymium Super Magnets (gaussboys.com)

Mmmm.... magnets!

Huge slabs uncovered in Marion Garry's garden in Buckhaven, Fife, had experts convinced they had found evidence of an early Viking village....Mr Speirs admitted that his team mistakenly ignored the finds of a World War II child's gas mask and old television remote in their hunt for Viking evidence. --'Historic find' is old garden patio (BBC)

The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts is the title of this book. To have called it the survival and transmission of ancient literature would have been pretentious, but not wholly untruthful. Manuscripts, we all know, are the chief means by which the records and imaginings of twenty centuries have been preserved. It is my purpose to tell where manuscripts were made, and how and in what centres they have been collected, and, incidentally, to suggest some helps for tracing out their history. Naturally the few pages into which the story has to be packed will not give room for any one episode to be treated exhaustively. Enough if I succeed in rousing curiosity and setting some student to work in a field in which and immense amount still remains to be discovered. --M. R. James (1919) --The Wandering and Homes of Manuscripts (Tertullian)

Great Scott, this is exactly the kind of article I spent about an hour or so looking for yesterday. Thanks for posting it, Eric.

Over the last two decades, academic [book] titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons. --Jennifer Jabson --No Mark of Distinction (Chronicle)

The title of my dissertation is "Soul and Society in a Technological Age: American Drama, 1920-1950." When it was accepted for publication, I was told that it would be retitled "Technology in American Drama 1920-1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine." I was momentarily miffed that nobody had asked my opinion, but they were absolutely right. My father, who for years was a technical editor for the government, spent much of his career prying semicolons out of dense academic reports. He finds the sentences in my book generally too long, but he only found a very small number of mistakes -- apparently I left a "the the" in the text somewhere, and there are a few subject-verb disagreements (hidden in strings of semicolons, which is why I and my copyeditor didn't catch it). So I think I did pretty well.

Oddly enough, one of the handful of general style notes my advisor gave me was: although the writing is clear, the sentences are so short that in places it reads like a newspaper story; I took that as a compliment -- nevertheless, I gave my semicolon key and hyphen keys (not to mention the parentheses keys) a quick workout: I wanted to match the diction that my adviser requested.

The game's artificial intelligence borders on idiotic. At one point, I conversed with the civic manager of Upper Seattle in his office. After our chat, he conveniently walked into the hallway and blankly looked on as I hacked into his safe and stole secret information.

I was especially disappointed with Invisible War because its ambitious technological underpinnings held much promise.

Graphics were filled with realistic nuances such as hanging lights which swayed to and fro when I bumped them. Boxes and other objects had real weight and could be picked up and thrown.

But all this technical wizardry was for naught and had no real bearing on gameplay. --Matt Slagle --PC version of Deus Ex: Invisible War disappoints (AP/USA Today)

I had been looking forward to this game -- the original Deus X was fantastic: a first-person shooter/role-playing/adventure hybrid with fully voiced dialogue and multiple solutions to every problem. Looks like the designers put too much energy into the technology, and not enough into the storyline. I'll read a few more reviews before I make up my mind, but I can tell right now I'm not buying this title for full price.

"It was the Critic, in the New Yorker, with the essay." --Eric Mayer --Who Killed the Detective Novel? (Eric Mayer)

Not, says Eric.

They're the ones who keep the puerile shows on TV, who appear as regular recipients of the Darwin Awards, who raise our insurance rates by doing dumb things, who generally make life much more miserable for all of us than it ought to be. Sad to say, they comprise a substantial minority -- perhaps even a majority -- of the populace. --Neal Starkman --The S factor explains Bush's popularity (Seattle PI)

Note to self: If ever writing an opinion column calling much or most of the world "stupid," avoid destroying own credibility by misusing the word "comprise." The whole comprises the parts; the parts compose the whole.

There are far better ways to organize an attack on Bush's policies, the legitimacy of his presidency, and even his personal fitness for the job. But Starkman's essay is instead a painfully obvious example of the ad hominem fallacy. Calling people stupid because they do not share your worldview does not demonstrate the ability to think critically.

Starkman has, of course, succeeded in stirring up the "Bush is stupid" meme; that will probably help Dean's campaign.

From Orwell's 1984

'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: duckspeak, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'

Update, 08 Jan: In "Just Another Leftist Loon," James E. McWilliams writes about the ad hominem attacks generated by his "moderately anti-Bush" op-ed. He recognizes that he sounds like a cloistered scholar surprised and stung by his first encounter with the great unwashed audience he hopes to educate with his brilliance; but since his reflection is published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that stance is understandable -- now he's hoping to educate his fellow academics that you need a thick skin if you want to bring your discourse into the public arena.

I wonder if McWilliams is familiar with the skin-thickening online rhetorical practices such as fisking, flaming, trolling, etc. -- if he were, I doubt he'd have been so surprised by what showed up in his e-mail.

Suddenly the cold white marble warmed up and flushed a deep golden brown, and the cold white pupils were suddenly swept by a wash of black. They turned to stare at the sculptor who was still kneeling in supplication. When he felt a warm hand upon his shoulder, he jumped back with alarm, but when he looked up to see his beloved, he cried tears of joy. He grasped her hands and told her how much he loved her, how she was more beautiful that he could have ever imagined, and begged her to stay and be his wife. | The (former) statue stared at him for a second or two, absorbing his balding pate, his weak, petulant mouth, his soft second chin, his dirty hands, his greedy eyes... Jasleen Modi --The truth about Pygmalion finally revealed  (University of Minnesota Daily)

A politically correct version of the legend. I wanted to like it more than I do now, but it did help me expand upon my earlier post.

The life-giving role of the goddess Aphrodite is played by an unnamed male god; this, and the addition of the (unresolved) subplot with the sculptor's friends creates a masculine conspiracy against the helpless statue, which is interesting, but undeveloped. The cutesy parenthetical insertions distract from the message, and by first describing the color changes in the statue from an omniscient viewpoint, the author diminishes the dramatic effect of having Pygmalion notice the warm hand. (The author has probably internally developed this scene as a movie and is describing the shots for us; I see that in a lot of student authors.) Similarly, we are told right away that the sculptor is "stupid," which detracts from the author's ability to show us actions which we ourselves can judge as stupid. (See "Show, Don't (Just) Tell"). And to call Pygmalion "perverted" for "doodling naked women" is far too prudish, even for the sake of a joke; the sculptor in the story has international fame, and thus he seemed to do pretty well for himself by ignoring his other studies in favor of practicing his art.

I encourage my literature students not to judge the cultures of the past by the standards of the present. Critique them? Of course! Condemn them? Well...

Certain actions by certain people and certain widely-followed practices don't hold up to modern scrutiny, but it is harsh to dismiss a whole society made up of individual members that that lived in a completely different moral world. I'd rather spend time exploring that moral world and seeing how the medium reflects, transgresses, or perpetuates it. When I teach Shakespeare, there are always a few students who are so excited by their first women's studies courses that they cannot get past the way certain male characters treat certain female characters abominably, and write theses that boil down to "Both Hamlet and Othello mistreat women they profess to love; therefore, men oppress women." Their later papers swap in new texts, but typically make the exact same argument. But when you compare Shakespeare's strong heroines to the female characters depicted by his contemporaries, it's pretty easy to see Shakespeare as a champion of the strength, character, and humanity of women.

"Pygmalion" exists in the context of a large mythology of transformations, some of them arbitrary, capricious, and downright cruel. In the original legend, we aren't asked to examine the statue's viewpoint, of course; and one of the great traditions of postmodern literature is to revisit well-known stories from the perspective of marginalized characters (often women, though consider Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). Modi's essay fits into that tradition. Though she succeeds in distancing us from Pygmalion's perspective, she puts nothing in its place.

The references to body image and (in the added subplot with Pygmalion's friends) men's social objectification of women are modern touches; but what if the sculptor were not old, ugly, and ill-kempt, but young, handsome, and well-groomed? Would his actions be any more justifiable, according to the modern, gender-blind ideology Modi asks us to apply to Pygmalion? In A Doll House, would Nora be as interesting a character if she left Torvald because she suddenly realized that all along he was a disgusting old letcher?

Far more interesting to me are the multiply-branching storylines of Emily Short's "Galatea" a text-based computer game in which you play an art critic examining the statue. Short's version of Galatea becomes sentient before she comes to life -- that is, she was aware of her creator's actions while she was still a statue; and, when asked, she will describe and reflect on her experiences in a very engaging way.

LBV-1806-20 may have formed in what Eikenberry called "violent, triggered star formation." In the process, a huge, massive star reaches the end of its lifespan and explodes in an intense supernova. The shockwave from that supernova then hits a young star just as its forming, compressing gas around it quickly -- over a period of 100,000 years or so -- at forces greater than the star is able to blow off on its own. --Biggest, Brightest Star Puzzles Astronomers (Space.com)

Plenty of space news lately, what with new photos from Mars, a comet-chasing probe, and the leak on the International Space Station.

Well, That was Unexpected.Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I showed my five-year-old son the two recent blog entries in which he features (Johnstown Flood and The Meatball), and to my surprise he spent the next 40 minutes dictating responses to all the comments left by readers. It was interesting watching his composition process... the sentences are choppy not because he speaks in choppy sentences, but because he has to pause in order for me to type what he says.

Anyway, now that I know how detailed and occasionally off-topic his responses are, I'll try to encourage him to dictate private e-mails instead -- those of you who aren't parents can probably only take so much of this unbridled cuteness. Well, according to Peter, it's time to play Legos now, so bye.

At first some girls were intimidated by the power drills, but soon they were vying for access to them.... After building their own siege engine -- a medieval invention to catapult objects -- they launched the head of a Barbie doll, to mimic the practice of launching diseased corpses over castle walls, to introduce disease among the besieged. Nestling Barbie'shead in a sling, they tugged a rope, released a lever, and launched the doll'shead in an arc across the college lawn.

[...]

African American students did not study together; they worked hard, but they strictly separated their social and intellectual lives. Chinese students formed study groups and had study mates. Their ability to form communities and to collaborate was a key to their success.

[...]

Many gifted girls do not achieve their own goals because their resourcefulness and eagerness to please causes them to compromise their goals many times in the course of their development. They sabotage themselves by taking less challenging coursework than they need, by stopping out of education or career plans, or by losing sight of their goals entirely?and often never aspire to goals commensurate with their abilities. Their strong priorities for maintaining relationships rather than achieving their own goals makes it inevitable that gifted women achieve less than gifted men....

[...]

On the reservation, an accountant is a friendly, caring person who often makes ?house calls? and who helps the family fill out difficult tax forms resulting in much-needed refunds. A social worker, on the other hand, is someone who takes your children away.

Selections from the book by Pat McNees

--New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering (4MB PDF) (National Science Foundation)

A PDF file. It took me ten times as long as usual to blog this entry, mostly because I was trying to figure out how to tell Google to offer me an HTML version of the whole file, rather than just the intro. (It's always a bad sign when a webmaster splits up a PDF into multiple small files; someone is clueful enough to recognize when the file is too large, but they don't think enough of usability issues to make the text available in another format.) No luck.

When I tried to download the PDF version of the intro, that window froze up for about 5 miutes. I have about six other windows open right now, so I didn't notice when Adobe popped up a window asking me whether I wanted to check for an update to their PDF viewer. When I kept trying to click on the tab to go back to the window where I thought the file was going to appear, I got nothing. So it was back to Google, where I found the author's home page, where I found the above selections.

So, I won't be trying to blog another PDF document from home anytime soon. Fie on PDF!

Rosemary suggested the Washington Post article "Why Janie Can't Engineer: Raising Girls to Succeed," which is a more accessible version of the same content, but which will soon vanish behind WashPost's pay-only firewall. But the article: "A college course on how to take apart a computer and put it back together attracted 300 male students and no young women -- until the announcement describing the course changed, to say that the computers they worked on would later be given to needy schools. Then the women signed up." Very interesting.

My sister let herself into my hotel room and sat on the edge of my bed. I said: "This was awful. I threw up in front of two members of the search committee." Her response was kind and gentle: "It could have been worse. You could have thrown up on two members of the search committee." --Lisa Ann Gosed --A Galling Interview (Chronicle)

RSF counted 42 journalists slain in 2003, while CPJ concluded in a separate report that the total death toll was 36. Both groups said the toll was about twice as high as in 2002 and that the war in Iraq was the primary reason for the increase. --Jim Lobe

--2003 Bad Year for Press Freedom  (Common Dreams)

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

Notwithstanding all his efforts, the only semblance of a revolt of the poor is the antimodern Islamic tide, which from the Marxist point of view floats in a medieval dream. With us he seemed pathetically hungry for some kind of human contact. Brilliant as he is, spirited and resourceful as his people are, his endless rule seemed like some powerful vine wrapping its roots around the country and while defending it from the elements choking its natural growth. And his own as well. Ideology aside, he apparently maintains the illusions that structured his political successes even if they never had very much truth in them; to this day, as one example, he speaks of Gorbachev's dissolution of the Soviet Union as unnecessary, "a mistake." --Arthur Miller --A Visit with Castro (The Nation)

The American playwright reflects on his recent visit with the Cuban dictator.

He never learned to use the MLA citation method, but today he's a successful engineer who supports the local arts council. | What counts as intelligence depends almost entirely on context. I find that my students are as smart, diligent, and idealistic as they have always been -- as I was. But what they know, as a generation, is inevitably different from what my profession defines as knowledge. --Thomas H. Benton --When Our Students Don't Respect Us (Chronicle)

Benton offers a good analysis of the professorial ritual of lamenting the inadequacies of our students. I confess I've done my share of this, just as when I was a student I lamented the self-centeredness and unavailability of my professors. But I've also done my share of defending the strengths of my students; I have yet to encounter a student who absolutely *cannot* switch into a more formal mode when required. (The student who inappropriately uses smileys or IM acronyms has usually mistaken the assignment for something much less formal.)

When I used to teach technical writing to engineering students, I quickly realized that by teaching basic writing skills (or, in the case of the many international students, basic English skills), I had the opportunity to contribute something to people who would one day design the highways and bridges and airplanes that I and my family would use. It was precisely because of their need that I had a job; and in my present position, too, my special skills mean that I can make a difference.

Chipping away at Pygmalion and GalateaJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Pygmalion is a legendary sculptor (whose role as King of Cyprus seems unimportant to most versions of the story) known for carving Galatea, a statue of a woman so beautiful he is no longer interested in real women. Moved by his devotion, the goddess of beauty Aphrodite brings the statue to life, and the artist marries his creation. Since the Greek legends were oral tales, I don't think there's any such thing as a definitive version of the Pygmalion legend. Bulfinch's Mythology is a good source of the main plot details. This legend about an artist has long been popular with artists; a sequence of four paintings by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones presents

1. a solitary artist ignoring real women and contemporary statues,
2. attracted to the creation that sits on the pedestal where he carved it,
3. embracing the newly living statue, and finally
4. kneeling before her.

I notice that only the third and fourth images in the series seem to be readily available online in poster form. (The images are from ABC Gallery, which unfortunately inverts the order of the third and fourth images.)

By contrast, a picture by Jean-Léon Gérome has Pygmalion embracing Galatea's upper body while the rest of her is still stone. What seems to be another angle on the same scene shows Pygmalion lunging forward, his cloak trailing out behind him, while most of her body is still stone (I've heard of chiseled abs, but this is ridiculous! Yuk, yuk! Sorry.)

The cynical and brilliant George Bernard Shaw took on the pretensions of the upperclass with his play Pygmalion, which, stripped of its rather bleak and realistic ending (Higgins is insufferably smug, and really does deserve his solitude) was later the inspiration for the high school musical standard My Fair Lady. The artwork for the original show features Higgins as a puppeteer, pulling the strings on Eliza, and up in the clouds a twinkly-eyed God is pulling strings on Higgins.

It takes the intervention of a goddess to turn Pygmalion's obsession with a particular artifact into a real relationship. Since classical goddesses don't seem to intervene from Mt. Olympus anymore these days, we're left with what we've got: computers. In the 80s, I recall seeing ads for some dumb movie in which teen geeks hook a Barbie doll up to a computer and it somehow comes to life as whatever completely interchangeable supermodel was selling a lot of magazines that year. As a geek teenager during the 80s, I was presumably part of the target audience for that film, but now I can't even be bothered to Google for its title. The mad professor of the German silent film Metropolis performs a similar transition, turning a metallic Robot-demon into a life-like simulation of a woman (though she's still a Robot).

I can't help but think of "Barry," the fellow who hit blithely on a chatbot over a period of several days, as recorded by Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. Barry's behavior was apparently so predictable that the program kept feeding him answers that generated responses that the program was equipped to understand; I think Turkle notes that Julia didn't so much as pass an intelligence test, but rather Barry failed one. (For a brief reference to the Barry/Julie exchange, see the review, "The Bewitching Miss Julia".) Julia the chatbot was a personality with no body, Galatea was a body with no personality. We can't compare poor Barry to Pygmalion; but I bet there's a postmodern conference paper in looking at a sister AI program, Alice, and "her" relationship with her creator, the brilliant but star-cross'd Richard Wallace.

I can't remember whether I had already decided to use the Pygmalion legend when I came across a discussion of computer simulation, art and puritanism by hypertext publisher and software designer Mark Bernstein. He used software called Poser to create a 3D model of a "The Greek Slave," a famous 19th-Century sculpture. (By the way, U.Va's resources on "The Greek Slave" are worth a visit. The site features an engraving of the statute in its exhibit context, as well as contemporary responses to it.)

Bernstein notes that in translating the statue to a 3D model (or, more accurately, a 2D snapshot of a 3D model) he had to work with the placement of the subject's hand in order to avoid the appearance of obscenity. I don't work with visual images that much, so my reaction is hardly scholarly. Once Bernstein characterized his creation as possibly obscene, it is hard for me to think of it as otherwise. Maybe simply seeing a digitally-generated nude body was creepy enough for me -- it hardly matters what gesture her hands were making.

I'm more conscious of the effort it takes to read between the lines of an ostensibly simple text, like the lyrics to "Paper Doll". Arthur Miller uses the song in The View from the Bridge, a play about a man's inability to cope with his own lust for his sexually-blossoming niece. "I'd rather have a paper doll that I could call my own/Than have a fickle-minded real live girl." Is this a veiled reference to pornography? I never thought of that before, but it's possible.

I don't know whether pornography seriously affected the development of photography and cinema; it's more likely that censorship, production codes and rating systems were the dominant factor, but the legality and economics of internet pornography are hard to ignore. I found over 2000 references to "pornography" in Wired. (The hits to my site will probably increase now that I've used "pornography" three times in one blog entry.)

Our brains permit us to predict the outcome of our actions, so that we don't have to rely on instinct or learned knowledge when faced with new situations. The imagination is an important tool for survival; and we all know the healing, restorative power of fantasy (and I don't just mean the sword-and-sorcery pulp variety; "Reality TV", spectator sports, and highbrow literature also cater to our need for fantasy). But imagination is not enough; we share our fantasies (and purge our fears) by creating artifacts, using a medium of some sort. By playing with his own digital paper doll, and talking about his experiences, Mark is probably on the right track. When Torill visited Seton Hill, she noted that every new medium has raised the same warning cries -- this is too realistic, it will overwhelm the senses, it will confuse the delicate and vulnerable in our society. I don't see virtual friends taking the place of real friends anytime soon. But if you look at it from the other angle, maybe our artistic creations will be given something closer to "life" through the assistance of digital authoring packages, synthesized speech, and chatbot scripts. We're very good at imagining we have relationships with fictional characters, if the execution is good enough; and the computer is just one more medium.

At any rate, as a culture, I think we'll learn to adapt to the way digitally altered images affect our minds, but if we don't develop the habit of critiquing the effect that various media have upon our psychology, our aesthetics, and our ethics, then the marketers and demagogues who control the media will be our masters. Perhaps the only solution is to put more sophisticated media creation tools into the hands of more members of the general public; democratize the huge power of digital manipulation, so that it is easier for all of us to put our imagination in forms.

I don't know when I'll have the time to write another massive blog entry like this, but it has been an enjoyable way for me to start collecting my thoughts about the Media Aesthetics course I'll start teaching next week.

The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion. --Michael Crichton --Aliens Cause Global Warming (Crichton Official Website)

SETI is the "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence" project. A screen-saver popular among uber-geeks actually gives your computer calculations to do in order to help out the whole SETI program. The "Drake equation" is a way of figuring out, out of all the stars where planets might exist, where those planets might support intelligent life, where those life forms might attempt to communicate with outsiders, and where those signals might actually have been broadcast at precisely the time necessary for us to be able to receive them now. I have a vivid memory of Carl Sagan introducing this equation in the classic PBS series "Cosmos." (See a few of my thoughts on religion and Sagan's novel "Contact".)

Since we have no meaningful way to supply numbers for most or all of these variables, Crichton calls this guesswork "prejudice."

From time to time I blog about how the news media accepts unquestioningly the "fact" that global warming is caused by human activity, and I confess to feeling a bit smug each time I see a "mistaken" story.

But I've got to be honest with myself. I hate the smell of cigarette smoke, and rejoice in every law that makes it easier for me to breathe fresh air. Crichton gives an interesting account of how the EPA used "junk science" to "prove" that second-hand smoke causes cancer. And it's really easy for me to want to pat the anti-smoking activists on the back for their cleverness.

If the pro-smokers are so tobacco-addled that they can't see how yucky their habit is, and if it will take a little bit of scientific hocus-pocus to reduce the effect their nasty habit has on my nose, then bravo! If it's true that the science that supports smoking bans is no better than the science that supports global warming doomsday scenarios, then I'm employing a double standard, calling junk science duckspeak (George Orwell's term for an utterance which, when spoken by a supporter, is true and just and good, but when spoken by an opponent, is false and wrong and bad.) (And, of course, all this presumes that what Crichton and others call junk science really is junk. Since I'm not a scientist, I have to accept -- on faith -- the word of experts. I've been following the global warming/population bomb meme complex for long enough that I can see where journalists are oversimplifying or selectively reporting in order to reinforce a particular bias; I am not as informed about smoking issues (nor, to be honest, do I plan to investigate, since I'm personally in favor of the current anti-smoking trend).

An older link, popular now thanks to the skeptics at Arts & Letters Daily.

Johnstown Flood
Johnstown Flood ReflectionsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

This afternoon, I took my son to our local Borders for a talk on the Johnstown Flood documentary. The flood was caused by the 1889 collapse of a dam originally built for Pennsylvania's canal system, then abandoned when rails came along. The presenter, Richard Burkert, a museum director whose commentary is included on the DVD (which is narrated by Richard Dreyfuss), gave a good background on the geography, economics, and social layout of the region.

The site became a hunting club for the likes of Andrew Carnegie and other Pittsburgh-area steel magnates; when the dam collapsed, a 90-foot wall of water, pushing a thundering wall of rubble, huge trees, and even locomotives, tore down a narrow valley. A young engineer who had been brought to the site for some unrelated work noticed the problem with the dam, and shortly before the collapse (hastened by record rains) telegraphed the city (the local telephone operator started calling the three dozen or so telephone subscribers), then mounted a horse to warn the people, Paul-Revere-style. Although the people had several hours warning, they were already flooded and thus many couldn't escape.

I'd say about 100 people turned out; based on the conversations I overheard before the talk began and the questions asked, I'd say the crowd was full of local history buffs and/or people with connections to Johnstown. Other than a poster version of the DVD cover, there were no visuals at the presentation -- not even clips of the DVD, which I found disappointing for Peter's sake. (He sat pretty still, though he lost interest after about 25 minutes and started playing with my PDA. His age was about a tenth of the average age of the audience members, so he did remarkably well.)

When I taught advanced technical writing, I frequently used risk management examples, so I was hoping for a bit more about the engineering involved. And while the presenter mentioned that the circumstances generated a lot of folklore surrounding the Johnstown flood incident, he didn't relate any of those folk stories in any depth. So I was left feeling unsatisfied in both the technical and humanities areas. At times, Burkert seemed to be enjoying the carnage too much. I can understand his excitement over the subject matter, but I couldn't help thinking of John Carpenter clutching his little statue and shouting "I am the kind of the world!" and reveling in the personal fame and fortune that the Titanic disaster eventually brought him.

Burkert described the event as America's largest one-day loss of civilian lives before 9/11, and said that the extensive media coverage and psychological impact was comparable. (Of course, I wanted to hear a little more about that, but Peter wanted to play with the Thomas the Tank Engine trains.)

An article in the local paper previews the Burkert talk. I'm assuming that the Johnstown Flood Museum website uses Flash or some other multimedia application; I've installed a utility to disable those bells & whistles because I find the long download times extremely disruptive. Those sites who know how to design good content invariably have a plain HTML introduction and a button that invites you to click on a multimedia presentation; if the plain HTML introduction looks worthwhile, I disable the Flash-killing feature and reload the page. But if not, I don't bother.

From email messages and front-page news in the New York Times to published books and magazine articles, the 10 ouchies listed here crop up everywhere. They're so pernicious that even respected Internet columnists are not immune. | The list also could be called, "10 COMMON PROBLEMS THAT DISMISS YOU AS AN AMATEUR," because these mistakes are obvious to literary agents and editors, who may start wording their decline letter by page 5. What a tragedy that would be. --Pat Holt

--10 Mistakes Writers Don't See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do)  (Holt Uncensored)

Mostly geared towards fiction writers. Some of the tips are a bit too broad; number 8, "awkward phrasing," isn't that helpful. Still, I appreciate this glimpse into the mind of a literary editor.

From pictograms to pixel fonts, written language has evolved over time, changing in response to communication methods and printing technology. This overview is presented as an introduction to the origins, evolution, and applications of modern letterforms. --The Evolution of Type (Medium Bold)

The ubiquity of the word processor has changed what it means to write. I still hear professors talk about "note cards," which were part of the writing process taught to me when I was in high school. The idea, of course, was that you could rearrange your note cards during the early drafting process, so that you would have some idea of the organization of your ideas before you actually started writing. For those of you born in the last 25 or so years, yes indeed, we actually wrote our papers out by hand, and then when we revised them we had to write them over again. We had a motivation to cut deadwood, since we could get the draft finished faster if we didn't copy that whole wordy opening paragraph and instead just copied the one sentence that actually introduced the subject we were really going to write about.

I'm not advocating that students should go back to the process of hand-writing their papers; instead, I'm simply noting that today's most experienced teachers learned to write in a very different way. I started word-processing some of my school assignments in middle school, around 1980 (although some of my teachers were refusing dot-matrix printouts). I have a great, satisfying sensory memory of picking up a stack of fan-folded paper, tearing off the rows of holes on the outer edges, and then separating the pages. I never bothered to tear apart all those perforations unless the printout was intended for someone else to read, and to this day I associate tearing perforated paper with that "job well done" feeling. When I was an undergrad at U.Va., for major assignments I would walk my disk to the laser printers in the computer lab (my favorite was a few steps from Cabell Hall at the other end of the Central Grounds from the Rotunda).

Since it is now push-button easy to get high-quality copies of drafts that are in progress, I wonder how much that affects the ability of today's students to recognize when they have put sufficient work into a paper. In medieval times, if you wanted about 20 pages to write on, you had to kill a sheep, skin it, and tan the hide (I recall the process has something to do with urine). So all writing that was produced was precious. That's taking it a bit too far, of course -- to make a mistake was costly, in terms of both time and resources, which undoubtedly affected the activities of a scribe (whose main job was to copy faithfully and accurately the words that somebody else had composed).

Jerz Course Books -- Spring 2004Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For those who are interested, here are links to the required purchase books for my classes; in a few days I'll post the full syllabi:

• Seminar in Thinking and Writing II (no new books)
• EL 150: Introduction to Literary Study
  
• EL 267: American Literature 1915-Present
  
• EL 309: Advanced Study in Literature -- Media Aesthetics

Update: Whoops, I posted those links hastily and got called away before I could check them. They should all work now.

This paper addresses the evolution of metaphors for the Internet and shows how they have constrained and determined the development of cyberlaw. | Within the law, metaphors mold the framework of discourse, determining the scope of appropriate questions about and answers to various social and legal problems. Courts and commentators employ metaphors as heuristics to generate hypotheses about the application of law to novel, unexplored domains. Metaphors structure the way lawyers conceptualize legal events, as they infiltrate, consciously and unconsciously, legal discourse.... Three metaphors in particular will be examined: the information superhighway, cyberspace, and the Internet as "real" space. --Cohen and Blavin --Gore, Gibson, and Goldsmith: The Evolution of Internet Metaphors in Law and Commentary  (Harvard Journal of Law and Technology)

Looks like a good find, via Clancy on Kairosnews. The actual article is, unfortunately, a PDF document, so I'm blogging it until I can get to the office in a few days.

Instead of being dollars or euros or kroner, links seem a lot more like the major prison currency, cigarettes, in the hands of a heavy smoker who cares more about smoking than about any other prison commodity. First of all, you can do something with them; as an afterthought, you also use them to get more PageRank if you like. --Nick Montfort --Linky Lucre (Grand Text Auto)

Nick's reading of Jill Walker's paper Links and Power comes up with some interesting observations. I've often thought of blogroll-hunting as a kind of game (one which I keep telling myself I shouldn't play so often). My goal is not so much to encourage people to link to my blog, but rather to find -- as soon as possible -- the links that other people post. For instance, Eric Mayer was poking through lists of weblogs and recognized my name from the interactive fiction community; I found his blog entry a few hours after he posted it. This kind of link-hunting keeps my online research muscles limbered up, and it's something I can do in a twenty-minute time window (while waiting for the kids to go to sleep or when a student doesn't show up for an office visit).

While my link-collecting activity is, from one perspective, no more meaningful than manipuliting blobs of light in the shape of spaceships or warriors on a video screen, or passively watching blobs of light reproducing the motions of professional atheletes thousands of miles away, my particular collection of links represents my memory (how many times have you blogged something just so you'd remember it?), and the aggregation proceeds according to a set of criteria that I may not always articulate (Mike Arnzen has noted a recent explosion of blogs relating to games, but that seemed perfectly natural to me since I've just bumped a few game-related projects higher in my priority list). I'm not sure whether eating dots in a maze or watching professional athletes creates anything of even the slightest value to others; but, as Nick points out, "Google likes blogs - but people like blogs, too! Google likes blogs for all the right reasons."

I remember a short story about a future society in which people are screened for intelligence in a sort of maze where they live their whole lives and try to attach meaning to the events that occur within the maze. One such event involves the collection of metal discs that occasionally appear on the walls. People pry these disks off, making their fingernails bloody (though one wonders why they wouldn't just use one of their discs to pry off the other disks...). These discs serve no purpose other than being collected; I forget what the other meaningless activities are, but robot caretakers encourage the humans in all their activities but one. There is one room that humans are told to avoid; the protagonist, whose name I rember is Jon, ignores the warnings and enters the room, which I think contains nothing more than a big question mark. (I wish I could find that story again. I must have read it in the 80s.)

Anyway, the collection of links on a web page is not as meaningless as the collection of ornamental metal discs, since I use other people's links to find information, people who share my interests, and, yes I admit it, sources of good links.