February 2004 Archive Page

Dog Canto

        Outside... il conformista
                walk milkbone
                                        roll-over
                                        il conformista
        Sit! sit!
                il conformista
        Paw! paw!
                il conformista
                                roll-over il conformista...
        Good doggy.
        Good good doggy.
                                Fidelius.

Brian Stefans --Il Conformista (Poem for a Dog) (Free Space Comix: The Blog)

A poem that uses only words that a (particular) dog understands. Found via GrandTextAuto.

The ability of players to interact with games has fundamentally changed them, Lowood said. Computer games, once seen as commercial products or a one-way communication between designer and player, are now seen as a much more open kind of medium that people can contribute to in other ways, he said. "So much of the content of a game is now generated by players. Games have become a platform that people can use creatively. As a medium, computer games offer many different opportunities for people to express themselves -- including artistic expression and political expression." -- Barbara Palmer --Computer games under sociological microscope in Cantor exhibit  (Stanford University)

I've followed Henry Lowood's work from afar -- his exhibit sounds fantastic. Wish I could see it.

Most non-arcade games that retain a rabid fan base years after they've become technically obsolote fall into one of two categories. They have a obsessively complex world that's been built up around them (Nethack, say, or tabletop roleplaying games), or they have a simple rule set with much greater depth in the gameplay and strategy than you'd expect on first glance (games like M.U.L.E., or the boardgames that many of my friends adore). Text adventure games don't really fit either of these categories, quite. As a classic piece of criticism and theory puts it, their goal is to avoid crimes against mimesis. They are telling a story (with puzzles, most likely), and it is the goal of the author to never once induce the player to think about the artifice and contraints of the system used to tell it.

A new type of game has sprung up in the past few years. Call it unfiction or alternative reality gaming -- the idea is that a narrative is strung together on the Internet (and possibly even to a limited extent in the physical world) which participants can unpack using exactly the same research tools and conspiracy-minded obsession over detail that they would for a real-life mystery.

-- Steve Cook --Interactive Fictions (Snarkout)

A usefully-linked summary of the history of interactive fiction, including the current IF revival.

BTW, the winners of the 2003 XYZZY Awards have been announced.

At Home

What do the marketing droids think the audience that comes to see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" will want to spend money on? What previews will I have to sit through?

I stayed home with the kids while my wife went to see an afternoon showing. Soon it will be my turn. She suggests I go early, to get a good seat. I charge up my PDA before I go.

In the Lobby

The few benches in the lobby are occupied by pods of teens on this Friday night. The line for The Passion is obvious -- few boxes of popcorn or JuJubes are being consumed there. People in this line aren't just hanging out. They look older than your typical movie crowd, though the only movies I've seen in theatres for years have been Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, so maybe I'm just used to seeing younger crowds. Up ahead, a kid with spiked hair and multiple ear piercings chats with a couple in their thirties; another kid has a baseball cap, but is wearing it with the brim forwards -- a rare sight these days.

A table off to one side has a display sponsored by the mall's Christian store. I can pick up a free Gospel of John if I want to know, "What is Truth?" My ticket stub is worth $8 off the soundtrack to The Passion.

The Catholic tradition has a long history of putting special devotional emphasis on the physical sufferings endured by a very human Christ. The sorrowful mysteries of the rosary and the narrative content of the Stations of the Cross are contemporary examples. In the middle ages, the faithful were encouraged to meditate upon artistic interpretations of the events leading up to the crucifixion; these devotions, which nurtured a vivid religious imagination, included narrative material that is not scriptural, such as the miraculous appearance of the image appearing on Veronica's cloth when she wiped Christ's face.

Still in the Lobby

While most media attention has focused on the movie's alleged anti-semitism (a charge dismissed by Maia Morgenstern, the Jewish actress who plays Mary), I've been personally more interested in the way some Protestant churches are responding to what may be their first real encounter with this particular tradition in Catholic devotion.

Informed by a version of the Bible that presents a prohibition against the making of graven images as one of the Ten Commandments (the Bible doesn't actually number the commandments individually; what is in the King James Bible a stand-alone prohibition of the making of images under any circumstances is considered by Catholics to be a continuation of the first commandment, a warning against the worship of false gods).

The Catholic theological emphasis on the Body of Christ leads to the artistic attention paid to the Crucifixion. Note to self: before posting to blog, copy and paste something here about Affective Piety.

Religious devotion which encourages the faithful to meditate deeply upon the physical and emotional sufferings of holy figures is called "affective piety." ... In their private chambers, using a picture, a statue, or spoken prayers to feed their spiritual imagination, the devout entered into the suffering of Christ, a martyr or some other holy figure with a psychological totality that we today would probably describe as a very extreme form of method acting.

Many modern Christians may be tempted to dismiss or ridicule such devotional practices, yet these same critics may have no problem with the idea of responding with powerful emotion to contemporary religious music or extemporaneous spoken prayer. Meanwhile secular culture provides many opportunities for people to cry over the imaginary troubles of soap opera characters, or to cheer or curse a televised sporting event.

-- "Religious, Political, Economic and Artistic Contexts of the York Corpus Christi Play"

Protestant churches emphasize the Word of God, and prefer their artwork to be more cheerful -- a cross in a Protestant church represents the Resurrection - Christ is no longer on the cross. The Biblical emphasis placed upon Mary in the Passion narrative has also been an historically sore spot. I'm curious as to how Gibson will use Mary in this film.

The lobby is packed now, and the noise level suggests that whatever somberness I detected when I first got here is gone. A forward push begins -- people who have been facing every which way and milling about all take a half step towards the bowtie-wearing ticket kid. But according to flashing overhead signs, all the other shows that start at 9:30 (in two minutes) are seating now , but we are asked to remain n the lobby.

Remember, everyone, the last shall be first. We wait -- locked together in a kind of gel that oozes forwards.

I haven't gotten around to cutting me hair in several months... but as I look at the shaggy manes and thick eyeglass frames on the ushers I have to wonder.... is 70s hair back?

In the Theatre

The first preview is a spoof of Caddyshack that turns out to be a American Express commercial. The audience laughs.

Next is a Coke commercial with a racecar theme.

Next is the movie chain'scomputer-animated ?branding? intro.

At 9:45 is the touchy-feely "don't download movies because you'll hurt a stunt guy's feeling" promo.

And the movie previews begin. Yawn.

The historical horse-race adventure Hidalgo.

Robert Redford as the kidnapped half of an older couple in The Clearing.

It's 9:51 now. Patience is a virtue, but this sucks.

Two Brothers (an animal adventure).

Miracle (the Disney movie about the US Olympics hockey team, back when the Russians were the Evil Empire).

Madison (something about boat racing in a blue-collar town).

Okay, so that's sports, old love in a pinch, heartwarming animal adventure, more sports, and more sports. That's how Hollywood is marketing to the audience for The Passion. All the promos try to be intense (really, how intense can a heartwarming movie about brotherly love in animals be?), but they appear to be marketing The Passion as an action film. Go figure.

9:57

After 27 minutes of what I didn't pay to see, what I paid to see starts.

I wrote this on my PDA on Friday, Feb 27, but didn't get it online until after midnight. I'll blog about the movie itself soon...

Let's assume that you have a brilliant Idea. Let's say a sitcom about a group of different people living under the same roof. Or a story about a police unit who dedicate their lives to solving crimes. Or maybe some other equally original idea that demonstrates how creative and innovative sort of a person you are.

Now, let's continue by assuming that you'd want to make it as a virtual series with a staff of writers and producers and you want to release scripts in regular intervals.

This is all very nice and all, but you might not have an idea as to how to do it. Well, this is where I tell you one way of doing it. --T. Henrik Anttonen
--A Beginners Guide to Starting Virtual Series (Voice Over)

An interesting article about organizing a team of writers to produce scripts for a non-existent TV series. Writing is hard work; some of those who wanted to do it for fun gave up when they looked at the schedule. But whether you are hoping to hone your skills for a shot at a professional job, or you simply have a passion for using words to create, an exercise like this would be a tremendous experience.

I used to participate in a collaborative epistolatory science fiction epic, at the suggestion of my high school friend Gilbert Stack. We started off writing letters to each other in-character, but I started supplying one- or two-page fictional treatments to contextualize the letters (sometimes showing what the character chose NOT to put in the letter), and soon some of us were writing mock newspapers and scripts. Steve Spishak (a Medievalist and the drummer for the cheesy 80s cover band "Gonzo's Nose") wrote an entry in blank verse... I still remember one of the lines... "This churlish syntax burns my English tongue" (spoken as a blank verse aside, but referring to an unpleasant prose interaction with a minor character). Another friend, Christine Heath, and my brother, John Jerz, were also regular contributors. I also remember contributions from Chris Park, Carol Johnson, Sarah McLeod... This was in the late 80s, and we did it all through snail mail. I still have several thick 3-ring binders, and I keep telling myself that some day I'll turn my corner of that universe into an interactive fiction game.

While our interactive literary work doesn't quite have the style of existing as tattoos or stickers, it really helped focus my writing energies in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do if I were merely writing for myself, without any sense of an audience or people who were sometimes writing against what I wanted to happen in our shared fictional universe. I kept an encyclopedia of technology and culture and a timeline; I think someone else created a map showing travel routes and distances. God, was I a geek... but I really loved it. My old files simply called this "MAIL Game."

The point of my nostalgic trip: I am so glad that, when I was young and frequently bored, I spent enough time away from the TV and the joystick to create something that meant something to me and my friends. I wouldn't have the time to start something like that today. Of course, I write all the time, in my blog, in e-mail, in the margins of student papers... but I've been feeling the draw of creative writing again. I'm kicking around an idea for a somewhat quirky academic paper, but I'm also hoping that I'll get back into writing interactive fiction.

Games Galore

Two interesting Slashdot threads... one is "Gaming Academia Gets More Mainstream Press", a response to the recent NY Times article on the upcoming Princeton conference, and another is discussion of Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century, a beautiful nine-part article on interactive fiction, featuring interviews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew Plotkin, Adam Cadre, and IF Competition winners Dan Rapivinto & Star Foster.

Update: I just noticed that The Onion has a favorable review of Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. (The link will expire soon.)

We and our colleagues at The Princeton Review have spent many years training students to take the SAT II, and have carefully analyzed the College Board's essay-grading criteria. To receive a high score a student should write a long essay of three or more paragraphs, with each paragraph containing topic and concluding sentences and at least one sentence that includes the words "for example." Whenever possible the student should use polysyllabic words where shorter, clearer words would suffice. The SAT essay will not be a place to take rhetorical chances. Flair will win no points; the highest-scoring essays will be earnest, long-winded, and predictable.

To illustrate how the essays on the "new" SAT will be scored, The Princeton Review has composed some typical essay questions, provided answers from several well-known authors, and applied the College Board's grading criteria to their writing. --John Katzman, Andy Lutz and Erik Olson --Would Shakespeare Get Into Swarthmore?  (The Atlantic)

How would Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein, and The Unabomber fare on the essay portion of the new SAT? The authors want to make the point that "real" writing is nothing like the writing that the SAT encourages. Fair enough -- but if you think the SAT is designed to test who is a great Elizabethan dramatist, then you are already confused.

In defense of the SAT (I can hardly believe I just wrote that), only Shakespeare's example could be considered self-contained, but it is not a timed academic essay, so naturally it fails when you apply the wrong rubric to it. All the others appear to be excerpts from longer works. Kaczynski's piece began as a student paper; lacking formal training and peer-review, he continued to write at the student level, so it is little surprise that his excerpt fares well.

"Games are big, big objects," said Barry Atkins, who teaches in the English department at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. "The days when you could play a couple of hours of Myst and write about it are over." | Dr. Atkins admitted that he didn't finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book, "More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form," (Manchester University Press), and only later realized he was two minutes from the shocking plot reversal at the end when he stopped. "I am very nervous that I got it wrong," he said. --Michael Erard --The Ivy-Covered Console (New York Times)

I knew this article was coming because the author e-mailed me late Tuesday in order to ask whether I knew anything more about Mary Ann Buckles, who wrote her 1985 Ph.D. thesis on "Adventure." (I tried tracking her down a few years ago, and found someone who thought she might be a relative, but I didn't go further than that.)

This is an excellent article... the author notes that Espen Aarseth, whose book Cybertext is a seminal work in studying games as games (rather than as kinds of literature or film) is only 38. Erard really manages to capture the newness and multidisciplinarity of the field with the following description of next week's Princeton conference ("Form, Culture and Video Game Criticism"):

A lawyer, a journalist, a composer, two professors, two lecturers and six graduate students will present papers with titles like "Musical Byproducts of Atari 2600 Games" and "But Our Princess Is in Another Castle: Towards a 'Close-Playing' of Super Mario Brothers."

It's very exciting to be part of such a young field (though I count three professors on the videogame conference program, not two).

My job description, as a generalist at a small liberal arts school, rather than a specialist at a research institution, simply doesn't leave room for the kind of intense research that I was able to do as a grad student (oh, those 16-hour days in the library). My dean didn't actually burst out laughing when I mentioned a desire to get a course release so I could play more computer games, or funding to purchase a game console and some of the latest titles -- which would, of course, be part of the new media lab, and which I would let students check out, for academic use. ;)

I used to do a much better job keeping up with interactive fiction, but I find that this year I'm so busy that I'm waiting for the XYZZY Awards to be announced, so that I can catch up on the winners I haven't played yet. Fortunately I found CliFrotz, which lets me play Z-machine games on my new PDA, so I've been working on some of the multiply-nominated games already.

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige today [Feb. 23] issued the following apology for his remarks about the NEA.

"It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA's Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind's historic education reforms. I also said, as I have repeatedly, that our nation's teachers, who have dedicated their lives to service in the classroom, are the real soldiers of democracy, whereas the NEA's high-priced Washington lobbyists have made no secret that they will fight against bringing real, rock-solid improvements in the way we educate all our children regardless of skin color, accent or where they live. But, as one who grew up on the receiving end of insensitive remarks, I should have chosen my words better."

--Secretary Paige Issues Apology for Comment about NEA (US Department of Education)

A few days ago, the Drudge Report's coverage of this story (about a Bush official calling the leaders of a large teachers' union "terrorists") featured an item noting that potential Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry once called Texas Republicans "legislative terrorists." It's not hard to find examples of politicians going overboard with their metaphors, but Kerry's attack on fellow politicians was just business as usual; for the Bush appointee to pick on underpaid and overworked teachers seems downright mean. Kerry would be wise to stay out of this fray, because it's already another black eye for Bush.

I'm actually blogging this mostly because of the rhetoric involved.

While Paige finally admits he "should have chosen [his] words better," he only does so after bringing our attention to the "the obstructionist scare tactics" the NEA's leaders have brought against the "historic reforms" proposed by the Bush administration. Paige also calls attention to his own racial and cultural background -- which complicates issues for those who prefer their enemies in the White House to be uniformly white, male, privileged, and conservative. Paige's statement tries to direct the attack at the NEA leadership, not the millions of (voting) members who compose the NEA -- but I'm sure the NEA's leaders aren't going to throw up their arms and say, "The jig is up -- Paige has discovered that we don't really have the interests of students or rank-and-file NEA members in mind when we visit Washington." The road leads ever on.

Hint to Paige and anybody else who has ever had to do damage control: if you want to look sincere while apologizing, a quivering lip and wavering voice is nice, but when you're through with the emoting, don't spend even more time defending yourself and re-phrasing the very attack for which you are supposedly apologizing. I'm reminded of Bill Clinton's 1998 speech in which he admitted that he "misled people, including even my wife," which I thought was an excellent speech until he brought up the investigations into his financial affairs. (Clinton should have taken the high road, and let his supporters continue attacking Ken Starr. But that's a different story.)

I just noticed Mike Arnzen has blogged a bit on the incident over at Pedablogue.

--Netstore USA (opengroup.com)

Buy my book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950... Priced at just $197.70! Outside of the US, that's $216.60, or about a dollar a page! Order now!

Sheesh! At that price, with the royalties I've earned so far, I could buy THREE WHOLE COPIES! Oh, wait, they already charged me for the advance copies I purchased, I guess I could buy just two more copies.

Thanks for the so-disturbing-you-just-have-to-laugh link, Rosemary. (It's much cheaper at Amazon, but if you ask your local university library to buy a copy, they'll be able to get it for less, and more people will get to read it.)

Below the Sinkhole You are about 75 feet into the cave. There is a dim light at the east of the passage. There is a methamphetamine lab here! >EXAMINE LAB Nothing extravagant -- about average for this area. You see some cookware, solvents, and acids. Looks like someone has just finished cooking. >_

--There is a methamphetamine lab here! (Bowling Green Daily News)

OK, for those who don't get it -- this news story about a meth lab found in a cave made me think of the classic game "Colossal Cave Adventure," which I'm researching in prepraration for a conference in a few weeks.

"He had a maturity beyond his age." -- security guard Jason Armstrong --Man dies in 11-storey fall (Ottawa Sun)

The quote above is applied to a university student who accidentally hurled himself over a balcony. The student was an engineering major, who apparently wasn't clear on the concept of momentum, as he charged a balcony railing in order to spit farther than his friends. It's little surprise to learn that alcohol was involved.

The reporter is walking a fine line in writing a story that won't be offensive to grieving relatives, but still highlights the ironies that will probably make this guy a Darwin Award winner.

Part of Maloney's job is to evaluate books on the sleeper list and decide whether they go to the bargain basement sale or get a second chance.

"It's a really hard thing to get rid of a book," Maloney said. "A big, big consideration for us is just space. Our juvenile fiction shelves are packed right now. There comes a time when you have to say 'goodbye."'.... For the 800 hardcover juvenile fiction books on Maloney's list, the odds aren't good. Maloney estimates about 80 percent will wind up downstairs for bargain hunters. --Librarians struggle to let go of lonely books (AP/Mankatopa Free Press)

Ahh! I always thought libraries were like museums. Quick, run to the library you remember from your childhood... somebody, look in Patrick Henry library in Vienna, Va., or the Fairfax County Public Library... are those dog-eared copies of Lester Del Rey's classic science fiction still there? What about Encyclopedia Brown, or the Henry Reed Detective Agency? Or the wonderful books about astronomy, that paint Jupiter with no rings and about 12 moons? Is there still a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which I checked out on one of my first forays from the Juvenile section to the Adult stacks, and is the page still folded down in the section that describes "Typical Dreams"?

According to the article, "Sometimes, all it takes to save a book from being discarded is a single person's desire to read it."

Via Waterloo Library Blog.

Two different things seem to have happened at the same place and time, according to the "spin" placed on two different reports from competing local papers.

Post-Gazette to seek wage concessions (Tribune-Review, reporting on its competition)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is gushing red ink, prompting workers to vote today on wage and benefits concessions designed to save the newspaper from insolvency, union officials said Sunday during a special meeting.

Vote on contract adjustments by PG unions (Post-Gazette, reporting on itself)
Leaders of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's 1,100 unionized employees urged the workers yesterday to approve contract adjustments that would help the company avoid a projected loss of $6.5 million in 2004.A Tale of Two LeadsTrib-Review/Post-Gazette)

Thanks for the links, Jess T.

Interesting comparison of stories... the Post-Gazette competes with the Trib-Review, so according to the Trib it is "gushing red ink". The Post-Gazette, reporting on itself, emphasizes the sacrifices its union employees are willing to make.

Competition is good for the public, because it keeps journalists on their toes and makes them accountable for their little mistakes (I presume that the Post-Gazette, which calls its owners "Block Communications Inc" is probably right, and the Trib, which calls the company "Blade Communications Co." is probably wrong) and biases (such as the Post-Gazette's privileging of the union leaders' plea to the rank-and-file union members).

When I was an undergrad at U.Va., there were two competing daily student papers, the Cavalier Daily (or rather the "Cavalier Five-Day-A-Week-And-Weekly-During-The-Summer) and the University Journal (which was three days a week during my freshman year and gradually worked up to five). A few years after I graduated, I learned the UJ went under, which was really too bad. Reading someone else's version of the story you covered, or seeing the photo someone else took at the same event, is really a great learning experience, even if it is sometimes humbling.

I remember when I used to cover city council meetings and other dry stuff for a local radio station, if three things happened that night and I write radio stories on two of them, no matter what, the next day at noon, the local paper would be out on the stands, and the third thing -- the thing that I didn't cover -- would be in the headlines. Being a very green intern, I was convinced that my news sense was completely wrong -- until the wiser, saner folks at the radio station pointed out that the newspaper was trying to reach the very same audience that listened to our radio station on the way to work in the morning.

Oh, I should note that the city desk editor of the local paper was married to the news director of my radio station; they were extremely professional about their work, and would try to scoop each other all the time. Once I worked hard on a 20-year anniversary story (on the destruction caused by Hurricane Camille), and had produced a half dozen stories, one or two minutes long; they were scheduled to run, one per day, in the week leading up to the actual anniversary. The local paper published a beautiful, in-depth report the weekend before the anniversary, which pretty much exhausted everyone's interest in the subject. Each of my little jobbies looked pathetic and lame, limping along five or six days after everyone had already clipped out the paper's big spread and saved it in their scrapbooks.

Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain....

"My pain when the nurse is changing my bandages is consistently extreme... But during the time I was in VR, I was pretty much unaware that the nurse was even working on my wound. | I mean, at some level I knew she was working on me, but I wasn't thinking about it because I was inside that SnowWorld." -- patient Mike Robinson, in a story by Becky McCall --Real pain dulled in virtual worlds (BBC)

The researchers are also using a simulation of the events of 9/11/2001 to desensitize survivors of the attacks to the trauma they experiencded that day.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I can still taste the beer.

I say this is a whole new kind of tired not because of the physical effects of my hangover. Believe me, that's not new at all. What's new is that I'm tired of this kind of tired. I'm tired of being fuzzy for the first half of each day. I'm tired of feeling like hell and looking out at a class full of students, wondering how I'll be able to pull off a lecture. I'm tired of a routine of drinking that I no longer enjoy, but feel compelled to do anyway. And I'm tired of throwing away my career a pint at a time.

At this point, you're probably thinking that this essay is another self-indulgent litany bred by our current culture of confession. And that's fine. Maybe it is. But there's a point to what I'm saying that bears directly upon the world of academe. --"James Waite" --Hung Over Again (Chronicle)

I don't know what I think about this article... it certainly got my heart pounding, but someone who can write so eloquently about his problem, yet who still feels helpless about it, is probably in some degree of denial.

Seton Hill University doesn't have a reputation as a party school, which is something that attracted me to it... it's hard to do my job when the students come to class hungover or drunk -- and if that does happen here at SHU, the students are discreet enough that it hasn't yet disrupted my classroom.

But this article examines what happens when the professor is the one going through the day in a haze. I personally don't drink; I never did in college because I was too busy, and I don't now because I'm too busy. But I have gone to class sick and sleep-deprived -- sometimes from cleaning up baby vomit (good excuse) and sometimes from becoming obsessed about a software bug (bad excuse). I really miss programming, but I really haven't had time for it at all (especially now that scholarship in both weblogs and game studies has taken off -- there's too much for me to keep up on).

As for the hungover professor, I think some students would jokingly say, "Well, as long as he gives As, that's fine with me," but "Waite" admits his ability to teach is suffering. Hmm... maybe the next time I'm really ill, I'll call in sick. I tell myself that if I cancel a class, both the students and I will have even more stress trying to catch up. And with two small kids at home, it's often more relaxing for me to come in to the office -- but maybe that's just the workaholic in me making excuses.

At any rate, I hope Waite writes again with an update.

--Star Trek Action Figure Collection (NubiNubsUniverse.com)

The really sad thing: I recognize most of these characters. Okay, the aliens from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" sort of blend into one another, but for the classic series, the episodes have been so firmly imprinted on my brain for decades that I can name most of the characters and episodes without much thought.

The L.A. Times ('free' registration required--thus my extensive quoting) has story about how:

the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored in nations under trade embargoes. Although publishing the articles is legal, editing is a "service" and it is illegal to perform services for embargoed nations, the agency has ruled.

This raises all sorts of questions like does tagging and indexing a blog post count as editing, does reformating an article to fit a house or blog style count as editing? And is a 'service' really a 'service' if no money changes hands? It seems some publishers, including the American Chemical Society, have decided to risk "fines of up to a half-million dollars or jail terms as long as 10 years" by editing scholarly articles they publish. --U.S. Embargos Extended to Editing ArticlesKairosNews/LA Times)

Since the LA Times requires an obnoxious registration, I'm linking to Scott's post on KairosNews instead.

--Technovelgy: Inventions from Science Fiction Novels and Books

There's no good blurb on this site, but it features news of technological advances that have been predicted in science-fiction. For instance, here's the listing of real inventions first mentioned in Fahrenheit 451. Pretty cool.

[O]n Feb. 20, 1954 -- President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, Calif., to make a secret nocturnal trip to a nearby Air Force base to meet two extraterrestrial aliens.

Or maybe not. Maybe Ike just went to the dentist. There's some dispute about this. --Peter Carlson --Ike and the alien ambassadors (M$ NBC)

A precious quote, from the author of a book on the political implications of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth: "There's a lot of stuff on the Internet," he says, "and I just went around and pieced it together."

Journalists aren't supposed to editorialize while covering the news, but the use of this quote pretty much says all that one needs to know.

A close second is the following:

Mixson's article "A History of Dwight D. Eisenhower's Oral Health" -- published in the November 1995 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Dentistry -- is the definitive work on Ike's teeth. [Some tooth-related info here.] That may be more than you wanted to know about Ike's dental work. If not, Mixson goes on at some length, quoting a long, lyrical passage written by Fairchild on this troublesome presidential incisor.

Computers and Composition Online is the refereed online companion journal to Computers and Composition: An International Journal, now in its 21st year and published by Elsevier. Our goal is to be a significant online resource for scholar-teachers interested in the impact of new and emerging media upon the teaching of language and literacy in both virtual and face-to-face forums. As part of this goal, we wish to foster a sense of community and collegial sharing of ideas by providing an online space where select features, announcements, and community resources work together to promote a virtual exchange for the latest and best work in the field. --Computers and Composition Online Weblogcandconline.org)

Found via KairosNews. Not a whole lot of action on this site yet... and the mission statement I quoted above reeks of administrativeese. Is this part of an effort by Elsevier (publisher of C&C) to respond to boycotts and other acts of rebellion over the control it wields over academic publishing?

I'm a bit suspicious, but I did contribute a long comment to C&C Online a few minutes ago. Overall I think it's good it's great to see yet another effort to rethink scholarship in light of new technology.

Leadholder can be broadly defined as any durable instrument that is designed to hold and be refillable with consumable pieces of graphite so that the graphite can be conveniently used for drawing or writing. Within this definition there are subsets such as porte-crayons, mechanical pencils, and drafting leadholders. This website is primarily concerned with drafting leadholders, which are commonly called by draftsmen in the US as simply leadholders. (From "What is a Leadholder?") --The Drafting Pencil Museum (Leadholder.com)

Okay, maybe I'm not quite that geeky, but I still enjoyed the site.

All of this carrying on is fine, but if Spike really wants shows men like to watch, they've missed a few great concepts. Here are ten new programs that appeal to real men:

• The Explosion Show - Every week, the hosts fill some interesting object with black powder and then, well, you get the idea...
  
• Crank Callers - Contestants harass strangers and win prizes
  
• Celebrity Mud Wrestling - The name says it all
  
• Target Practice - Like those hunting shows on the Outdoor channel, except that the big game they're after is the neighbor's lawn ornaments
  
• Psycho Friends Network - Wisecracking comedians staff fortune-telling phone service
  
• Pick-Up Truckers - This is our reality show: Blue collar guys are taken to a real bar and compete to see who can be the first to convince a female patron to come home with them
  
• Mug Shot Makeover - Fashion experts visit the drunk tank with timely grooming advice
  
• Riding Lawnmower Demolition Derby - OK, it's sort of a sport, but it's not on ESPN
  
• Cheer Factor - Adult cheerleader routines are rated by regular guys with number cards
  
• Simian Nightly News - The events of the day are reviewed by chimpanzees dressed in designer suits

Are you listening, Spike?
--Driving the Spike [Scroll down a bit] (Every Fool's Guide to the Universe)

This site seems to archive only by page, so I can't send you to the entry I'm quoting from. It's the one posted at 9:58PM.

A 40-plus-year-old A-list actor pondering whether or not to appear in a game? Heck, even Roger Moore would have been loathe to actively participate in what was once the perceived domain of momma's boys.

"Traditionally, Hollywood signed away rights without any expertise or any idea of the plot lines," said industry analyst P.J. McNealy.

Several factors helped change Hollywood's mind. Technology advanced exponentially, making it possible to accurately recreate the voice, looks and movements of real people. Another factor was the Sony PlayStation 2. Or to be more exact, 60 million PS2s, GameCubes and Xboxes sold in the United States alone.

As games became synonymous with mass entertainment, Hollywood got it. The movie executives who chanted "cross-branding" and "synergy" at power lunches got it. Game developers got it. Even the actors got it. Soon Electronic Arts was convincing not only Brosnan, but Bond regulars John Cleese ('Q') and Judi Dench ('M') as well as William Dafoe, Heidi Klum and Mya to join "Everything or Nothing." --Tom Loftus

--Stars seek more control over video games (M$ NBC)

Via Terra Nova, which features some thoughtful musings about digital rights and the creative freedom of game designers.

"Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold." -- Rosalind, As You Like ItAs You LIke It @ Seton Hill UniversityJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I asked students in three of my classes to attend Seton Hill University's production of As You Like It. I thought the casting was very well done. With her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the actress playing Rosalind looked very much like the rustic youth she was pretending to be. In Shakespeare's day, of course, the female parts would all have been performed by boys. In a sense, our SHU production featured a woman pretending to be a boy pretending to be a woman pretending to be a boy.

I do think our Rosalind muffed the line I quoted above -- she emphasized "thieves," giving the line the sense, "Beauty provokes thieves before beauty provokes gold." I would have told her to emphasize "Beauty," giving the line the sense "Thieves are provoked by beauty sooner than gold." The line was a bit of light-hearted banter that leads to the plan to disguise Rosalind as a boy. Another exchange with Celia and later some extended comedy with Audrey and Touchstone riffs on the idea that a woman cannot be both beautiful and honest (and Phebe is further evidence to argue in favor of that idea).

I was reminded of a class discussion on The Canterbury Tales, in which the students couldn't determine whether The Wife of Bath's Tale is feminist or misogynist. In order to prod the discussion along at one point, I noted that the Wife twice mentions that her latest husband beat her, but only the second time does she mention that she started the fight by hitting her husband first. I mentioned that I once heard a statistic that indicated that women are more likely to strike men than men are likely to strike women -- but that when men do strike women, they are far more likely to cause an injury. Julie Young put some effort into investigating the validity of that little factoid, and concludes that, like nearly any fact, it can be used out of context to give the wrong message.

Several SHU bloggers have already written about the play, including some in my "Media Aesthetics" course.

Brendan notes that "Watching Is more Fun Then Reading," a sentiment I've heard before from SHU bloggers. Even so, Allison finds that the middle school children in the audience for a field trip were more attentive than some of her classmates, and writes, "I have no clue how anyone can sleep through shakespeare." Julie observed that "Some things are still funny 400 years in the future. Other things aren't."

Other students who mentioned the production include Amanda, who says she picked out my chuckles over the heads of the crowd of middle-school students who were visiting on a field trip. Sherry (who preferred the play to the book) observes that in the middle of the play "it's like the characters just stumble around the forest rambling," and wonders if all Shakespeare is like that.

I remember my college professor comparing the Forest of Arden scenes to a cocktail party. I prefer to think of the ballroom dance skits in the old Muppet Show -- they would have a quick shot of muppets dancing to a sweeping waltz, and then a two-shot where there would be a quick setup and punchline, followed by a quick cut to more dancing.

The comic presentation of Duke Senior and the flashiness of the contrived happy ending served to underscore the forest scenes as attempting to accomplish just a little bit more than presenting an idealized view of a human society ruled by love -- there were some elements of satire, but not many. Which is fine -- it's a comedy, after all. Humans tormented by love and folly are worth examining too, though humans wracked by guilt and lusting after power usually make better drama.

While blogging this, I was browsing through EbscoHOST in another window, and came across a 1991 article, "Kairos and the Ripeness of Time in 'As You Like It.'" It's by Maurice Hunt, whose article on plagiarism I recently blogged.

Whoops, before I could read much of Maurice's article, a student came by to warn me that the teacher's podium is acting up in the classroom where my next class is about to meet... so I'd better sign off.

The magnitude of these effects is also somewhat alarming. The best estimate of the effect size of exposure to violent video games on aggressive behaviour is about 0.26 (Fig. 2). This is larger than the effect of condom use on decreased HIV risk, the effect of exposure to passive smoke at work and lung cancer, and the effect of calcium intake on bone mass ( [Bushman & Huesmann (2001)]). As a society, we have taken massive and expensive steps to educate the public about these smaller medical effects, but almost none to deal with the larger violent video game effects. --Craig A. Anderson

Update: This link to the table of contents page lets me download PDFs. Your mileage may vary. --An update on the effects of playing violent video games  (Journal of Adolescence)

This is not your usual hand-wringing, scare-mongering article in a parenting magazine.

I hope to see the game-playing public and games researchers consider the implications of this report seriously, and not merely shrug it off as yet another example that, where gaming is concerned, "they" don't "get it".

Of course, those who argue that television shows, music, or books are positively correlated with increased violence (or what have you) risk being labeled a censor. The common refrain from the gaming community -- it's the parents' fault, not the games' fault -- is as much of a cop-out as the parent who prefers to blame games (or some other media, or a peer group).

Is it possible to have discussions of taste and ethics concerning videogames, without either moralizing recklessly, or being recklessly accused of moralizing?

Via TerraNova, where the discussion started out very good but at the moment looks like it has resulted in more of the same old same-old.

After a conversation with Mike Arnzen, I've been on the lookout for scholarly works that are critical of gaming and gaming culture. Here's a good one, according to Reality Panic: "Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing".

More than 150 Lego builders and collectors converged on Portland over the Presidents Day weekend for BrickFest PDX, a celebration of all things Lego. While plenty of individual work is on display, the big draw is the chance to interact with like-minded folks.... In one of the smaller conference rooms, a team of 10 guys, mostly young men and two preteens, attempt a speed record for assembling an Imperial Star Destroyer, a 3,000-piece Star Wars monstrosity that usually takes a single builder about a week of spare time to construct. The team wants to do it in less than an hour, but the record is 13 minutes more than that. --Marty Cortinas

--If You Come, They Will Build It  (Wired)

Sorry, the title just doesn't... click.

Email newsletters continue to be one of the most important ways to communicate with customers on the Internet. Newsletters build relationships with users, and also offer users an added social benefit in that they can forward relevant newsletters to friends and colleagues. Still, users are highly critical of newsletters that waste their time, and often ignore or delete newsletters that have insufficient usability. --Jakob Nielsen --Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength (Alertbox)

[O]bjective achievements in the arts are demonstrable?and if they can be historically established for the arts, then they are even more clearly identifiable for the sciences. These two spheres of human endeavor represent two kinds of potential objectivity: there is as little chance of the human race giving up Homer or the Beethoven symphonies as there is that it will give up the notion that the earth is a sphere. Over time, achievement in the arts and the sciences is seen as not merely an invention of scholarship, a product of fickle fashion, or a general social construction....The fundamental principle of human achievement is expressed by Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics and accepted by philosophers since, and more recently even by psychologists: that human beings derive pleasure from the just exercise of their skills and capacities. From crossword puzzles and rock climbing to painting, composing music, playing a musical instrument, or solving equations, Murray says, ?The pursuit of excellence is as natural as the pursuit of happiness.? For the creative geniuses who are the subject of his book, I prefer to say that achieved excellence simply is happiness. --Dennis Dutton reviews Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment --Of Human Accomplishment (New Criterion)

Hmm... achievement for achievement's sake is dangerously close to "art for art's sake". I suppose Murray at some point had to define what he means by "excellence". To excel in cruelty or to escape punishment for a crime is a kind of excellence; I suppose some people might excel at doing nothing. But that's probably straying too far from the book's subject area (which is, after all, about accomplishment, not destruction or avoidance).

Okay... a quick glance at the article reveals that Murray specifies "Transcendental goods" as one of the four qualities for human accomplishment, so that neatly handles my objection. As Dutton puts it, "These values are the true, the good, and the beautiful—the first central to science, the last to art, and the second to both science and art."

Conference ConundrumsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Hooray... I just heard that I got near-full funding for both Princeton videogame conference (where I'll be presenting a paper on Will Crowther's original "Adventure") and the San Antonio 4C-s (where my paper topic is "Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in their Academic Weblogs"). Because the 4C's is a long conference in an expensive city, I might not be able to afford to go to the whole thing, but I present early and there's that blasted "stay overnight on a Saturday and get a cheaper airfare," so I'm going to have to wrestle with this one a bit. I'm hoping to share a room with a former colleague from the University of Toronto, but he may have had to book already... we'll see what happens. I've got the next six hours of my day booked absolutely solid...

Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web, and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about 19 million books with unique call numbers, plus another 9 million or so in unusual formats, but most have not made it onto the Web. That may change, but for the moment, a tremendous amount of human wisdom is invisible to researchers who just use the Internet.

"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian and author Gary Price. --Joel Achenbach

--Search For Tomorrow: We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?  (WashPost)

Of course, the archives of the Washington Post are part of the "dark net" -- most of the articles disappear behind a pay-per-view firewall after a few weeks.

Most of my students are working on their short midterm papers now, and a few have complained about the research exercises I have asked them to complete. I'm asking them to supply, in varying combinations, a sample thesis statement, quotations from their primary sources, a brief annotation of and quotations from secondary sources, a bibliography, and a revised thesis statement (showing how they have incorporated their research into their thesis statement). While students in my freshman comp class can expect me to read and comment on a complete rough draft, I can't supply that service to all my classes -- but the one- or two-page research & thesis exercise is still an excellent opportunity to provide feedback.

I have seen far too many student papers ruined by students who mistakenly trusted bad sources; some students first write an essay based on what they already believe, then they treat the research phase as if their goal is simply to "find quotes that support my opinion." Hint: if you've already written your opinion before you looked at outside sources, then you're not writing a research paper.

Writing is not easy.

<> !*''#
^"`$$-
!*=@$_
%*<> ~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED

Translation:

"Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH."

--Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese --Stuck Shift Key Poetry (Net Funny)

This interesting bit of geek poetry illustrates the orality of poetry. On the rare occasions when I get the chance to code, I tend to do it alone; and on the rare occasions when I do discuss programming, I sometimes have difficulty with the specialized vocabulary. This poem dates from about 1990, so I have no idea whether the transliteration still works with the current generation of programmers. How about it, Jess, Will, Rosemary, and any lurkers out there?

As for the poem itself, to read it aloud you have to pace yourself to follow the pattern set by the first line. The first line begins with two trochees (BAH buh), while the second line begins with a trochee and a single stressed beat -- that gives only three syllables to cover the space previously occupied by four. The phrases "bang splat" and "back-tick" match up, but where the first line has "tick tick" the second line asks you to say "dollar dollar," squeezing four syllables into the space previously occupied by two.

So this text, when read aloud, is really following an invisible musical notation. The first line reads as if it is six quarter notes and the final "hash" is a half note -- and that sets the pattern for the other lines. Line four is awkward because it starts with an unstressed syllable, but otherwise the pattern still fits. Still, "Vertical-bar" in the last line simply doesn't fit -- you either have to pronounce all three syllables of "Vertical" on one quarter-note and "bar" on the other, or spread out all the syllables equally, which makes a stress fall on "cal" (which should definitely be unstressed). At first I thought the acceleration in the final line was deliberate, since it leads to the "CRASH", but it's only the first foot that rushes -- the rest of the line falls back into the steady pattern.

Spotted in "Poegram" on MGK's "Digital Studies" course website.

She asked how I was adjusting to the "difficult" corporate world after coming from the "less stressful" academic world. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing.

Let's see: I'm only working five days a week. At night, I am not furiously preparing a lecture for the next day. And I actually enjoy weekends without the nagging feeling that I should be working on more revisions and resubmissions. Yeah, I think I've adjusted just fine, thanks. --Robin Moriarty --Finding Nonacademic Work Overseas (Chronicle)

I'm actually quite happy as a college professor, but there were brief moments during the dot-com craze when I wondered why I didn't feel compelled to head for Silicon Valley and see what happens. Actually, the fact that my wife doesn't want to live anywhere near the San Andreas Fault pretty much solved that career crisis, but it was still interesting to daydream, and it's somehow comforting to remind myself that I'm not the only academic who brings home bookbacks bulging with homework. For me tonight, it's about a four-inch stack of papers to grade, a teaching demonstration, and about 20 e-mails connected to a research project that just hit a major setback. Such is the life of an eternal student.

I can't wait until Spring Break -- when I can really get caught up on my work.

With the media opera R.U.R., we want to appreciate the Czech author Karel Capek (Czechia's Goethe) and his importance for the European cultural expression. It is he who in R.U.R. used for the first time the expression robot, derivated of the Russian word "robota" = work. R.U.R. is a classic of science fiction literature and has nothing lost of its formative influence. The latest example is Stephen Spielberg's movie A.I. – Artificial Intelligence which has obviously taken scenes from Capek's play, however keeps quiet about it's source. Central Europe is the "cradle" of the robots and not USA, even if their movie industry want to make us believe that by thousands of pictures.
--R.U.R. OperaMedia Archiv Praque)

Just got this in an e-mail from the Media Archiv Praque, probably because I have a website devoted to the play R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots).

Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd,
Turn'd critics next, and prov'd plain fools at last;
Some neither can for wits nor critics pass,
As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass.
Those half-learn'd witlings, num'rous in our isle
As half-form'd insects on the banks of Nile;
Unfinish'd things, one knows not what to call,
Their generation's so equivocal:
To tell 'em, would a hundred tongues require,
Or one vain wit's, that might a hundred tire.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Part I, Part II, Part III --An Essay on Criticism (Representative Poetry Online)

I think it's probably safe to guess what Alexander Pope would think of blogging. Bear in mind, though, that he was writing this at the ripe old age of 20.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE

--Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (Project Gutenberg)

Note... Wilde doesn't offer any pithy judgements on those who find beautiful meanings in ugly things (according to Wilde, they would be corrupt but charming) or who find ugly meanings in ugly things (I assume Wilde finds them uncultivated, but does that make them barbarians or simply pragmatists?).

I've been involved in the discussion of a proposed new design for Seton Hill University's website, so I've turned to Oscar Wilde to help me understand the mindset of those who prefer their designs beautiful but useless. While it's possible to test a design for useability, it's not possible to test it for beauty.

Some of the new questions in a very young field: How do you judge a game? As you would a novel? Should we think up a whole new vocabulary for evaluating games? What do the social dynamics of online worlds — those massively multiplayer games — tell us about human behavior?

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the IT University has established the Center of Computer Games Research, which just graduated its first Ph.D., Jesper Juul.

Juul appears to be the first person anywhere to ever get his doctorate exclusively in video game studies. His dissertation "Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds" seeks to define what video games are, and how academics ought to go about studying them.

"There is an interesting naughtiness in taking something that many people consider unimportant and frivolous and then creating very detailed theory about it," Juul said. But, he added: "I would say that video games merit much more analysis than novels or movies simply because they are less understood." --Nick Wadhams --Academics get serious about video games (Mercury News/AP)

It's not news that academics have been studying computer games, but it is news that the study of computer games is developing into a scholarly field of its own (rather than being situated within existing fields, such as literature, cinema, artificial intelligence, and so forth).

Besides Juul, this article also mentions Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth, Henry Jenkins, and Gonzalo Frasca. It also mentions next month's Princeton conference on Form, Culture, and Videogame Criticism.

Assumption, though, is too mild a word when it comes to the belief in mental health. The taken-for-granted-ness of this idea ranks with God, romantic love, the nuclear family, the goodness of free markets and the wickedness of Communism. For most people, suggesting that mental health might not exist would be like telling the kind of people who read blogs that they could have a meaningful life without the World Wide Web. The reality of mental health gives those of us without it a motivation to keep embracing pain because it builds character, it is part of the healing process, it will make us better people. --John Spurlock --The Myth of Mental Health (The Blue Monkey Review)

The "you have a right to be healthy" meme certainly works against the Church's "human suffering is part of a divine plan" meme, the latter being an important part of a religious outlook that invites the contemplation of Christ's suffering.

Modern society doesn't have many universally accepted rituals for the preservation of order in our lives, but for those who practice the morning jog, the AA session, Friday night poker, or even the communal viewing of a popular TV show (I used to love watching "COPS," which plays out a metanarrative of restoring virtue and honor) -- these rituals serve much the same function.

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person. --Cory Doctorow --E-Books: Neither E Nor Books (Craphound)

Ancient catapults were state-of-the-art weapons of unequalled power?but how powerful were the military engineers who created them?... The fearsome machines terrorized battlefields and sieges until the proliferation of gunpowder. Their power was impressive and terrifying. Roman catapults could hurl 60-pound (27-kilogram) boulders some 500 feet (150 meters). Archimedes' machines were said to have been able to throw stones three times as heavy. --Brian Handwerk --Catapult Makers: Rock Stars of Antiquity (National Geographic News)

When the newest cheating scandal surfaces at some prestigious southern university known for its military school style "honor code," the headlines leap across the tabloids like stories on child molestation by alien invaders.

It's almost never suggested that all this might be something other than a disaster for higher education. But that's exactly what I want to argue here. -- Russel Hunt --Four Reasons to be Happy about Internet Plagiarism  (St. Thomas University)

Found via the Plagiarism Resource Site.

--A Scheduled Quiz on As You Like It Sprang (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A scheduled quiz on As You Like It sprang
And caught some students unprepar'd today.
Soft-hearted me! I bargained with them thus:
They'll blog in verse (as Shakespeare would have done),
And I will grant them an exten-si-on.

In these movies, priests are suicidal, corrupt and/or lascivious. Nuns are heartless and sadistic.

Before you run to your keyboard: yes, I'm aware of scandals, past and present, involving the church. And yes, some of the films listed above are powerful, important works based on true stories.

But a lot of this stuff is just exploitative garbage. And no other religious group gets bashed with such frequency. Can you imagine a similar number of films with Jewish leaders playing villains and moral weaklings? --Richard Roeper --Join the clubbed: Catholics know pain of being bashed  (Sun Times)

As a young boy, I found it very easy to spot when an actor was not Catholic. When a Catholic makes the sign of the cross (touching the forehead, chest, and then each shoulder), inside your head you are saying "In the name of the (touch head) Father, and of the Son (touch breast), and of the Holy Spirit." Well, in truth probably most of them shorten it to "'Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit." But there's a little pause when you hold your hand on your chest, before you make the horizontal stroke. When non-Catholics do the sign of the cross, unless they have been coached by someone who knows better, they rush that horizontal motion -- it looks like slashing. So it was always clear to me when an actor was only pretending to be Catholic.

[I recently received the following e-mail... --DGJ]

Dear Sir:

I am presently working on a science fair project for my school. I found your article, Instructions: How to Write for Busy, Grouchy People. I was hoping you could expand on that a little more for me.

I am in the 7th grade. My project this year is attempting to prove that 99% of people fail to read the following directions after being told and read to do so. I was wondering if you could help me document as to why people think they are above having to read instructions? Truly most of the people I have tested have come straight out and said instructions are for idiots, or fools with too much time. Needless to say these fools did not pass the simple task laid out before them.

One of my questions because of the failure rate of this test is: are people so transfixed or gullible to believe they can do anything without reading the how to's first?

I would like to thank you up front for any advice or help you can offer towards my Science fair project. I look forward to hearing your answers to questions and any other responses that may help my research.

Sincerely,

Heather
7th grade

Why people think they are above having to read instructionsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I was so impressed with the professionalism of Heather's request that (after asking her permission, and after she checked with her parents) I'm posting her question along with my response.

Most of us probably remember more vividly the time we wasted reading instructions that don't help, than the time that we save by reading instructions that really do help. Think about it -- if you are late for an appointment and you are stuck in traffic, you will probably dwell on the miserable experience you are having (because there is nothing else to do). When things are going well, you are free to daydream -- and time flies when you're having fun. While there are some optimists who prefer to accentuate the positive, people who turn to instruction manuals are already having a problem of some sort, so they tend to be grouchy and stressed (and they probably associate those feelings of stress with the action of consulting instructions, making them even more reluctant to consult instructions in the future).

Even though I have taught hundreds of students in technical writing (the kind of professional writing that emphasizes instructions, manuals, and other documents that help people get work done), and I should probably know better, I myself usually try to avoid reading instructions, for all the usual reasons:

1. stopping to get help seems like it will take up more time than it will save
2. I'm too proud and stubborn to admit I don't know what I'm doing
3. I've already put so much time into this that I don't want to give up until I try just one more thing... and one more... and one more.

Researchers call this the "Paradox of the Active User." Even when timed experiments show that people usually save time when they read the instructions first, we tend to get anxious unless we are doing something. Reading instructions feels like doing nothing -- especially when the clock is ticking.

My wife, who is not fond of computers, can't for the life of her remember the three-step procedure that connects her to the Internet (turn on the computer, click the little telephone icon, and click the blue "e" icon). Rather than spend precious mental energy on these steps (or finding the piece of paper on which I wrote them), she prefers to ask me to carry out her online business. Likewise, I have no idea where she keeps stack of bills to be paid or the extra toothpaste. Our specialized behavior works for us, because we know we can rely on each other.

Women typically have more complex and more powerful social networks than men, which may explain why women are more likely to ask for help -- those who work harder on a daily basis maintaining their social networks (by talking on the phone, chatting online, or even passing notes in class) are more likely to be able to depend on that network being there the next time they need help.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect that our brains are hard-wired so that, if we don't feel the source of help will always be around whenever we need it, we prefer to solve problems on our own. Students who are trained to rely on step-by-step instructions can feel lost when they enter college (or the real world) and realize that few problems are as neatly laid out, and few answers are as clear or as universally accepted, as their middle-school or high school textbooks might have suggested. It's well-accepted that people remember things longer, understand them more fully, and feel a greater sense of satisfaction about the work they accomplish when they work things out by themselves. So perhaps generations of human experience has trained us that, in the long run, we really are better off when we solve problems on our own.

While it is annoying not to be able to set the VCR or fix a plumbing problem the right way the first time, truth be told, the consequences of our daily failures don't mount up to much in modern society. The average person is surrounded by a lot of very complex gadgets that consume a great deal of our time -- which is bothersome, but the inconvenience level is low enough that most of us aren't motivated to change our behavior.

Imagine, for a moment, that we lived in a bizarre world where large packs of robotic dogs would appear randomly and bite out all our car tires, unless we performed a special ceremonial dance that put the robot-dogs in a trance. Since a car with four chewed-out tires is a serious inconvenience, people would probably learn how to perform that dance pretty quickly.

Soldiers are trained to follow orders. Firefighters know their equipment inside and out. Lawyers choose their words very carefully and pay close attention to the fine print in contracts. When the stakes are high, people are much better at noticing details and following instructions.

We only really notice instructions, manuals, guidebooks or maps when we are already frustrated and angry. Too often, we'll find ourselves sifting through registration cards, tossing away advertisements for related products, scanning diagrams of doohickeys and whatsits, none of which seems relevant to solving the immediate problem: the gear thingy on our gizmo is stuck and we don't know why.

If, on the other hand, the manual is clearly written and well-organized, we can grab it off the shelf, find the info we need, and put it away again in half a minute -- so perhaps we are likely to forget how helpful the manual really was.

We cannot change human nature -- the fact remains that people are generally very impatient when it comes to following instructions or reading manuals. But equally at fault are the people who design objects that are too complex for their intended users. Some objects with complex functions simply have to be complex -- but there's plenty of needless complexity in our daily lives.

At the left is a picture I took in a game room in a hotel in Wisconsin. Elsewhere in the game room were vending machines that took money, and arcade games that took only tokens.

The picture shows a typical change machine. Well above eye level is a large decorative sign that reads "PURCHASE GAME TOKENS HERE." On the left front of the machine, someone has taped a piece of paper that reads "This machine gives out tokens, not quarters."

Sherlock Holmes would confidently conclude that the hotel guests regularly ignored the large wall-mounted sign, thus leading a hotel employee to print out and post a clarification right on the machine.

"Why do we get so many stupid customers who don't read signs?" the hotel worker was probably thinking. But posting yet another sign for the customer to read (or ignore) merely added to the problem.

Put yourself in the flip-flops of a poolside hotel guest with a caffeine craving. You spot the soda machine, near a familiar brown box with a huge label that reads "CHANGE." Why should you expect it do dispense anything but change? You approach the machine, fishing in your wallet or purse for bills, and you notice the official-looking sign with the green, yellow and red boxes. Some safety inspector probably figured it was a good idea to place this important sign at eye level, but it has nothing to do with change or tokens, so you ignore it. The little brown machine also includes signs and labels bearing additional instructions on how to insert bills, a safety warning, and the telephone number and address of the company that services the machine.

You've already identified a familiar machine, and you expect it to act in a familiar way. That's perfectly reasonable behavior, and not remotely idiotic or foolish. Most of the signs on and around this particular machine are not in the least helpful in getting you the change you want. So you ignore them.

Why didn't the hotel management simply cover over the word "CHANGE" and replace it with "TOKENS"? A smaller line of type underneath it could supply directions to the nearest change machine. I bet few people would have trouble following those instructions!

You can't change human nature. You can't expect people to read every word in the instruction manual and study every diagram before they do anything, because that's simply not the way people work in the real world. But you can change the way you write, in order to make the most of your reader's limited attention span.

For more about writing technical reports, see "Short Reports: How To Write Routine Technical Documents." For an excellent case study that describes how to offer criticism in a way that won't enrage your reader, see "Ask Tog: How to Deliver a Report Without Getting Lynched."

The shooter, officer Richard S. Neri Jr., is white. The victim, Timothy Stansbury Jr., was black. Scientific research has a say here too, probing whether our rawest reflexes can be primed by modern fears based on race. --Erik Baard --Misfire: Why Brain Structure Makes Unintended Shootings Inevitable (The Village Voice)

[A]t least two transformations appear to distinguish the production of new-media news from the typical case of print and broadcast media: The news seems to be shaped by greater and more varied groups of actors, and this places a premium on the practices that coordinate productive activities across these groups.

This, in turn, seems to influence the content and form of online news in three ways. The news moves from being mostly journalist-centered, communicated as a monologue, and primarily local, to also being increasingly audience-centered, part of multiple conversations, and micro-local.

In the online environment, a greater variety of groups of actors appear to be involved in, and have a more direct impact on, the production process than what is typically accounted for in studies of print and broadcast newsrooms. These studies have tended to focus on the work of editors and reporters. Based on the analysis presented in the previous chapters, it is reasonable to speculate that at least four additional groups of players may be having a growing degree of agency in new-media news production. --Pablo J. Boczkowski --Redefining the News Online  (OJR)

The "news world" is an interesting concept. I can't help but think of virtual worlds...

Warning... if you are one of those whose eyes glaze over whenever a geek starts blathering about Star Trek, you might want to skip to next paragraph. Okay, are they gone now? Good. I always wondered why Star Trek: The Next Generation didn't feature the Holodeck as a communications medium... Picard is being honored at a ceremony back on Earth, at which he is holographically present... perhaps a witness to a crime is prohibited from leaving her homeworld... or perhaps a race of aliens use facial expressions so different from ours that we can't understand them without the holodeck's mediation (though that would require the creation of alien physiognomy more complex than forehead bumps and splotches). I believe I saw an episode of Deep Space 9 in which Dax turned the captain's image into an alien of some sort, but there it was presented as a clever trick (and of course was never again mentioned in any other episode when a similar deception would have helped).

We're taught not to believe everything we hear, but it's hard not to have intense emotional responses to complex multi-sensory stimuli -- even when, intellectually, we know that what we're seeing has been manipulated or even completely manufactured.

I'm thinking of this topic more than usual because the student paper which I advise has published its first online edition: Setonian Online.

Brian McCollum designed the site as part of an independent study. I'm sure he'll welcome constructive comments.

It's not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that's equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They're too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding democracy. Worse yet, the medium itself doesn't encourage reasoned argument or the kinds of people who engage in it. --Crawford Kilian --A Forecast from 1994: Net Propaganda (Writing for the Web)

A very interesting set of predictions, now 10 years old, about how the Internet might shape politics. Particularly noteable are the comments about dirty tricks: "e-mail bombings" and viruses.

Jill Drake, from Tenterden, Kent, will fly to Los Angeles and scream for an hour to promote Disneyland's new Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. --Terror task for screaming champ (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Rebellion in American Lit Class!Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've got a tough crowd in my American Literature class.

When I opened the discussion of The Great Gatsby with the question, "How was Gatsby great?" the students in their small groups overwhelmingly decided that he wasn't great at all. A few mentioned favorably his love for Gatsby DAISY [Duh! --DGJ], but even then they thought his fixation on her was kind of creepy. Then we went to the computer room and I let the students blog. We're talking about the same book next week, so their homework is simply to blog about it.

If you'd like to participate, please stop by the New Media Journalism website, see what the students are blogging about, and weigh in with your opinions. (You might search the site for "Gatsby" if there aren't any Gatsby postings immediately visible.)

I'm planning to say as little as possible about the subject because I don't want my opinions to sway the students too much, but if nobody brings up the points I was hoping they would discuss, I'll mention them in class next week.

(You might also find posts on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, and A Jury of Her Peers.)

[I]t seems the media (TV and newspapers) are just now picking up on the "Beyonce Knowles as Lois Lane" rumor from earlier this week, and even though the rumor has been shot down as being false, various TV news programs and newspapers are running with the story.

It also appears that Johnny Depp is not connected with the role of Lex Luthor as previously rumored, but that he is supposedly trying out for the role of Jor-El.

As always, take these as purely rumors. Nothing is official until Warner Bros. announces it... actually, believe nothing until you actually sit in the cinema and see it for yourself. :)

Media Rumors (www.supermanhomepage.com)

My former student Bobby Kuchenmeister sent me this item. The underground fan network has already deflated this as a rumor, but the mainstream media haven't noticed.

It's not unheard of for a PR campaign to "leak" something that is still under negotiation; when politicians do it, it's called a trial balloon. If the public response is too negative, the informal report can be disowned as premature.

Original	Rewritten	Comments
At the bottom of this form you can choose to leave your name, address and telephone number. If you leave your name and number you may be contacted in the future to participate in a survey to help us improve this site.	[Removed]	42 words reduced to 0. Instructions/information should not be given in advance.
If you have comments or concerns that require a response, please contact Customer Service.	Do not use this form for customer service enquiries. Contact Customer Service instead.	14 words reduced to 13. More directly stated. Also added a direct link to contact customer service.

--Writing for the Web (Monash University ITS)

Hmm... I don't think I agree with the general statement "Instructions/information should not be given in advance." Perhaps in some cases the instructions are given too far in advance, and should therefore be delayed until when the user might actually need them... and certainly if a web interface is so complex that it requires instructions, it would make more sense to revise the website so that it follows standard online conventions (which would reduce the user's cognitive burden when faced with a new system).

And while it's true that the revised customer service text is shorter and adding the link to the instructions is very helpful, the revision is also blunt. I try to state instructions in positive terms -- emphasizing what the user should do: "We don't check these survey results on a regular basis, so if you want to talk to somebody, use the customer service form instead." But the revision depends heavily on context.

Which leads me to another problem... I recognize some of the content on this website as being copied and pasted from other source, but there are few outbound links -- if I like what I saw in the excerpt from Jakob Nielsen's page, I'd like to be able to link to it directly. (Yes, there are links at the bottom of the page, but as a college writing instrutor I cringe at writers who don't take the time to cite properly, in the body of their text, precisely when they are using borrowed material, and to identify from where they borrowed it. (If the author simply numbered the end notes and inserted those numbers in brackets in the body of the text, I would be satisfied, though there's really no good reason why the online material couldn't be directly linked.)

I presume that the screen grabs that show various forms of microcontent is original, since it uses examples from Monash University, but there's no way to link directly to those original examples; the page also does not identify an author or a date. (I had to hack the URL to learn about the site where this page was posted.) My guess is that somebody threw these links up to use during a workshop, but there's no way to be sure.

Link found via Crawford Kilian's blog, "Writing for the Web." (I've used Kilian's elegant book of the same name in several courses, most recently in "Writing for the Internet.")

Doesn't this just make your blood boil?

Writing Instructor Loses Job for Discussing Iraq War in Class
WINSTON-SALEM, NC--Forsyth Technical Community College (FTCC) writing instructor Elizabeth Ito has been dismissed for taking a brief part of her class to discuss the war in Iraq. Ito criticized the Iraq war in a writing class on March 28, 2003, while the ground invasion was still underway. Her remarks, which later served as the basis for a writing assignment, lasted only ten minutes, but as a result administrators at the college decided not to renew her contract.

If it doesn't make your blood boil, then it's not doing its job. The dateline at the beginning makes it look like a news article, but it's actually a press release from the "Foundation for Individual Rights in Education." Sounds like a noble organization with a respectable mission... but I can't help feeling annoyed by the clumsy attempts to "spin" the facts in Ito's favor. How many rules of basic journalism does the headline alone violate? A journalist needs an open mind, but has to stick to facts. Consider the AP version of the story:

College teacher believes views on Iraq cost her a job
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - A former English teacher at Forsyth Technical Community College is appealing the school's decision not to renew her contract, which she claims is the result of her political views about the war in Iraq. | Elizabeth Ito accepts criticism of her professional demeanor for railing against the war during a business-writing class one day last spring. | But she says the firing was a punishment for her political views.

While FIRE puts in the lead that Ito "has been dismissed for taking a brief part of her class to discuss the war in Iraq," the AP story more accurately identifies that as a claim -- one that the school contests. Whereas the press release says Ito was "dismissed," the news article gives the wordier but more neutral "the school's decision not to renew her contract."

While the press release uses the word "discuss" to describe Ito's handling of the political material, the AP story says "Ito accepts criticism of her professional demeanor for railing against the war" and describes the incident as follows:

Ito walked into her business-writing class, closed the door and said, "I guess we're going to liberate the Iraqis even if it means killing every damned one of them."

"You could call it a rant, you could call it in an invective," Ito acknowledges. "I admitted I didn't do a good job. That's not a point of contention."

Two students walked out of class that day and complained to Susan Keener, the chairman of the humanities and communication department. At least one said that Ito had shouted down any student with a viewpoint different from her own.

The press release refers to "remarks, which later served as the basis for a writing assignment," but the idea for the assignment came only after Ito realized she "may not have given the subject a balanced hearing," and in the AP story, Ito herself supplied "invective" and "rant" to describe what the press release characterizes as "discussing".

Another passage from the press release is worth a mention:

President Green did not respond to FIRE's letter, instead choosing to explain FTCC's actions in a public statement posted on FTCC's website. Green accused Ito of, among other things, "a lack of competence." The college could provide no support for this accusation, however, and the statement was eventually removed from FTCC's website.

We can safely ignore FIRE's attempt to insert itself into the story here... but let's look at the rest of this excerpt. By placing in close proximity the statement that the school did not support its claims that Ito was incompetent and the observation that the statement was removed from the website, the press release may give the illusion of an association between those details -- the kind of potential misunderstanding a trained journalist would actively work against. Simply because the college has not offered proof does not mean that there is no proof. I am not a lawyer, but it doesn't seem to me that the college is under any obligation to divulge the contents of a private personnel file. Note that in both versions of the story, Ito accepts partial responsibility -- the press release only challenges the college's inability to come up with evidence of her incompetence.

Although the college's statement has been removed from the web, a Google search returns the URL http://www.forsythtech.edu/welcome/pressconf.html for the document. Given that the article was stuffed in the "welcome" directory (rather than a dated archive) and given the generic name "pressconf.html" one should probably not be surprised that this document has been moved. I can't find any trace of it online (which helps Ito in her effort to paint herself as an ideological victim), but Google yields a cached copy. [Update, Sept 2009: the Internet Archive is now the only place I can find a copy of the Forsyth response to the Ito incident.]

The "other things" with which Ito is accused include the following:

First and foremost, this is not about freedom of speech, academic freedom, politics, or the war. This is not about a single incident. Frankly, the college and I do not care whether she supports or opposes war in Iraq. This is about a lack of competence, professionalism, and ability to meet standards of professional behavior. It is about a first-year probationary teacher who did not do her job adequately.

Elizabeth Ito was at times unprepared to teach class, dismissing her class early because of failure to prepare. She spent time on issues outside of the regular class content, failing to relate the issues to the curriculum, and did not permit students to express their opinions. She failed to respect diverse ideas of students and in their own words, "shouted them down" when their views differed from hers. It's important to note that the complaints of her own students brought much of this to our attention. When her supervisors tried to address these problems with her, she would not accept their valid constructive criticism.

If FIRE makes the appeal to silence -- arguing that, since the college hasn't provided evidence of her incompetence, it must not have any -- then perhaps we should note that FIRE does not say that the college has no evidence to support its claims that Ito lacked professionalism and professional behavior (terms mentioned in the same sentence as "lack of competence"); nor does FIRE object to the college's claims that Ito was "at times unprepared," that she did not respect diversity of opinion or relate material to the syllabus.

The administrator who defends the college's actions by saying "We're not here to spin out theories and sit around and blather about the world" is not exactly demonstrating intellectual curiosity; the quote makes me clutch at my heart and suck air in through my teeth. I don't see him winning any "educator of the year" awards, though he might have a career in politics. Ito fits pretty neatly into the stereotype of the out-of-touch campus radical consumed by an irrational passion for one ideological issue -- I'm trying to keep an open mind, but I've seen nothing so far that suggests otherwise.

Teaching is not easy work; I have made more than my share of mistakes, and I'm sure I'll keep making them.

Still, I can think of all kinds of ways to combine a technical writing curriculum with a critical discussion of the military/corporate/political/legalistic complex -- and one of the ways I did that was by critiquing press releases.

I introduced the iteration and testing of psychological warfare documents (surrender leaflets) dropped behind enemy lines. You may remember the story of a large Iraqi family gunned down in their vehicle because the driver didn't stop at a checkpoint -- because, according to an army specialist, the family misunderstood the meaning of a leaflet that was intended to instruct them to stay in their homes. I also used a document, full of passive verbs and nominalizations, written by a Nazi engineer recommending improvements in the efficiency of a gas chamber. I was conscious of the fact that I often had students who were freshly out of the military and sometimes still in the reserves, and one of my former students was actually in psychological operations. Ultimately, I tried to argue language has the power to heal and the power to destroy.

Update: Oops, corrected the link to the AP story. Thanks, Mike.

Update: CommonDreams has a much more persuasive, much more effective press release... if I had read "North Carolina Teacher Fired for Antiwar Remarks" first, I probably wouldn't have been motivated to write this blog entry. The press release is marked as coming from the "Ito Defense Fund," so the bias in the headline is perfectly expected. I heard a warning bell when I noticed that the author refers to Ito as "Elizabeth," and John Slade, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, as "Dean Slade" rather than "John". That's a rhetorical strategy, designed to personalize Ito and emphasize her powerlessness in comparison to the administration -- but unlike the FIRE article's rhetorical efforts, this one works, and I suppose it's very possible that the article simply records an existing power imbalance on the campus; but as a writing teacher I am probably so sensitized to the use parallel structure and gender issues that I wouldn't take my reaction as typical. Nevertheless, the "Ito Defense Fund" release doesn't characterize Ito's classroom action as either a "rant" or a "discussion," but instead says Ito "spent ten minutes at the beginning of her business writing class voicing her concerns." I see nothing duplicitous or dishonest about that phrasing. The author of this piece describes Ito writing numbers on the board and inviting the class to respond to them. This is a good instance of showing details that lead the reader to make a conclusion -- in this case, Ito was not a ranting nutcase, but was instead using current events to spark a discussion. (I take back what I said earlier about not seeing anything that works against the image of Ito as a stereotypical ranting radical -- this was all I needed, and I was surprised that FIRE didn't do a better job of describing the controversial event.)

The article doesn't include any of Ito's statements indicating that she is willing to share the blame, but rather notes that one of the students who complained about Ito "did not think Elizabeth should have been fired for her remarks". None of this really examines the economic factors involved -- was Ito, as a new hire, simply at the bottom of the totem pole during a time of budget cutbacks, or were there newer, less experienced (and less vocal) people hired the semester after her contract wasn't renewed?

I'm going to hold onto these documents, and Mike Arnzen's thoughtful response to this blog entry, for the next time I teach journalism.

I recently posted a comment on Mike's blog in praise of "risk" as a criteria for grading student writing, and I feel I took a bit of a risk myself in writing this blog entry... but it's been an exhilarating couple of hours.

Oh, gaack... it looks like the curricular weblogs are down. Well, I hope it's just temporary. I'd better cut this off now...

Googling for 'weblog'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I found this line in my weblog tracking service today:

03 Feb, Tue, 15:49:46 http://www.google.com/search?q=weblog&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=100&sa=N

My weblog main page generally gets a couple hits from Google each day, and I do like to see what people are searching for, so out of habit I glanced in the URL for the keyword -- and I was a little surprised. Yup -- someone's Google search for "weblog" turned up this site on a page of results starting at 100 -- and then someone clicked on that link, thus generating the above line in my tracking service. I checked and for the moment anyway, out of nearly 9 million Google hits for "weblog," my blog comes up 109th.

I know this ranking thing is pretty much meaningless, and I'm sure this is just a fluke -- but it's a pleasant fluke, so I printed out the page to have a keepsake.

My mother taught me many things -- how to make wonderful Italian food, how to tend a garden, how to love one's family -- but during the last 48 hours of her life, she taught me the greatest lesson of all: how to die. -Paula A. Treckel --The Taking of My Leave (Chronicle)

While the quote sounds like something schmaltzy out of Reader's Digest, the essay doesn't dwell on the sentiment: "'Go and dig up the f-ing bleeding heart!' he yelled at me from Canada."

A good reminder of our mortality -- and why I should log off my computer now and go home to my family.

[P]ress releases are unreal and possibly pointless. First, you write the press release from other already-written things. You can even fudge quotes, which is a big no-no in journalism. Then you have to get everything approved by absolutely everybody. I'm not big on getting stuff "approved." I think it's weird that you have to do this when what you wrote the release from was "approved" to begin with. Very odd. Anyway, you put six or so hours into this article, and then you send it out to news organizations. They can decide to use your article for a story idea, not use your article at all, or they can hack it up into bits and make it a "news brief."

That is scary. -- Julie Young --Write What? (A Work in Progress)

I often see students trying to cite university or corporate press releases in their research papers, instead of peer-reviewed academic articles. Julie's blog essay is a reminder that a press release is a persuasive document designed to cast the best possible light on the issuing organization.

And the made-up quotes in press releases are almost always laughable -- no good journalist wants to put long paragraphs of administrative mumbo-jumbo into an article.

Rosemary Frezza, Blog Angel (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've blogged about trolls, but I've also been thinking about the beings that I call blog angels -- those helpful, friendly folks who may or may not have blogs of their own, but who regularly e-mail suggestions or leave them in comments, who privately warn me about typos or broken links, and without whom blogging would be much less fun. Rosemary Frezza e-mails me at least once a day with a list of typos and broken links -- not just on my weblog, but on other pages on my site as well. I love her dearly -- I've known her all my life, because she's my sister.

Happy birthday, Rosemary!

Today being Groundhog Day in U.S. (and elsewhere?) reminds me how the movie Groundhog Day suggests a model for how interactive stories could work. However, rather than write up my own essay on the topic, I'll link to others who have already discussed this, found via Google... --Andrew Stern --Groundhog Day and IF (again) (Grand Text Auto)

Always capitalize and use trademarks in their correct form.

CORRECT: The image was enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements software.

INCORRECT: The image was photoshopped.

INCORRECT: The image was Photoshopped.

INCORRECT: The image was Adobe® Photoshopped.

Trademarks must never be used as slang terms. --Permissions and trademark guidelines (Adobe.com)

Somebody hand me an aspirin -- I'm crying in my coke here, because lawyers simply aren't real people. I recognize that the company has an obligation to protect its trademark so people don't xerox it so much its value lands in the dumpster -- but this prescriptive grammar twaddle (look that up in webster's) won't exactly make photoshoppers quivver like Jell-O. The strategy is at best a legal band-aid.

Adobe's website also uses, without the ® symbol, "whiteout," "escalator," "Frisbee", "gramophone," "linoleum," "cellophane," and "spam". I think I've made my point, but if anyone would like to keep searching for additional evidence that Adobe doesn't live in the same world it wants users of its products to live in, check out this Genercized Trademark list.

It has been said that reality is all about perspective -- a camera is a pinhole view of the world that frequently filters out much of the story. With that in mind, check out this video of the familiar "I have a scream" speech by Dean. I'm no Dean supporter, but from down in the trenches it doesn't look nearly as bad as it played on TV. Obviously the video you've seen on the news has the best part and the audience noise turned down, but from this vantage point, the speech almost seems appropriate for the crowd and the moment (but was still a lapse in judgement to forget cameras were rolling). --Mathowie --MeFi's take on 'I Have a Scream' (Metafilter)

I'm at home and haven't bothered to check the video over my slow telephone connection, but since I've blogged about Dean's speech before, I thought this alternate view was worthwhile.

Unless we get an influx of suggestions within the next three hours, I'll have no choice but to watch this year's Super Bowl. I write this post from the living room of Vidiot Emeritus Peter Ko, and if the prospect of sparing me from the tedium of this year's game isn't enough to spur your creative suggestions, the least you can do is spare Pete from the tedium of my company. --Super Bowl Weblog XXXVIII (Tee Vee)

An interesting site... the Tee Vee bloggers are commenting on the commericals. (How far did you get in Colossal Cave Adventure, Monty?)

My kids are sick, so Leigh and I planned to go to church separately today. I tried to go to an early mass at a different church, but couldn't find the church... my wife had given me directions that she later admitted weren't very good. So I decided to go to the latest mass in the area -- the 7:00pm service at the cathedral. But apparently the bishop is a football fan -- mass was cancelled.

;-) Neterature: all the quirky, jerky kinds of writing that is/are on the World Wide Web -- blogs, fan fiction, role-playing game sagas, news filterese, spam poetry, prose parodies, etc.

Neterature: Usually energetic passionate innovative and irreverently funny. Not always great or even good. But the best of it is young and sassy and undeniably full of life, in ways that on-the-page writing is not so much anymore.

And it's blooming everywhere -- in e-mail and instant messages and, more and more, spilling off the screen into our daily parlance. It's changing the way we express ourselves. --Linton Weeks --iT was a dark+stormy Nite (Washington Post (will expire soon))

A good survey. Ultimately, it sides with the wistful "because we are no longer crafting our stories and poems on paper with pens or typewriters, gone are the days when we were forced to think through everything before we wrote it down," which is 1) an overstatement and 2) missing the point. We come into contact with lots of bad online writing, but those of us with weblogs can make it easier for everyone else to find the good writing. Bloggers are editors -- not in the sense that we fix other people's mistakes, but because a weblog archive is the table of contents of an anthology; a single richly-linked blog entry functions as a separate codex.

Weeks gives a good survey of writing culture online, but still applies old media criteria to it -- which is rather like admitting that a horseless carriage does a lot of things horses do, and a lot of things that horses can't do, but questioning them because you can't breed horseless carriages. Of course you can't -- because horseless carriages aren't horses.

A neuropsychiatrist is quoted as saying that, when you read online, "Your critical faculties are in abeyance." They needn't be. People can be trained to appreciate modern art, fine wines, and just about anything else that follows discernible principles of aesthetic and meaning.

I do find it very amusing that Jakob Nielsen is introduced as someone who teaches people how to write online. His specialty is usability in human-computer interfaces, and of course he's great in that realm. But only by trial and error have he and other usability specialists determined what kind of writing permits people to use technical documents most efficiently. Nielsen has no expertise in the use of writing to persuade, inspire, entertain, etc. He has never claimed that he has, of course -- it's this article that presents him as a writing expert.

True or false? Technical writers?

A. Write about technology.
B. Translate specialized knowledge in a manner that is adapted to readers? needs, level of understanding, and background.
C. Present information that helps readers to solve a particular problem.
D. Persuade readers to see things, ideas, and events as the writers see them.
E. ?Set the agenda? and shape day-to-day reality by choosing what gets written and for whom. --Leah A. Zuidema --Technical Writing: An Overview (Michigan State University)

I've blogged a link to Google's HTML conversion of the original PDF version.

I found this document extremely interesting becuase it was produced by an educator for an audience of secondary school teachers. (Adding to the "fun" factor is the fact that I and a former colleague of mine at UWEC are cited.)

--wood s lot

A few good finds from this Canadian blog:

• The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
  E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, James Trefil
  Third Edition, 2002

• The Day of the Condour
  or How to be a Propour Canadian Spellour
  Ronald de Sousa
  repost

  I scarcely dare fourmulate this question, lest it be censoured, and--Horrour of horrours!--deter our Honourary Donours. Yet suffour me to exhourt you: four though some may harbour the thought that this minour question is not wourth the furour, or think--in errour--that I speak humourously, this issue is especially impourtant for our langourous juniours to considour -- provided, of course, they have not been savouring liquour priour to pouring over this text, endeavouring to gauge its tenour.

• The Awesome Destructive Power of the Corporate Power Media
  The Black Commentator

  If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s – flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum – can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble.

  The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of media’s role in the American power structure.