March 2004 Archive Page

"[T]he world's first consumer application of an electronic paper display module in Sony's new e-Book reader, Librié, [is] scheduled to go on sale in Japan in late April. This 'first ever' [...] display utilizes E Ink's revolutionary electronic ink technology which offers a truly paper-like reading experience with contrast that is the same as newsprint."

(See also E Ink's press release and BBC News.)

Commercial E-Paper Display

I look at my students: some barefoot, others wearing hats and dressed in clothes they could easily have slept in, and I think how the college classroom has become an adjunct of the dorm bedchamber. Sometimes, when I begin classes, I get the impression that the students resent my interrupting their conversations. Few of them take notes, and I unconsciously make an effort to be more entertaining.... Today's tenure process, particularly the requirement that one get high scores on student evaluations, makes it extraordinarily hard to demand as much from students and to use the fear of disapproval as a motivation. It's hard to deny there is a direct correlation between high scores on student evaluations, grade inflation, and the relaxation of standards. | From the perspective of more than a decade, I can see how much I learned from the old lions, but, if they had been required to hand out student evaluations, my younger self would have punished them with the lowest possible scores.--"Thomas H. Benton" --Remembering the Old Lions (Chronicle)

Too often, writers workshop their egos, instead. It's human nature, especially if your story is on the table and everyone's talking about it. But to get the most out of a writer's workshop, you need to think of the story on the table as your car, and everyone around the table is a mechanic looking under the hood. If you want to learn how to fix it -- or just soup it up -- on your own, you have to watch and listen. And get your hands dirty. --Mike Arnzen --Working the Workshop (Gorelets)

--Dominique (Interactive Face) (Alterfin)

43.75 %

My weblog owns 43.75 % of me. --Does your weblog own you?

--Old School Moveable Type (MGK)

Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? --Richard Long --Back from San Antonio (2River)

The BBC news item, Puzzle over three-headed frog (originally titled "'Warning' over three-headed frog") spawned this story that swept the news media and the weblog circuit over the week following March 5th 2004. Briefly: staff and pre-school children at the Green Umbrella day nursery, Weston-super-Mare, UK, found the above. After they'd taken photos and a video, it escaped. The BBC took up the story, citing one of their own wildife experts, biologist and presenter Mike Dilger, as "stunned" and saying "it could be an early warning of environmental problems" (they published the same factoid in their CBBC Newsround children's section). From there, the tale snowballed to newspapers worldwide. Here's a slideshow of images at local6.com, and there are videos at CBS News (scroll down to "Freak Frog") and ITV West. But is it really a three-headed frog, or a hoax as some have suggested? --Three-headed Frog... not! (Apothecary's Drawer)

This "Apothecary's Drawer" looks like a great site, with posts debunking the Nanniebot and face on Mars stories.

Today, those never-ending online "massively multiplayer" games like "EverQuest" have matured into mainstream, vibrant attractions, drawing hundreds of thousands of paying customers - male and female.

But their growth appears almost stagnant compared to the popularity spike for multiplayer online shoot'em-ups and other mostly war-themed fare geared toward users of console systems, led by Sony Corp.'s Playstation2 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox. --Matt Slagle --Tale of two video game worlds: Online consoles soar, PCs stumbleAP Wire)

He was the greatest director of his generation. Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny!" Lolita's heart-shaped sunglasses. The Dr Strangelove cowboy riding the nuclear bomb like it's a bucking bronco. And on and on. So many images have implanted themselves into the public consciousness, surely because of the director's ever-burgeoning attention to detail.

"Why don't you just accept," says Jan, "that this was how he worked?"

"But if he hadn't allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he'd have made more films," I say. "For instance, the Space 1999 lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial." --Jon Ronson --Citizen Kubrick  (Guardian Unlimited)

Since it was initially packaged with every Mac shipped, it's likely the majority of buyers used it as a quicky Rolodex, if anything. But HyperCard's biggest win was a very low entry threshold for those who wanted to build their own 'stacks' - combinations of user interface, code, and persistent data. There were plenty of examples to suggest ideas, and all the code was open for tweaking. This did enable a burst of creativity by users, many of them educators and artists with no training in programming or database.

The proliferation of ideas created its own confusion. What was this thing? Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question. --Tim Oren --A Eulogy for HyperCard  (Due Diligence)

We the "early adopters"have been playing with blogs in our classes for awhile now. We're loved them just for the sake of loving them. We've evangelized them to our peers and our students, with mixed success.

But now, blogs must pull their pedgagogical weight. It's no longer enough to just put a student blog collective online and see what happens, or to send your students to Blogger and allow them to pretend like it's the same experience as writing a paper journal that they turn in to their teacher. --Stephanie Holinka --And The Crowd Cried out for Pedagogy (Weeblog)

I'm looking at a dead pigeon laying on the sidewalk, headless, and I wonder: ?What am I doing here?? --David ThomasDo You Know the Way to San Jose (Buzzcut)

I can't seem to figure out how to permalink to short story items that don't display the "more" link. For the page with the pigeon posting, the best I can do is send you to Buzzcut's home page.

Mike Vitia Blogs the 4Cs (Vitia)

Departures and Arrivials in the Blogosphere

Individuals and groups need to remain vigilant in finding and naming bad science and bad therapy. Our guide isn't Foucault, but Aristotle, who saw virtue in the mean behavior. No one wants to live in a world in which there is a deficiency of social control. Bad guys need jails. Drug addicts and the mentally ill need treatment. But neither does anyone desire a world of excessive social control. Yet, to find that mean (and Aristotle recognized this too) is hard work, the product of all our best thought. But it is the only way to the ethical life. John Spurlock --Therapy, Psychometrics, and Eugenics(!) (The Blue Monkey Review)

I find the Meyers-Briggs types useful in helping me interpret other people's behavior, and maybe helping me to predict how someone else might respond to me... and even to help me work against my tendencies (for instance, since high school I've known that I score in the middle between "introvert" and "extrovert" in the Meyers-Briggs test, but only recently did I realize that I am an extrovert with my family and in the classroom, but an introvert with my professional colleagues. This weekend at the 4C's was the first time I really felt comfortable going out with groups of people doing things that everyone else seems to do while at academic conferences. I even went bar-hopping for the first time in my life -- though it was a spectator sport for me, since I don't drink. (Incidentally, I've observed that bloggers have even more trouble staying on a single subject, the more alcohol they consume.)

Why do we feel the need to classify ourselves and each other? Especially when most of the classificaion systems -- like the one based on the four bodily humors -- have done far more harm than good. The theory of humors was responsible for the bloodletting and leeching and other "treatments" that claimed plenty of victims throughout history. Illnesses that existed only on paper and in the mind of "doctors" led to sterilization and lobotomy and electric shock therapy.

Of course, the notion that these Web sites have to "count" toward tenure and promotion is one that most directly pertains to a relatively small audience: tenure-track faculty members, particularly those seeking tenure, promotion, or other institutional recognition. These Web sites have value (and thus "count") for an audience that is much larger than this, an audience that includes teachers working in non-tenure-track positions, those teaching at schools where the tenure requirements have little to do with scholarship, graduate students, Web readers interested in the topics of the sites, and so forth. I also think it's important to say that the creators of these Web sites put together their pages for reasons that exceed the question of how it might (or might not) fit into their own cases for tenure and promotion, much in the same way that most of us who are trying to publish our S/scholarship in journals and books are presumably motivated by more than simply how it looks on our cv. Steven Krause --Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites  (CCC Online)

Oddly enough, that's also my provisional answer to your question -- self-publishing isn't enough, and neither is any cutting-edge new media project. Publishing in traditional academic genres about new media activities does take time and energy away from those new media activities, but I don't think we really have any choice -- at least, not until we have succeeded in explaining to the reigning generation of scholars why what we do is valuable, and why doing it the traditional way is less valuable. We're not there yet.

Andre Torrez has found a way to use some new technology to get in touch with an old friend.

He's been spending a lot of his down time -- in airports and waiting for friends -- playing old-school Infocom interactive text games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. --Daniel Terdiman --Bots Open Door to Gaming History (Wired)

I'd have no idea this article headline was about interactive fiction if I hadn't seen it linked in a cluster of IF articles on Appunti Disordinati di Viaggio

Remediate The Alamo!Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My wife and I had visited San Antonio (among other Texas cites) during our low-budget honeymoon (10 years ago this July), and I really wished I could have had the whole family with me -- the Riverwalk is so pleasant, and my son Peter (age 6) would enjoy the military history.

I had no idea that San Antonio is gearing up for the premiere of the new Alamo movie. Street barricades, tents, and movie set lighting were being set up in front of the Alamo. The movie title was etched into a big obelisk shaped like a silhouette of the building's distinctive front, and technicians tested the special effect -- flames shooting through the letters. TV crews were setting up, and photographers were prowling.

We circled the outside of the building, and caught the ending of a presentation delivered by Alamo employee Pete Huertas, who delivered a stirring oral rendition of the battle, told from the prospective of the American defenders who died in after sustaining a 12-day artillery barrage from Santa Anna. The most notable figures are Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett, and the young Col. Travis -- the latter of whom is undisputably the favorite here in Texas.

After attending two days of conference papers delivered by experts in rhetoric and communication -- some of whom mumbled into their notes, apologized in every other sentence for how badly their presentation was going, cut themselves off in the middle of their presentation without even starting in on the conclusion, or went way over time (thus excluding the possibility of questions from the audience) -- seeing a good rhetorical performance was a welcome relief.

Don't get me wrong -- it wasn't every presentation that was bad. (For the bloggers who are reading this, don't worry, I wasn't thinking about your presentation... all the blog-related talks have been good, and most of the others as well.)

Huertas, standing outside, off to one side of the complex, gestured expansively towards the church building, where Davey Crockett's Tennessee volunteers planned to retreat after Santa Anna's forces entered the compound. He described Santa Anna's motions from the perspective of the Americans trapped in the fort, attempting to place us all back in history.

His presentation did not vilify Santa Anna and his Mexican forces, but it did glorify the Americans. He emphasized the desperate messages that Travis sent out to the regional and state authorities, pleading for reinforcements; and he emphasized the government's failure in coming to help. I explained to my Canadian companions the unique history of the Republic of Texas, formerly an independent nation, and still a fiercely independent culture, suspicious of the value of depending on the government rather than on independence and ingenuity.

Huertas told me he was a junior teacher for 23 years. He gave up on the state educational system because he said it was geared towards teaching students to pass tests, rather than expanding their minds.

When I mentioned the delicate cultural role of interpreting the historical events surrounding the siege of the Alamo, in an increasingly multicultural society that may not wish to hear the same messages in which the losing American forces are glorified and the winning Mexicans are pretty much faceless and nameless. (except for Santa Anna himself), Huertas responded that he wanted to "go ahead with what I know to be true, in spite of Hollywood."

At this point, Huertas' boss saw me taking notes, and Huertas told me that Alamo employees have been told not to talk to all the reporters who are here to cover the Hollywood premiere.

Later, in a museum setting in one of the side buildings, volunteer docent Max Knight gave a more objective description of the battle, carefully sourcing and qualifying all his claims about where the bodies of Travis, Bowie, and particularly Crockett were found. Bowie was ill upon his arrival at the Alamo, and quickly turned command over to the young Travis. Legendary accounts of Bowie's death have him whipping out his eponymous bowie knife (which, according to one exhibit, is credited with killing Dracula in Bram Stoker's Dracula) and defending himself to the death; but Knight drew our attention to the lenght of the Mexican bayonets and pikes, and asked whether we really thought a bowie knife would be much use. The Mexican accounts of Bowie's death had him shaking in fear beneath his blankets. Knight said that Bowie would indeed probably have been shivering from his sickness, and may have been able to fire the pistols Crockett gave him, but that's all we know for sure. (He dismissed the story supplied by a woman who claimed to have been a nurse tending to Crockett at the end of the battle.)

Knight noted that Disney's movie presents Crockett surviving the siege, not torching the powder kegs and dying in a heroic explosion, as in John Wayne's portrayal). Texans can be very possessive of the stories about their icons; and since Crockett is on record as giving a speech promising that he would defend The Alamo to the death, his survival (and subsequent execution) problematizes that legendary material.

The convention floor is closing now... more later.

Update, 27 March: Something I didn't notice when I was here before was a monument bearing a poem in traditional Chinese characters, donated in 1914 by Shiga Shigetaka, who saw parallels between the siege of the Alamo and the siege of Nagashino Castle in 1575.

My "Computer Connection" section (in a distant corner of the main exhibition hall) was more interactive than I had expected, so I didn't get to cover all my material -- notably this list of "good practices" for using blogs in the classroom. Since a "real" weblog is a license to write whatever and whenever you want, an instructor who assigns the topic, frequency, or length of blog entries (in order to facilitate grading) violates the spirit that draws voluntary bloggers to their avocation.

The "forced blogging paradigm" is the resistance that results when even voluntary bloggers feel hampered by the imposition of academic rules and standards. It's also the resistance that results when students who don't really want to blog at all are forced to do so. Here are a few strategies I've found helpful.

In Class, Refer to Student Blogs. In the minute or two before class starts, I sometimes chat with students about the content of their blogs. Of course, the best bloggers will tend to get the most attention, and the result is that the infrequent bloggers will feel marginalized. That'sthe way it is in the blogosphere outside of academia, but it makes good pedagogical sense to recognize the achievements of less committed bloggers, too.

When asking a student to repeat for the class the contents of a particularly good blog entry that I feel might be useful in sparking a discussion, I find that students sometimes need their memory jogged if they are expected to talk about something they blogged in the wee hours of the morning or maybe a couple days ago. Calling the blog entry upon on the screen, saying a few words about why it seemed significant to you, and then inviting the student to click through their weblog seems to be a good strategy.

Begin Oral Presentations from Blogs. I ask my students to blog their notes for their oral presentations. In my upper-level course, peer pressure encourages students not to identify this kind of forced blogging as an assignment -- students just casually mention a thought that occurred to them while reading Plato, and then launch into their subject from there. Since I encourage them to link to their sources, it's easier to encourage them to emphasize their own ideas, rather than spend most of their oral presentation summarizing what they find on SparkNotes or other curiousity-killing "study guide" websites.

Give Flexible ?Forced Blogging? Assignments. Requiring students to post X comments of length Y every week may force some middle-of-the-road students to write a little longer, a little more frequently; but it will also encourage the Type-A students to stop when they have reached the magic number. That can kill the dynamic of a weblog, which feeds off of the feverish productivity of the A-listers. I might also ask students to write a short response to the assigned text, but give them the option of blogging it (if they have a lot to say and want to make it public) or just hand it to me on paper. Even if only or two students blogs a reaction essay, those will probably be at least mildly interesting.

Blog During Class. Not all the time? but whenever the site is sagging a bit, asking all students to blog for 15 minutes can help perk things up. Sometimes I suggest that they post only comments that contain questions for their peers, rather than create new entries. Responding to the 'Forced Blogging' Paradigm: Good Practices for Weblogs in the ClassroomCCCC 04)

Blogging puts students in the driver's seat. There's a great community of bloggers at SHU. The ride can be bumpy -- particularly if some students feel left out or attacked. But sometimes, the best thing an instructor can do is sit back and trust the students. They'll work this out, and they'll do it through writing.. what more can a writing instuctor ask?

[Grr... the Word file that has my abstract in it won't open on this public terminal on the convention floor. I'm retyping this from my lecture notes.]

When a curricular weblog program was made available to all students, faculty and staff at a small liberal arts university, the students, expected to blog as part of their course grade, initially expected to be told what to write about, how frequently to write, and how many words were required. While about a quarter of the students rarely if ever blogged more than the bare minimum, and therefore appreciated being told exactly what their blogging should be, other students quickly developed a sense of audience and ownership over their own blogging space; these students object to "forced blogging" assignments, reporting that their regular readers found those entries boring, or becuase the academic discourse they felt they had to adopt jarred with the tone offered by the rest of the site's content. The field of composition studies encourages students to invest themselves in and take ownership over their writing. How do issues of "investment" and "ownership" translate into their participation in a shared blogging environment? My presentation examines the tension between forced blogging and voluntary blogging. Blogging is a medium that developed to meet the needs of a specific kind of writer. As many of us who teach with weblogs have quickly recognized, not every student is that kind of writer. Incorporating blogging into our curricula requires us to address these questions.

New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University

Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in their Academic WeblogsCCCC 04)

Sarah Jane Sloane, "Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom."
Cynthia Cox, "Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom"
Bonne Smith, "All Along the Blogwatch Tower"
Lisa Langstraat, respondent: "In Blog We Trust"Teaching the Blog (CCCC 2004)

Sloane identified the start of the weblog culture with the 1996 Geocities offer of free home pages, and then credited Jorn Barger with the term "weblogging" in 1997. There's a great deal of difference between a Geocities home page and a blog; as far as describing the development of personal online publishing, the chronology makes sense, but the format of the blog was being used by the authors of the earliest web pages. And Barger didn't exactly coin the term "weblogging" -- in a Dec. 1997 newsgroup posting, he announced that he was going to start a log of his daily web readings, and the name of the file where he placed this log ended with "weblog.htm". His post didn't actually use the word "weblog" in its present sense, and he credits Frontier and Scripting News for the form.

All three presenters treated weblogging as experimental, all three were blogging in writing classes (two of which were, I believe, freshman composition, and one graduate writing course), and the latter two particularly followed at format of "what I thought I was going to do with blogs" followed by "what actually happened".

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up -- instructors who don't actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don't make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are "really" bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

Cox observed that, despite her explanation of what she expected in terms of the length, frequency, and content of student blogging, students tended to find their own values for the online writing that they did.

[Whoops, the next session is about to start... this blog is unfinished, but I'd better post it now.]

A mattress and box springs stacked near a curb catch the professor's eye. There is some scrap metal on top of the mattress, along with a few sticks of discarded lumber. He reaches into his pocket and retrieves the small, round magnet attached to his key chain. "This," he says, "is a scrounger's most important tool." If the magnet is attracted to the metal, then it's probably iron and therefore not worth grabbing. Iron isn't worth much at the scrap yard. If the magnet is not attracted, then the metal might be aluminum, a more sought-after commodity. The magnet likes the metal, and so we leave it behind. --Thomas Bartlett explores the recycled and only occasionally stinky life of "punkass anarchist" professor Jeff Ferrell.

--The Emperor of Scrounge: A tenured professor becomes a Dumpster diver (Chronicle)

As you've probably noticed, the look of this page has been updated. What do you think of the new look? (Please leave your opinion in the comments for this entry. For reference, here's the old look.)

Put a +2, +1, 0, -1, or -2 at top of your comment indicating how you feel.

FYI This entry written by Will Gayther - I wrote the software that runs this weblog, and did most of the redesign.What Do You Think Of The New Weblog Look?

One problem with our effort to sanitize the language of all that might offend is that it leads to lunatic results. Just ask the music reviewer at the Los Angeles Times. Last month he reviewed an opera by Richard Strauss, which he described as "a glorious and goofy pro-life paean." A diligent copy editor replaced the controversial term "pro-life" with the inoffensive "anti-abortion." This resulted in not one but two embarrassing corrections explaining that the opera has nothing to do with abortion. --Margaret Wente --Call me nuts, but PC language cripples us (The Globe and Mail)

If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot or InfocomBot2. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports "save" and "restore" commands, so you don't need to lose your place. --Classic Infocom Games via AOL Instant Messenger (Waxy)

Dennis Jerz, professor at Seton Hill University presented a paper on the history of Adventure, which I believe is acknowledged as the first text-based computer adventure game.

I found many concrete suggestions in Jerz's presentation for those of us looking to develop software to teach expert bodies of knowledge.

--Modelling and scaffolding expert thinking  (The Dancing Sausage)

--Technorati's Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati)

"Every age tries to communicate the message of Jesus in the idiom of that time period and culture... There is a spiritual hunger in our culture, and [Gibson] is tapping into it and speaking to the culture in a way that it can hear. And I think the genre of our culture is violence." --Fran Leap, a colleague of mine here at Seton Hill University, interviewed in an article by Ann Rodgers --Gibson's 'Passion' remains a concern over portrayal of Jews (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

I've read concerns that Gibson's use of violence will once again desensitize society to violent images, but the youth culture that is not particularly attracted to traditional religious media has already been desensitized; and Gibson isn't interested in their attitude towards make-believe violence, he's interested in their attitude towards the core Christian message of the significance of the crucifixion and the value of meditating upon it.

(I blogged my own thoughts about The Passion of The Christ, and about waiting for the film to start).

English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It's6:50 in the morning. After logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines and clicks through one of the links to read a story about war reporting that he thinks his student journalists might be interested in. With a quick click, Tom uses the ?Furl it? button on his toolbar, adds a bit of annotation to the form that comes up, and saves it in his Furl journalism folder which archives the page and automatically sends the link and his note to display on his journalism class portal for students to read when they log in. Next, he scans a compiled list of summaries that link to work his students submitted to their Weblogs the night before. With one particularly well done response, he clicks through to the student'spersonal site and adds a positive comment to the assignment post. He also ?Furls? that site, putting it in the Best Practices folder which will send it to the class homepage as well for students to read and discuss, and to a separate Weblog page he created to keep track of all of the best examples of student work. It's7:00. --Will Richardson --Morning at RSS-Blog-Furl High School # (Weblogg-ed)

No assembly lines. No wireless Internet service or lattes Most work was done with hand or horses. Unlike modern ?death march? projects, 27 people actually died in the course of engineering the Brooklyn bridge.

Modern web developer	Washington Roebling's team
3 week / month release cycle	14 year release cycle
Electricity	Horses
Coffee, doughnuts and air conditioning	Water and the elements (think muggy NYC summers)
Carpal tunnel syndrome	The bends
Layoffs	27 Deaths

If nothing else, the Brooklyn bridge is a reminder of what difficult projects are truly like. Sitting at a desk all day arguing through bug triage meetings might be frustrating, but it'snothing compared to what these people had to go through.

--Programmers, designers and the Brooklyn Bridge (UI Web)

"Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds," Willard said. "I'm not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could've happened to him?"

Stanford theoretical physicist Carl Lundergaard seconded Willard's theory on the loonball.

"He's definitely had some advanced training, though I'm not surprised that it went unnoticed for so long," Lundergaard said. "It's hard for the layperson to differentiate schizophrenic ramblings like 'Modernity chunk where the sink goes flying on the ping-pang' from legitimate terminology like 'Unstable equilibria lie on the nodal points of a separatrix in phase space.'" --Raving Lunatic Obviously Took Some Advanced Physics (Onion -- Will Expire)

"It signals our intention to take Doctor Who into the 21st century, as well as retaining its core traditional values - to be surprising, edgy and eccentric." --Jane Tranter, BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning, --[Christopher] Eccleston is new Doctor Who (BBC)

"Miller belongs to the generation that was politicised by the failure of capitalism to deliver on its promises, and disillusioned by the failure of Communism to provide a morally viable alternative. Unlike many members of that generation, he did not scuttle into the conservative camp, but tried to rescue the idea of justice from the mire of Stalinism and what he saw as the shallowness of the youth rebellion of the 1960s. What he hung onto is expressed, oddly, in a section of Timebends in which he talks about revisiting his old university at the height of the 1960s revolt, and finding himself warning the students that, however wonderful it felt to be there, they mustn't forget that the FBI was among them and someday they might have to account for their actions." --David Edgar feels Gottried's Arthur Miller: A Life does justice to Miller's works, but not to Miller's life. --Back to Reality (London Review of Books)

Your worst nightmare has come true. (Or maybe your fondest wish - if you are a sick little puppy.) The dead no longer stay dead. Zombies are taking over the planet. So what do you do? Give up and become a shishkabob for one of the ever growing ranks of the undead? Not on your life! You are prepared for this, thanks to the following list. --The Survival Guide for a Zombie World (http://zombiejuice.com)

This paper examines metablogging in terms of Dawkins's concept of the "meme" and Reddy's critique of the "conduit" metaphor for communication.... The language of metablogging uses metaphors that emphasize communality and proximity, and thus offers an alternative to the social risks Reddy associates with the conduit metaphor. --Dennis G. Jerz --(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit' (BlogTalks)

If you're an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. --Henry Farrell --Academics and Blogging (Crooked Timber)

1. What prompted you to start blogging?
   
   

   I had started developing a collection of online writing resources in 1996, and by early 1999 I was having trouble keeping them organized in several overlapping navigation schemes. I wanted a central location where I could post links to new or recently updated handouts, and in order to give people (presumably my own students and other instructors looking for online resources) a reason to bookmark that page I thought I would create what we would now call a filter (that is, a site with little personal commentary, the main purpose of which was to send readers off to interesting things to do elsewhere). The wayback machine archived how my protoblog looked in June, 1999.
   
   As a literature Ph.D. student teaching technical writing in a liberal arts school, I felt a desire to connect the worlds of technology and humanities. After a former colleague e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, I brazenly copied the form. On July 20, 1999, I posted something about the 30th anniversary of the moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that I was writing that entry on the anniversary -- so I added the date. Throughout 1999, I kept the A & L Daily signature "[more]" link, though I remember being frustrated by it for some time before I started using meaningful words from the body of the blurb.
   
   At first I mostly featured links to writing centers and my own online handouts, but as I realized that my page was attracting more attention from the outside world than from my students, I created one column for humanities and one for technology, and just posted whatever I thought was interesting in either column. I started e-mailing the webmasters of resources I thought were valuable, telling them that they were my "link of the day". I had already been advocating the value of what I called annotated lists of links (I first drafted that handout in 1997), but I don't think I really convinced any of my students to get excited about the possibility.
   

   All this time, I was coding my blog by hand, without any sort of automated tools (well, I did use a WYSIWYG editor). I did later create some PERL tools to automate the process of shifting entries from the home page to the archives, and I later created a form that let me add to the database over the Web, though in order to publish I still had to drive to the office and hit a button that ran a script which copied files from my hard drive to the university server. Bleah.
   
   My site didn't mention the word "weblog" until 2000, when it appears exactly once, when I linked to the Feb 2000 Wired article noting the boom in weblogging.
   
   In 2001, I blogged 10 items that I later classified under a "weblog" category. It wasn't until fall, 2001, when two students chose weblogs as the subject of term projects that I seriously considered the form, and actually started blogging about it. Technical writing major Jan Carroll created what turned into a very popular blog devoted to September 11 poetry, and CS major Chris Warren, who had already been keeping a personal weblog and photoblog (and from whom I coincidentally just got an e-mail a little while ago), wrote a term project on identity in weblogs. Both students were having difficulty finding relevant scholarship, though I noticed early on that journalists seemed to be paying much closer attention to the phenomenon than my English composition and technical writing colleagues.
   
   

2. And what keeps you going?
   
   

   I went back on the job market, this time trumpeting my weblog and other new media experience, in order to see what would happen. I ended up as Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism.
   
   

3. Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship?
   
   Yes -- at first only indirectly. My first "annotated list of links" was a bibliography of websites devoted to interactive fiction (text adventure games); at one point I added print resources and the result was published in a journal. I had an article called "On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy" scheduled to appear in "Dichtung Digital" a few days after Google announced its purchase of Blogger, so I spent the weekend updating it... Although I ended up not being able to attend the conference, my paper "(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit'" from last year's BlogTalk is being published in the proceedings.
   
   
   
4. If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not?
   

   
   Not applicable to me.
   
   

5. Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?
   

   
   Fodder for my own blog... Seriously, I also I value them as ways to connect with distant people who travel to conferences more frequently than I can (what with my two small kids, "all-but-dissertation" wife and a heavy teaching load), and as ways to connect with my students. This term I'm using blogs in three of my four classes and also supervising the development of the online student paper, so I'm thinking quite a bit about pedagogical blogging. Our school is big on getting students to use PowerPoint, but I can't stand that medium, and instead require students to blog their oral presentations. They present by going up to the front of the room and clicking through the links in their blog entry. That usually makes the oral presentation go better, since students don't have to take notes on the content; it also makes the network of student blogs richer -- I've managed to create a culture where students discourage each other from saying "I'm putting this on my blog because my teacher told me to," and students are challenging each other to make their blog entries interesting for their regular readers. Of course, some students only blog when they have to, and others probably drop my class because the whole blogging thing is too freaky for them.
   

   On a personal level, other than videos for the kids, I watch almost no TV, preferring instead blogging, reading, or computer games.
   

Very Tired on a Friday Afternoon. But it's a good tired.

Seton Hill University featured "information literacy" in a faculty seminar at the beginning of the year, but thought the content of that training was too basic to be of much interest or help to me. While I've found my new media activities to be well-supported here, I do expect that I'll have plenty of explaining to do when it comes to annual review time. Now that weblogs are mainstream enough that I can expect my students to "get" blogging without much trouble, I need to start thinking critically about how to present the value of blogging to a generation of scholars who don't automatically go "Wow that's so cool!" when they see a blog. Hence, this conference proposal.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I'm still working on "Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in Their Academic Weblogs," which I'll be giving at the 4C's next week... I'm behind in my blogging for the Princeton Video Game conference earlier this month, and I've haven't yet managed to unbotch my handling of the paperwork for a conference I attended last August.

What's this? Little voices from several stacks of papers are calling to me... "Grade us! Grade us!"

Back to work.

Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public'simagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one'slife and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends? feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent. 

Here we report the findings from an online survey conducted between January 14th and January 21st, 2004. During that time, 486 respondents answered questions about their blogging practices and their expectations of privacy and accountability for the entries they publish online... --Blog Survey: Expectations of Privacy and Accountability (MIT Media Laboratory)

--Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook (Politechnika Szczecinska, Akademickie Centrum Informatyiki)

The development of the icon reflects the change from files existing on floppy disks (which needed to be regularly swapped in and out of the early computers) to the metaphor of the file cabinet (presumably more familiar to computer users than the computer).

This page demonstrates how the development of the icon seems to lag behind the technology. How many websites still use what looks like a dot-matrix printer as the icon for "print this page"? The second to last icon in the list above looks like a PC Junior from the late 1980s, with its tiny horizontal cabinet. I guess they wanted enough room to emphasize the screen instead of the CPU, which is a sign that computer users were expected to think of the screen when manipulating their files, not the bits in the CPU (or the papers in the metaphorical file cabinet). The rightmost icon, which shows a flatscreen monitor and a tower case, is for Windows XP Professional; clearly Microsoft expects those users to have cutting edge equipment. The mouse icon has the center scrolling wheel and the keyboard has the curvy wrist rest -- both are recognizably Microsoft computer accessories.

My computer, like those of most on our campus, is black -- but Microsoft probably isn't interested in having its icons make users think of Dell. Does any Windows user actually own a flatscreen monitor with a plain white frame?

Good voice acting can't save a bad game, but talented actors can imbue a game script with genuine emotional freight. Some of the best in-game voice work is not the long bits of dialogue in boring cut-scenes, but tiny, subtle bits of atmosphere. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft's quiet, voluptuous moans as she hurled herself off ledges were half of what made the character so erotically charged. In Super Mario 64, Charles Martinet?a longtime voice actor who has done dozens of Nintendo titles?does almost nothing but grunt, sigh, giggle, and gasp, yet he gives the tiny anime plumber a surprisingly human quality. --Clive Thompson --The Game's the Thing: Why are Hollywood actors starring on your PlayStation? (Slate)

GREETINGS. MY BROTHER, THE LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION, WAS RECENTLY DEPOSED BY A VIOLENT COUP THAT DESTROYED ALL KEYBOARDS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOWERCASE LETTERS...

I AM INSTEAD SOMEONE WHOSE WEBLOG HAS RECENTLY BEEN HIT WITH A VARIATION OF THE "NIGERIAN 419 SCAM".

I tell you, what with e-mail spam, pedophile-hunting viligantes, and the 419 scam, even the most far-out science fiction authors couldn't predict just how convoluted and endlessly strange the world would become, all thanks to the wonders of technology.

The group's volunteers pose as kids, and when an adult hits on them, they publish the person's picture, phone numbers and e-mail address on the site so the group's supporters can hound the person by phone and e-mail. Perverted Justice has made more than 600 such busts since it was formed in July 2002, and many of its marks have lost their jobs and been scorned in their communities as a result of the exposure.

--They Wanted to Teach Him a Lesson  (Wired)

Well. Those Brits do have some different standards. I just can't see that happening here. At least not any newsroom I've worked in. You might find yourself all over Romenesko in the morning. I seem to remember a pretty big stink over the Post-Dispatch's disappearing Coke can and National Geographic's magical moving pyramids. It's not a long walk from there to Brian Walski. --Doctoring Photos in London (News Designer)

It's certainly not a pretty picture. I do think that cropping a picture is justifiable. The Guardian left the limb there, but changed its color to gray -- making it less noticeable. Since photo editors often used to "dodge" or "burn in" areas to affect their brightness, I think that's probably following the letter of the law, though completely changing blood-red flesh to gray is probably violating the spirit. Still, that's probably more defensible than removing it entirely and replacing it with a false background.

The Guardian apparently has this story, but is requiring registration now. Feh, I simply can't be bothered.

[T]he main thing that's hard to do in IF is build a story where there's a lot of internal character development as opposed to external action. There are some ways to approach it, but they're all challenging, and there aren't very many examples of IF where people have done it successfully before. Whereas if you're writing a book, you can just sit down and write some lines of internal monologue for your protagonist, and it's not inherently different from writing a fight scene or dialogue or anything else. --Emily Short, interviewed by Bill Loguidice --Interactive Fiction and Feelies: An Interview with Emily Short  (Armchair Arcade)

It is still dark when I get up, the suitcase carefully packed the day before. I will be away almost a month, the preparations have been exstensive, at work and home. The little plane takes off, and carries me into dawn.
--Transit - but going where? (Thinking with My Fingers)

Some experts charge that the $1.4 billion antivirus industry is content with perpetuating a business model that is profitable for the companies, but onerous for the user. --Michelle Delio --Cashing In on Virus Infections  (Wired)

A new poll suggests fears that "The Passion of the Christ" would trigger anti-Semitism were unwarranted.... A leader of Jews for Jesus considers "The Passion of the Christ" a Godsend for Jewish evangelism.... The Vatican said Pope John Paul II has met with Jim Caviezel, the actor who portrays Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ."... "60 Minutes" curmudgeon Andy Rooney's commentary about "The Passion of the Christ" has prompted a record number of angry letters and emails. --Short News Items and Archives on 'The Passion of Christ' (Click2Houston.com)

These were the men who broke out of Nazi Germany's supposedly escape-proof camp Stalag Luft III on a moonless night in March 1944, creating one of World War II's most enduring legends and inspiring a classic war film.

The Great Escape itself was 60 years ago but Squadron Leader Jimmy James, one of the 76 who escaped through the tunnel code-named Harry, clearly remembers the moments as he waited underground to scramble to freedom.

--Soldiers Relive WWII Great Escape 60 Years On (Reuters)

I think it's odd that Reuters filed it under "entertainment," but that's just my opinon.

The link will expire soon...

The Great Figure

A unit on Williams and Demuth on the "Model School Library" doesn't preserve the spacing in Williams's original poem... it makes no sense at all as a few lines of prose.

By the way, I stumbled across a plucky little website that argues Munch's "The Scream" is no good.

Update: Fixed the broken URL. (Thanks, Mike.)

Using voice-recognition middleware developed by ScanSoft, Lifeline can recognize over 5,000 words and 100,000 phrases. In practice, that means that the game's main character, Rio, will understand anything that's relevant to her predicament, as well as many things that aren't.

Lifeline is thus a unique step toward deeper player immersion in the game world, but not simply because of the technology. It's because although Rio is the main character, "you" are not Rio -- "you" are another survivor, trapped in the security room of the space station, who is watching Rio on the security monitors and giving her advice. --Talk Your Way Out of Trouble  (Wired)

"The Windmills of Your Mind" is too crazy to be anything but a piece of its crazy time, and it is almost airily psychotic: "Is the jingle in your pocket/Or is the jingle in your head?" A question like that made a lot of sense in 1968. --Mind the Windmills (http://boynton.ubersportingpundit.com)

A new object has been discovered in the Solar System; it's nearly as large as Pluto, but 13 billion kilometres away. Tentatively named Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the Sea, it's approximately 1,700 km in diameter, which makes it the largest Solar System object found since Pluto was located in 1930. --Astronomers Find a Second Pluto (Universe Today)

On a platform before a crowd of curious onlookers, the scientists eagerly ripped open a box of CDs containing data from a newly released million-second-long exposure taken by two cameras onboard the Hubble telescope, and struggled to transfer the data to nearby computers as they answered a multitude of questions shouted out by reporters and middle-school students.

So began Science Live: The Race to Decode the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

--Michelle Delio --See Astrophysicists in Captivity  (Wired)

I wonder... if this is supposed to get kids interested in science, will they be bored when they realize that "real" science doesn't offer this kind of artificial adrenaline injection? What if a "Bill Nye the Literature Guy" dressed up in a funny costume and pretended to do literary research in front of a camera, with a modest budget for special effects and gallons of caffeine for the editors to use when they stitch the show together?

Oh, well... maybe that's what poetry slams are...

Nobody won. Nobody even came close.

But that didn't stop organizers of the DARPA Grand Challenge from declaring an unusual race across the Mojave Desert a spirited success. --Marsha Walton

--Robots fail to complete Grand Challenge (CNN)

A story in a campus paper has alarmed administrators of one of journalism's highest awards, prompted a crackdown by the university and sparked a debate over journalism ethics, privacy and freedom of the student press. --Michael Weissenstein --Student Article Sparks Ethics Debate (Newsday/AP)

Thanks for another great link, Jim. (Well, I didn't actually link to Yahoo's version of the story -- that site is too cluttered, and there are more legible copies of AP stories available.)

The effects of music on performance on a computer-mediated problem-solving task were examined. Participants completed the task in anonymous dyads as they were exposed to either Classical music, Punk music, or No Music. Results indicate that those in the Classical music condition performed better on the problem solving-task than those in the Punk music or No Music conditions. However, those listening to the Classical music offered more off-task comments during the task than those listening to No Music. Implications for website designers are discussed. --Christine Phillips --Does Background Music Impact Computer  (Usability News)

I Want My Jerz.
Tough on Dirt, Gentle on Jerz.
Today's Jerz, Since 1903.
The Appliance of Jerz.
When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Jerz.
Hope It's Jerz, It's Jerz, We Hope It's Jerz...
Make Fun of Jerz. --The Advertising Slogan Generator (The Surrealist)

Can you identify the candybar by looking at the cross section?
Make a guess and click on the cross section to find the answer.

--Name that Candy Bar (Science Museum of Minnesota)

For decades, elementary schoolbooks have maintained that the Great Wall of China could be seen from space - but now the books are being rewritten. --China ends Great Wall space myth (BBC)

The first student chooses State University. Immediately, word spreads across campus, and high-fives are exchanged all around. "She's a fine young woman," exclaims a top university official. "And what stats! A 1520 on the SAT. A 4.0 GPA, including several advanced placement courses. She will boost the status of our chemistry department in a way that no one has for years!"

At the crosstown rival, they're stunned. "We did all we could to recruit her," says a professor, who asks not to be identified. "We flew her in on a private jet. Took her to the finest restaurants. You can't win 'em all."

Next to sign is another blue-chip prospect. Not just someone with the usual high GPA and SAT score. This one also has had six years of Arabic and an internship in the Middle East.

"We got him!" cries the chief recruiter for a top Ivy League school as soon as the student states his intentions.

[...]

On and on, the announcements come. Reporters scramble for quotes from family members. The sought-after students make brief remarks on how difficult their choices were.

Meanwhile, high school athletes go to after-school workouts as usual, dreaming, naively, that the public and media will one day place as much importance on throwing a football as on the skills that made these other students the center of attention. --Mike Revzin --If the limos were for high scores (SAT not football) (CS Monitor)

Last year I was previewing a textbook that I was about to use in a Human Development course I was teaching. The book was the usual flamboyant montage of facts, grids, and pictures, but then I suddenly ran across a most unusual sentence. It read, ?As a folksinger once sang, how many roads must an individual walk down before you can call them an adult.? I was stupefied. -- Bernard Chapin --The Language Police Live Inside of My Head (Strike the Root)

You've probably seen, heard or even used the term "spamming" to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or "spam" to refer to the UCE itself. Following is our position on the relationship between UCE and our trademark SPAM.... Let's face it. Today's teens and young adults are more computer savvy than ever, and the next generations will be even more so. Children will be exposed to the slang term "spam" to describe UCE well before being exposed to our famous product SPAM. Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, "Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?" --Spam and the Internet (Spam.com)

In the 20th Century, making the news was almost entirely the province of journalists; the people we covered, or ?newsmakers?; and the legions of public-relations and marketing people who manipulated everyone. The economics of publishing and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions -- call it Big Media, though even small-town newspapers and broadcasters exhibit some of the phenomenon's worst symptoms.

Big Media, in any event, treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't. You might write us a letter; we might print it. (If we were television and you complained, we ignored you entirely unless the complaint arrived on a libel lawyer's letterhead.) Or you cancelled your subscription or stopped watching our shows. It was a world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable.

Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation, or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp now. --Dan Gillmor --Making the News: Book Introduction (Draft)  (eJournal)

The day is saved when the Enterprise arrives, along with its commander, Adm. Janeway (Kate Mulgrew (news)), and the doctor (Robert Picardo (news)) from the "Star Trek: Voyager" TV series. --Vegas 'Trek' attraction could revive franchise (Hollywood Reporter)

The technical details of this attraction are enough to freak your inner geek: "Kasanoff and Johnsen assert that it is the first "Star Trek" production to be shot digitally; the first all-digital motion picture to incorporate live action and animation within a 3-D cinema environment; the first multiple-angle 3-D cinema production with 3-D effects from the front, overhead and both right and left sides of the participant; the first time a Steadicam has ever been used in a digital 3-D production; and the first worldwide attraction to use 2K digital cinema projection, which produces the highest-resolution digital projection commercially available."

What woman could resist a wedding proposal in the form of a brand-new computer? Johnson popped the question by etching the message, "Will you do me the honor?" into the side of the machine.
Photo: Courtesy Michael Johnson
--With This Rig, I Do Thee Wed  (Wired)

Miss Dyson, a student careers adviser, thought she was sending a private email to Alex Hewson, her boyfriend. By accidentally clicking on the "reply all" command, however, she distributed it to everyone on his original recipient list.

The message went to 30 friends of Mr Hewson, a PR executive with the firm Carat International. Many then forwarded it to their friends. --Roya Nikkhah --Red faces as email to boyfriend is seen by thousands (The Telegraph)

I do think the headline suggests the content of the e-mail is a bit racier than that suggested by the quotations in the story.

The conference provided a compressed picture of some of the intellectual activity going on in video game studies today. In a short summary, it was clear that early attempts to define the discipline or ague against a sort of "academic colonization" were hopeless. The ideas flowing into the area of video game studies from all quarters hold great promise to energize the notion of studying something as banal as video games. The literary critics were not going to leave our beloved game world, I discovered. Then again, neither were the musicians, lawyers, cultural studies folk, computer science departments or anyone else.

The fact I gathered over and over again at the conference, and one I think that has been missed in the past, is that the variety of people studying games'even those who don't happen to call themselves "ludologists"'still share a common passion and pioneering spirit that all gamers have. Yes, even those literary critics care about games. --David Thomas
-- Princeton Video Game Conference (Buzzcut.com)

David Thomas sent me some pictures of me from the Princeton conference... he promises more photos (and, if he hasn't had second thoughts), a long blog post soon.

Update: David's Princeton video game conference notes are up now.

Here is the lineup for session 2. (Note the joysticks in the foreground.)

• Dennis Jerz / You are standing at the beginning of a road: examining Will Crowther's "Advent" (c.1976)
• Christy Wampole / Electronic games as a constrained medium
• Robert Bowen / Musical by-products of Atari 2600 games

Playing something (probably "Atari Adventure") on the projection screen, courtesy the Atari 2600 brought by Nick Montfort.

A Few Photos from Princeton Video Game Conference

I intentionally tried not to post about this (I guess I am meta-posting now) for a simple reason: this is not the way that a scholar discussion should take place....

This is not how this game is played. If anybody has to respond about what has been said at a conference, that should be made based on the actual papers that were presented. Of course, since papers are published on, well, paper, they are not up-to-date to the wonders of blogging technology, which allows us to have a debate instantly. Again, I have no problem in defending my position and ideas, contrasting them with other arguments and changing my mind if I am proved to be wrong. But I simply cannot do that based on anything but the original authors arguments. If we do not follow these simple academic rules, then he get into a “he said she said he said” game that could be a lot of fun, but will not do any good to videogame research....

[I]f we want to be serious about game research, we must discuss based on published material and not on blog posts, which can be useful for many things, but cannot be the only source of material for scholarly debate. --Gonzalo Frasca --The Dangers of Academic Blogging (Ludology.org)

My other major area of scholarly interest is weblogs, where this kind of metascholarship, as messy as it can be at times, seems to me a vital part of the academic discourse. When I couldn't attend BlogTalk in Austria last year, I greedily lapped up the real-time blogging on the event, with the understanding that what I was reading was just that -- blogging.

Do we need a new symbol like the smiley... a suitably unassuming icon that means, "This is my own subjective opinion, based on what I remember hearing six hours into the day-long conference I attended a couple days ago"?

Nah, probably not.

Blips, bloops and beeps emit from the room that houses the exhibit, where a dozen video-arcade games from the late 1970s and '80s are lovingly arranged in chronological order, each lit with a single spotlight. Three free tokens, good for one game play each, are included with museum admission. Additional tokens may be purchased for 25 cents each.

Buy a bagful of those tokens, because these games are just as addictive as they were back in your misspent youth. --Michelle Delio --When Space Invaders Ruled Earth  (Wired)

Back on store shelves, video-game companies are discovering what the music industry has known for a long time: the past can be mined for profit. The classics are being cloned, emulated, compiled, enhanced, and updated for a home market made up of children craving novelty and post-boomers binging on nostalgia. --Carl Goodman

those in the humanities tended to distrust the technology, and those in the sciences often considered humanities-applications to be wasteful of a precious resource.

Specific kinds of projects, however, were more readily assisted by 1960s technology, even if character-sets were inadequate because computer-printers had either an all-uppercase or upper-and-lowercase character-set that was designed to represent standard English language. Nonetheless, medievalists, despite their graphic needs, generally made the heaviest use of the technology, often to assist preparing editions of manuscripts --A Brief History of Computer Concordances (CCRH)

The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief IntroductionJerz's Literacy Weblog)

While I mostly wrote those conference reflections for the benefit of game theorists who weren't able to attend the conference, if you're new to the subject, you might appreciate a general introduction.

Over the past few years, a very exciting movement in Europe (and particulary in Scandinavia) has been carving out a new field of game studies; it looks like the name "ludology" is going to stick (ludus being Latin for "game").

The mainstream press has covered this trend with bemusement ("Off to College to Study... Videogames?"), but the general thrust of the article is usually something along the lines that computer games are now too deeply embedded in our culture to ignore.

The ludologists reject the idea that games are primarily a kind of variable storytelling, a kind of interactive movie, a kind of educational role-playing, an occasion for pathology, etc. Instead, games are games -- objects in their own right, with an aesthetics, a rhetoric, a cultural history, and a discourse of their own (so far as it has been shaped right now).

I don't intend the following to be definitive, or limiting. I'm just doing my best to describe what I see, in a framework that my humanities colleagues and students will be able to understand.

Of course, I wouldn't say ludology necessarily denies that the storyline or cinematic elements of a game might be part of its value. A great story or great visuals is not enough to make a game successful; in fact, plenty of games with no narrative content, blocky graphics and horrid bleepy sound, and which seem to have no point, are nonetheless fun (at least, to the people who play them). In order to get at that core -- what makes a game worth playing -- a theory of computer games has to get really geeky, drawing on the mathematic principles of what might be called classical game theory , which basically atomizes games into abstract principles such as risk, payoff, strategy, objectives, agency, and equilibrium. Gonzalo Frasca boils all this down to one concept: rules. These are foreign concepts to narratologists (who want to think in terms of stories, or potential storeis), film theorists (who concentrate on the visual grammar that is used to represent the game state), psychologists and sociologists (who are concerned with what games do to us when we play them), though they are probably very familiar to business people (who want to know the secret formula for an addictive game, so they can make it just hard enough to be a challenge, but not hard enough that people don't think it's worth the money).

Whew.

While my literary background and my chosen subfield within games (interactive fiction) would seem to naturally predispose me towards narrative, I think my work with text games shows me just how poorly the vocabulary of fiction applies to other types of games (such as simulations or game-like social spaces, where the narrative content, such as it is, is mostly improvised by players interacting a shared virtual space).

Tell your kids, there are more and more ways to make a career out of video games! They could become game designers; they could also play games all the time (or observe other people doing so) for academic research. -- Anne Collier --Web News Brief 7 (Net Family News)

It's interesting to see how the general public is constructing this field -- and of course this helps me see what to expect when I start publicizing my "Game Culture and Theory" course for next January.

While it's important to choose an academic field that you enjoy, I spend far more of my (limited) research time reading scholarly works and writing up my own research, than I spend playing games or watching others play games. And playing a game for fun is a different kind of activity than playing a game because you're about to write a paper about it. When you're about to give a talk on Adventure, you want to be sure you don't confuse the crystal bridge that appears when you wave the rod and the rickety wooden bridge that collapses when a bear crosses it. (I'm happy to say I caught that mistake before I delivered my paper, but only because I had the game with me on my PDA during the train ride...)

Culture CacheJerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Culture" was in the title of the conference, but it was only obliquely discussed, as in Peter Bell's "Hidden play," an analysis of handheld gaming culture (as compared to cultural responses to the Sony Walkman); and Greg Lastowka's "Virtual crimes," which ponders the legal ramifications of actions that have economic consequences in the real world (as evidenced by the eBay auctions of cyberspace goods and services), unlike the social transgressions examined by sociologists working in MUDs and MOOs. I felt Tevis Thompson's hymn to the action of jumping in "Tevis Thompson / But our princess is in another castle: towards a 'close-playing' of 'Super Mario Bros.'" was very useful to me, particularly since since Joust was the last jumping game that I really enjoyed). My own paper dealt, in part, with the manner in which the culture of the Cave Research Foundation (the organization through Will Crowther explored the real Colossal Cave) influenced "Colossal Cave Adventure," though in the time I had, I only managed to touch indirectly on how caving may have affected the history of game design.

Is There a Ludologist in the House?Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The absence of European videogame theorists turned the Princeton Video Game Criticism Conference, at first simply by default, into a polite but noticeable anti-ludologist festival. I don't want to give the impression that we were overrun by knee-jerk narratologists, of course, but the program was arranged so that it ended with those speakers who made it a point to disagree with the Scandinavian model.

Here at the Princeton English department, the narratologists had the home team advantage, especially when the last few speakers drew on the discourse of literary criticism.

Eric Hayot, Edward Wesp (who co-authored two presentations), and Barry Atkins, author of More than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form, deliberately positioned themselves in opposition to the Scandinavian ludologists -- notably Gonzalo Frasca (who is, of course, not actually Scandinavian, but I digress).

Atkins began with the stereotypical image of the insanely focused gamer, hunched over and madly pounding on keys. Like the character Jack Nicholson plays in The Shining (who types endless variations of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."), the person in question is not having any fun. (Of course, neither is he accomplishing much work... )

Atkins recalled Aarseth's observation that a cybertext requires "labor," and notes that anything that you have to work at ceases to be fun. Note to self: Google for Tom Sawyer's line about work, which consists if everything a body doesn't want to do, and fun.

Atkins cleverly extended his "work" trope by examining the relationship between games and the workplace, noting that in an effort to control employee actions, employers are removing solitaire and other standard games normally installed as part of Windows. I don't believe he explicitly mentioned the "boss button" (which interrupts a game by popping up a fake spreadsheet or text file in case your boss walks by), but he did note that each level of an action game is typically geared towards a fight with the level "boss."

"Labor" and "work" are both reasonable interpretations of what Aarseth called the "non-trivial effort, required by readers if the "ergodic" texts such as videogames, interactive fiction, and literary hypertext. Such a text begins to reveal its contents only in response to actions of the user; this is an entirely different kind of effort from the effort one invests in interpreting those texts.

But there are plenty of kinds of effort that don't qualify as "work." Perhaps more to the point, as Tom Sawyer teaches us, in the right context, effort can be both work and fun.

I'm forgetting now how much of this comes from his talk and how much comes from the conversations we had in taverns and in cabs in and around Princeton, but Atkins feels that the European model of games scholarship is too serious -- that is, the theory of videogames currently being formulated in ivy-covered halls pays far too little attention to the fact that we play games because we expect them to give us pleasure and we stop playing them when they cease to be fun. Without a theory of fun, scholarship is too dry, and risks becoming irrelevant to the common experience of gamers.

Note: Regarding the alleged lack of attention to "fun," Jesper Juul writes:

That is so strange considering how much time I've spent on discussing fun.
Even my 1998 MA work discusses it: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/DAC%20Paper%201998.html
And here: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/WCGCACD.html And in relation to the experience of time: http://www.jesperjuul.dk/text/timetoplay/
At the 2002 Manchester conference I also presented a paper on gameplay and fun.
And a general essay about theorizing fun and the issue of focusing too much on games as being challenges: http://www.igda.org/columns/ivorytower/ivory_Apr03.php
I don't really understand how this idea came to be, it's just so patently untrue.

Point taken, Jesper, but see my clarification below.--DGJ

One reason for the disconnect is because younger scholars who don't have the benefit of working in an environment that already recognizes new media objects as worthy of critical study [Note: Added for clarity. --DGJ] are, of necessity, courting the approval of their superiors. Mary Ann Buckles, whose 1985 study of "Adventure" seems to have been the first PH.D. devoted to the study of a computer game, does not seem to have had that kind of institutional support, and the result is worth examining: What Ever Happened to Mary Ann Buckles? (Ludology.org)

Just as the theologians, priests, congregations have significantly different roles to play on the inside, and more distant observers who can place a particular religion in a greater context have a role to play on the outside, the culture of games affords plenty of room for theorists, designers and consumers on the inside, but it seems to me game studies is a bit top-heavy -- many theorists, but few who are doing the basic research that establishes cultural and technological influences on recent developments in game culture. I enjoyed the nostalgia books (such as Herz's Joystick Nation), by my own recent examination of the "Colossal Cave Adventure" source code, and two presentations on the Atari 2600 have stirred the latent geek in me... I want to know more about the instruments and palette that the early game designers had available to them. I look forward to Matt Kirschenbaum's book on the development of storage media; while he has more to talk about than just games, the creative ways early game programmers worked around severe constraints is definitely worth study. (If there are more places to look, and I just haven't found them, someone in the know please set me straight.)

FilmCroft: I'm Ready for My Close-upJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Jordan Hall's presentation was the only one that relied heavily on cinema theory, though she showed an admirable awareness of the problems such an approach causes.

To take just one example, she suggests that the default method of playing the Lara Croft games -- from the perspective of a camera floating along behind the protagonist -- distances the (usually male) player from the character. The shot/reverse-shot cinematographic technique will show a close-up, then show what the character is looking at... While Tomb Raider permits the player to view the game world from Lara's eyes, Hall finds that, lacking the information a cinematographer would provide by inserting a close-up, rather than identifying with Lara, the player merely appropriates her gaze.

Considering that the person holding the controller has already appropriated Lara's whole body, ownership of her eyes is probably a minor point. Further, because the player has chosen to switch away from tracking mode and view the world from the PC's eyes, presumably to get a better look at some object in the game world, the close up - which is the director's way of announcing that a perspective shift is about to occur, is not necessary. While a director can use shot/reverse-shot to communicate emotion via the actor's facial expression, once again, that information is not necessary -- Tomb Raider is not successful because it conveys Lara Croft's emotions; it is successful because it is fun to play (although that's of course not the only reason). Hall is right to critique the nature of that "fun," as well as other cultural manifestations of the Lara Croft phenomenon, but really, if a game kept cutting away from action sequences to insert close-ups of the PC, I'd get pissed off pretty quick.

It's a videogame convention to play intense music in the proximity of a enemy, even before the PC or player has noticed it. That's a moviemaking technique that also communicates important information about the game world. How might a quick cut to Lara's face be useful during game play? Perhaps, when in a room with a pushable block or other hidden exit, Lara would stare suspiciously in that direction? I don't know... if you start giving your avatar that much individuality, what's the point of playing? I recall being disappointed that the magic wand cursor in King's Quest 7 sparkled whenever in the presence of a clickable region. As annoying as pixel-hunting clickfests could be, the sparkling wand took away even that small bit of exploratory fun.

I found Hall's clips from cut scenes illuminating; anonymous male characters gaze in wonder and fear at scenery or monsters; the shot/reverse-shot technique invites us to identify with their emotions and their plight, in a way that we do not empathize with Lara. Elsewhere, Hall notes, we see males gazing in wonder and admiration at Lara's abilities, but she also notes a lack of male characters during action sequences.

For a discussion of camera and agency in games, I'd say an adventure game like Syberia is worth a look. I finally finished the game after getting stuck on the "Blue Helena" puzzle... Syberia did make occasional use of close-ups of the PC, Kate Walker, which helped establish her growing fascination with the enigmatic inventor Hans Voralberg. As a game with pre-rendered backgrounds, it doesn't permit the shifting camera angles that Hall analyzes, but I did find the final cut scene emotionally effective -- right up to the point that I learned that it was, in fact, the final scene, and that was nothing more to do. When controlled by the cinematographic cut scene, the PC made a final decision that ended the game (and set up the sequel).

With the music swelling, Kate runs across several screens of gamespace, at one point knocking over a chair that was not a clickable object during the game. For some reason, I found that event significant -- the cut scene wasn't simply replacing the animation shown during the action sequences, it was taking over the world in which the action sequences took place. I found that a bit troublesome, just as a box that had not been a clickable object near an action climax suddenly conveniently contains a bomb when the plot requires one.

These actions break the "fourth wall," which can be effective when done well -- and I almost thought the bumped chair worked. It emphasized the PC's fictional presence in the virtual world, which was consistent with the designer's decision to take control away from me during the PC's climactic final choice.

Syberia which has (as far as I can tell) no timed puzzles, lots of dialogue, a haunting rich, string-heavy main theme, and gorgeous scenery. I usually played it late on my laptop, wearing headphones, in bed, after everyone else had fallen asleep. (Somehow it never felt right playing RPG or FPS games in that context). Still, the final cut scene forced the game to conclude in only that one way that sets up the sequel. Is that, in and of itself, bad? No, but it may be the reason why some reviewers felt cheated by the end. The designer's desire to tell a story trumped his desire to give us a satisfying gaming experience.

Form, Culture, and Video Game CriticismJerz's Literacy Weblog)

• The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief Introduction
• Is There a Ludologist in the House?
  
• Culture Cache
  
• FilmCroft: I'm Ready for My Closeup...
  
• What IF? An Alternate History without "Adventure"?
  
• Metaconference Morsels
  
  • Good People, Good Memories
    
  • You are What You Blog
    
  • Gaming Reporters
    
  
  

Princeton Videogame Conference: PrologueJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just shook hands briefly with Nick Montfort while on the way to make copies of my handouts. I'd better get back to the coffee and donuts... More later.

'The Passion' is the MediumJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Yes, I had to look away during the torture scenes -- but no, not for the reason you probably suspect.

Portrayal of Jews

Because Gibson had 2 hours to fill, the Jews get much more screen time than they do in other movies on Christ. I've read complaints that Pontius Pilate and his wife were portrayed too sympathetically, but the wife's sympathy is scriptural, and in the movie, the Roman torturers were disgusting brutes. By contrast, the Jews were presented as sincere in their beliefs. Further, it's established that this is a clandestine meeting of only a portion of the Jewish leadership, and one priest who objects is forcibly ejected from the Temple.

I've seen plenty of movies or plays that depict members of the Catholic hierarchy, dressed up in their religious finery, twirl their moustaches or rub their hands greedily, while chuckling about how easy and fun it is to deceive the faithful. (See my blog entry on "Join the Clubbed"). It can't be a comfortable experience, if you're a devout member of any faith, to see actors pretending to be your religious leaders, imitating the beautiful ceremonies and icons that mean so much to you, while performing un-beautiful actions.

Still, I thought that the final scenes of the movie, where the Jews stumbled around the damaged temple, were calculated to show that the old order was irrelevant now. I can see that would be offensive to Jews, but is that, by itself, anti-Semitic? Hmm.

I think there are few artists who feel they are obligated to avoid offending people who won't feel comfortable with their message. The Romans were depicted as being just as confused, and with the exception of John (who silently and bravely accepts Jesus' gift of his mother), Jesus' disciples -- the first Christians -- are confused at this point, too. So, as a moviegoer I didn't feel invited to hate the Jews.

There's a scene where Jesus spots the foot of one of his torturers, and flashes back to the foot-washing scene at the Last Supper -- that's the model for how we are supposed to respond.

In the Catholic Good Friday service, the congregation and a small group of readers re-enacts the events leading up to the crucifixion. There's usually a handout or a missal that reads like a playscript. The congregation takes the part of "Crowd." That's how it's presented. Not "Crowd of Jews" or "chief priests and temple guards," but "Crowd." (Maybe it's "People." I forget.) We are the ones who, when given the chance to release Jesus, call out for Barabbas; we are the ones who answer Pilate with "Crucify him!" Since I am relying on my religious upbringing to help me interpret the movie, it's possible that people who don't have that upbringing will interpret the same movie differently. I never once got the idea, in any part of my Catholic upbringing, that the Jews were to blame; every year the dramatic reading underscores the theological message that Christ died for my sins. So I think we have to take Gibson seriously when he says he doesn't see the movie as promoting hatred.

Special Effects

The over-reliance on sound effects and make-up distracted me; I looked away during parts of the torture scene. As a Catholic, I am familiar with the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary and the Stations of the Cross -- so it wasn't as if I was surprised by the content of these scenes.

I have seen real people with black eyes and bruises; while I haven't seen gunshot victims, I have seen footage of gunshot victims on TV, so I think I know what a gunshot victim looks like. I have never seen anyone brutalized in the manner depicted in the movie, but it seems to me that with all those wounds there should have been more blood. The cat-o-nine tails is designed to bite into the victim's flesh and tear off pieces; in one shot there was a simulated tearing of skin, but since the movie isn't really going to gouge out the actor's skin, they had to instead build up the areas around the hole.

I looked away because I wanted to stop critiquing the make-up.

Form and Content: The Verdict

While the bungee-jump Jesus, the cartoony sound effects, and the over-reliance on makeup distracted me, critics who complain about such things as the shoulder dislocation and the other non-biblical elements are missing the point. The bit about the Roman soldier chastising his underlings because they drilled the hole in the wrong place, and the use of ropes to stretch Jesus, dates from at least the York Crucifixion of Christ. In that play, the introduction of the non-biblical ropes were doubtless an excuse to secure the actor to the cross so they could lift him and the cross up safely, but since everyone watching the movie would have been bracing themselves for the nailing, putting this extra bit in early was a good technique -- it's employed regularly in the horror film genre, and it works.

This is not a movie that one "enjoys," but I'm glad I saw it.

The bit with the snake in the Garden of Gethsemane is simply a visual enactment of the scriptural curse against the serpent in Genesis; likewise, the crow pecking out the bad thief's eye is a representation of the scriptural warning that, if your eye causes you to sin, it is better to pluck it out than for all of you to be damned. After having seen those lessons in motion picture format, I'm glad Jesus walked the earth in the days before cinema. The graphic representation of those lessons calls more attention to the medium than to the message, but I can see why they are there -- if the crucifixion scene didn't contain any new material, the sequence of events wound have been too predictable.

I think Gibson miscalculated at some points, but I disagree with people who see these moments as gratuitous. You may not agree with what he was trying to do, and you may not respond to being disturbed the way that Gibson intends you to respond.

I felt a huge emotional rush during the brief shot of Satan, howling in a bone-strewn wasteland, knowing that he has failed. Part of me wished for a Lord of the Rings style harrowing of hell; the vision of Jesus in heavenly armor, divinely kicking ass would have been a great antidote to watching all that suffering -- but the movie doesn't go there, because Gibson doesn't want to purge all those feelings, he wants you to take them with you out of the theater and into the world.

There simply isn't enough material in the Gospels for a 12 hour movie that won't draw on sources outside of the Bible. Think about it -- the Bible doesn't say precisely where people were standing, what they were wearing, what their facial expressions are, etc. Yes, some of the most important scenes are described in more detail, but artists have embellished and expanded upon the Bible before; writers of hymns rewrite Biblical passages to make them rhyme, for instance. So there's a long tradition of artists using non-Biblical material in order to adapt the message to a different medium. Protestants think of church as the means of bringing people to the Bible. Historically the Church has seen music, statues, stained glass, and drama as valid media for the transmission of Gospel truths and the salvation of souls. The R.C. tradition does hold, with mainstream and fundamentalist Protestatnts, that only the Bible is the inspired Word of God, but in the Catholic tradition, the purpose of the Bible is to bring people into the Church, which is where they can receive the sacraments -- rituals involving physical things such as bread, wine, water, oil, hands. These sacraments can be described in words, but take on their full meaning only when they take on physical form.

Gibson was trying to reach (one might even say, deeply disturb) an audience used to all kinds of images of carnage. He wanted to unsettle the audience in such a way that the final glimpse of the resurrection would leave people hungry for more.

Mainstream Christianity will benefit from an artistic vision of the meaning of religion that does not focus excessively on eschatology -- that is, the Rapture, the Apocalypse, end of the world, you name it. Now people have something else to talk about.

Examining the '10%' MemeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've encountered this statistic in student papers before, so I know that Kinsey didn't actually claim that 10% of the population was gay. According to The Kinsey Institiute, "10% of males were more or less exclusively homosexual and 8% of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. For females, Kinsey reported a range of 2-6% for more or less exclusively homosexual experience/response."

That's not the same thing as saying 10% of the population is gay, but it's much less quotable. Just like a student who has already written a research paper that defends his or her position, any advocacy groups looking for statistics to support their views will emphasize the evidence that supports their position best, and often completely ignore evidence that calls their convictions into question.

I haven't read any of the Kinsey reports, but I am aware of the controversy over his research methods. In one study, he measured the number of ograsms that juvenile male subjects have during a timed period -- and this study included children from age 14 to 5 months. One of Kinsey's former associates says the research included collecting information from trained volunteers who had experience. Or, to give the same statement a shocking "spin" -- that is, they worked over an extended period of time with pedophiles who used stopwatches to observe "partners" as young as 5 months.

Dr. Judith Reiseman writes,

Kinsey fathered not only the sexual revolution, as Hugh Hefner and others have said, but the homosexual revolution as well. Harry Hay gave Kinsey that credit when Hay read in 1948 that Kinsey found "10%" of the male population homosexual. Following the successful path of the Black Civil Rights movement, Hay, a long-time communist organizer, said 10% was a political force which could be melded into a "sexual minority" only seeking "minority rights." With Kinsey as the wind in his sails, Hay formed the Mattachine Society.

But 26% (1,400) of Kinsey's alleged 5,300 white male subjects were already "sex offenders."[34] As far as the data can be established, an additional 25% were incarcerated prisoners; some numbers were big city "pimps," "hold-up men," "thieves;" roughly 4% were male prostitutes as well as sundry other criminals; and some hundreds of homosexual activists at various "gay bars" and other haunts from coast to coast.[35] This group of social outcasts and deviants were then redefined by the Kinsey team as representing your average "Joe College." With adequate press and university publicity, the people believed what they were told by our respectable scientists, that mass sexual perversion was common nationwide-so our sex education and our laws must be changed to reflect Kinsey's "reality." -- Kinsey and the Homosexual Revolution

So... regardless of whether you agree that people found in gay bars are "social outcasts and deviants," the study of 5300 white males included 26% who were "sexual offenders" and 25% who were "incarcerated prisoners".

I'd have to read the study myself to determine whether Kisney would count a prisoner who is serving a jail term of three years, and who is raped by his fellow-prisoners on one occasion, would count as having sexual experiences that are "more or less exclusively homosexual" during that three-year period.

But look out -- Dr. Reiseman is a professor of communication, she is not an expert in human sexuality; her area of expertise is not human sexuality, but how selected details of the Kinsey studies have been publicized by certain advocacy groups, to the point where nowadays few people bother to question them. She is president of "The Institute for Media Education," and she writes books and gives talks on the subject of fraudulent sexuality studies; thus, she's made a career out of debunking Kinsey's research. Those details may affect how you accept the evidence she chooses to present, but you should be equally critical of the way people who support Kinsey's claims present Kinsey's research. (See www.drjudithreisman.org.)

No matter what your position on whatever issue, be skeptical of statistics that you hear someone cite on TV or that you find online. I think supporters of gay marriage should stay far away from the 10% statistic.

What stinks about the whole affair is not the glee with which Drudge refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good lie, but that most of those lies (including, apparently, this most recent one) are supplied to him by print journalists who don't have enough evidence to put them into their own pages.

Thanks to people like Drudge, the internet is turning into a gigantic gossip laundering operation for cowardly print hacks. Heard a juicy rumour about a presidential candidate? Know it's probably total rubbish but want to print it anyway? No problem! Just leak it to Drudge, wait for him to print it and then run it in your own pages as an "internet rumour". Job done. --Paul Carr --Why Drudge is bad for online journalism  (Media Guardian)

The Nietzschean diet, which commands its adherents to eat superhuman amounts of whatever they most fear, is developing a strong following in America. ... "One must strive to eat dangerously as one comes into the Will to Power Oneself Thin," Nietzsche wrote. "What do you fear? By this are you truly Fattened. You must embrace your Fears, as well as your Fat, and learn to Laugh as you consume them, along with Generous Portions of Simple Salad. Remember, as you stare into the lettuce, the lettuce stares also into you." --New Nietzchean Diet Lets You Eat Whatever You Fear Most (The Onion (Satire))

Today's computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished. It's just like "Space, we've done that!" -- a few inches of exploration and some people think it's over.....Today's arbitrarily constructed computer world is also based on paper simulation, or WYSIWYG. That's where we're stuck in the current model, where most software seems to be mapped to paper. ("WYSIWYG" generally means "What You See is What You Get"-- meaning what you get *when you print it OUT*). In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today's software concepts. --Theodore Nelson --Way Out of the Box (Ted Nelson's EPrint Archive)

Nelson writes "the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper," but as Nick Montfort reminds us in his "Continuous Paper," computer culture was well-established before screens replaced the rolls of paper streaming through print terminals and teletypes.

The document quoted above is an example of Nelson's version of a two-way web, part of the "transquotation" concept in his Xanadu. His ideas challenge too many people's notions of writing, ownership, and locality to catch on in the mainstream (at least for now). The freak-your-mind possibilities of this implementation of open-source text sound fantastic. I'm sure this has been debated in the RSS/XML/Whatever debates that often gets A-list bloggers riled up. I need to get a bigger job jar -- mine's overflowing as it is. But here's a light piece about Xanadu and transclusion.

The notion that women want to be with their kids is crucial to the logic of de Marneffe'sargument. With it, she inverts the whole Friedanian case against domesticity. In de Marneffe'sview, it is a mistake to equate staying at home with forgoing an adult identity, because it is precisely in caring for children that an adult identity is forged. (As I write this, my five-year-old twins are marching around the house, naked, singing, ?Ants! Ants! Ants wear underpants!?) She realizes that this notion may strike some as hopelessly regressive; however, she assures us, it is not. --Elizabeth Kolbert --Mother Courage: Kids, Career and Culture (The New Yorker)

The final paragraph of this review highlights classist assumptions that, according to the author, define the modern women's movement, which seems to include arrangements by which women who want careers outside of the home purchase the services of women to replace them as caregivers and housekeepers. Presumably, these working-class women work, not out of a personal desire, but out of financial necessity.

For many under 30, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" is, improbably, an important news source.

A poll released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people aged 18 to 29 cited "The Daily Show" and "Saturday Night Live" as a place where they regularly learned presidential campaign news.

--Young America's news source: Jon Stewart (CNN)

Random conversations with nine people, aged 19 to 26, waiting to see a taping of "The Daily Show" last week revealed two who admitted they learned much about the news from the program.

It's a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. --Jakob Nielsen --Risks of Quantitative Studies (Alertbox)

Scientists have cast doubt on the well-established theory that a single, massive asteroid strike killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

New data suggests the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, supposedly created by the collision, predates the extinction of the dinosaurs by about 300,000 years.

--Dinosaur impact theory challenged (BBC)

So why this terror of the new medium? I don't think it has much to do with the concern to protect the weak and feeble-minded potential murderers out there. This is all about money.

Television is one of the media which has the most to lose, as statistics show that games take time away not from people's reading , but from their "screen-time".... The coke-swilling, hamburger-gobbling habits that the swedish activist blame video games for, are according to this research created by television and commercials, and maintained by the sedentary lifestyle learned in front of the screen. --Torill Mortensen responds to the latest outbreak of the "videogames cause violence" meme. --Games, violence, money and the criteria of news (Thinking with My Fingers)

The electric shock hadn't hurt Jeremy very much, but he had bumped his head on a metal leg of the auditorium seats which he fell into. I had told him to ham it up when I applied the electrode of my violet-ray machine to his outstretched hand, but this was much more than I expected.

I was using the machine in a lecture on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Many of the Romantics thought of themselves as "natural philosophers" and employed such devices to experiment with electricity, which they thought had rejuvenating powers.) I was so flustered by Jeremy's feigned collapse (and twitching) that for another five minutes into my lecture, I forgot to remove my black rubber gloves. But I'll bet that was one of a handful of lectures those students will remember for a long time; maybe they'll even retain an intuitive appreciation for the complementary relationship of science and literature.

[...]

Eccentric professors are genuinely loved, and they are a glue that holds together the culture of an institution over time. They are not highly paid, transient "superstars"; but they are the professors to whom former students send their own college-age children. --Thomas H. Benton --In Praise of Eccentric Professors (Chronicle)

From Yahoo! News:

Update: Torill responds.The Importance of PunctuationJerz's Literacy Weblog)

44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files

In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the nation'sadult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:

• 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
• 20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their computers.
• 17% have posted written material on Web sites.
• 13% maintain their own Web sites.
• 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
• 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
• 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
• 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
• 6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
• 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
• 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
• 3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
• 2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.

--Content Creation Online (Pew Internet Trust)

I'm not sure that permitting file-sharing should be in the same category as providing original content to the web, but it's still an impressive set of statistics.

While no replacement for writing articles and books, and no one is going to get tenured or promoted through blogging (at least not today); but what I've called a serious blogger would get a big plus on the positive side on the ledger from me when it gets to merit review time! Failing to reward it would be failing to recognize that blogging is not just another new communication medium; it is a new way to do scholarship. Mark Sargent (a dean at Villanova) --Academic Credit for Blogging (Professor Bainbridge)

I reworked the draft, adding some charts and tables to demonstrate that the program wouldn't require any new dollars. But mostly I substituted abstract nouns for concrete ones, stuffed sentences with nominalizations, and replaced active verbs with passives, violating the rules of writing that students in the M.F.A. program would be expected to follow. --Dennis Baron --New Programs, New Problems (Chronicle)

I'm not part of Seton Hill's MFA program, but as the "new media journalism" specialist I was hired to take a leadership role in getting the NMJ program off the ground.

Planning for the program was well underway when I was hired, so my role was mostly writing up or otherwise wrangling together syllabi to flesh out the 8 or so new courses in the NMJ curriculum. Two of the courses hit administrative snags that John never fully explained to me, aside from glancing in the direction of the administration building and giving a sad little sigh every time I brought it up. For a sample syllabus on "New Media Aesthetics," I had offered a special topic course on "The Documentary Film" because I thought it would fit better in a journalism program, because I thought it would be easier to explain that course to non-experts, and because it's a genre that interests me; but cinema also fits in with art and communications, so the proposal set up a red flag.

John was very encouraging when I suggested that I supply a version of the syllabus that focused on digital culture instead.

He handled all the final paperwork details for the new slate of courses. As the deadline approached, I sent him an e-mail with about 12 files in different formats, and he filled out all the forms, checking the right boxes and, I presume, providing the right amount of administrativese.

Sensory Immersion vs. PainJerz's Literacy Weblog)

"What are tweezers?" he asked.

"Kind of like little pliers," I said.

I poked the tweezers into the palm of my hand, showing him the red mark but noting that my skin didn't bleed. I then let him poke my hand with the tweezers. More red marks, but no blood. Then I let him poke his own hand. He got the tweezers turned around and poked the rounded handle on his palm... his eyes lit up and he said, "That didn't hurt at all!"

I had recently blogged a BBC article about a VR system designed to distract patients who are undergoing a painful procedure. So I asked Peter to read a poster written in an Old English style typeface. At six, he's an excellent reader, but the lettering was difficult for him.

By the time he got through the third word, I had the sliver out.