August 2004 Archive Page

After a week, Rubel -- a blogging aficionado and practitioner who writes about the narrow topic of how blogs and participatory journalism are affecting the practice of public relations -- says he definitely lacked the depth of knowledge of current events gained in a normal week. "I felt a little naked," he says, having received the basics of the week's news from blogs, but not getting the real meat. --Steve Outing
--The Blog-Only News Diet (PoynterOnline)

Of course Rubel got a shallow perspective on the news... his experiment involved only reading the blog entries (and, presumably, whatever excerpts from other sources the bloggers chose to post). He didn't follow the links that bloggers cited. The bloggers held big steaming slabs of meat out to him, but he ignored them in favor of the garnishes.

This is a fundamental misuse of the medium of hypertext. If you write for traditinal print, you have to define your terms, and put in all the necessary background and context, so that your reader can construct something of significance out of the information you have provided. When you write for hypertext, you can simply link to the background, definitions, and context -- the sequential paragraph just isn't the main conveyor of meaning in hypertext prose.

Rubel might just as well have printed out these blog entries and read them on a park bench -- he's reading the words, but the words are only part of the medium.

While it's very clear to anyone who has spent time in message forums or blogs that many people don't actually "click through" to check sources, still, to create an experiment that deliberately preculdes click-throughs probably won't end up measuring anything about blogs.

Like a good journalist, Outing doesn't offer any criticism directly, but he does link to Jeff Jarvis, who claims Rubel's experiment is a PR stunt. (Rubel responds & Jarvis re-responds in the comments.)

Blogs do serve as a platform for opinion, but there are countless blogs that I value not because I agree with (or even care about) the blogger's opinions, but because the blog is a great source for intersting links.

Via Torill Mortensen, who cautions, "Some blogs can act as news sources and contain journalistic coverage of a topic. But don't confuse the channel and the medium! A blog is a channel for many different genres, and not a newsmedium."

Maybe my next scholarly project will be an experiment in which I watch TV with my eyes closed. Or maybe I'll read only words that have no vowels in them.

Thirty-five years after computer scientists at UCLA linked two bulky computers using a 15-foot gray cable, testing a new way for exchanging data over networks, what would ultimately become the Internet remains a work in progress. --Anick Jesdanun
--Web Turns 35, but Still Work in Progress (AP/My Way)

It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials.

"As a high school librarian, part of my job is to help my students develop critical thinking skills," Stagnitta wrote. "One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site."

Wikipedia, she explains, takes the idea of open source one step too far for most of us. --Al Fasoldt
--Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source  (Post-Standard)

I'm teaching a brief unit on Wikis in "Writing for the Internet" this fall.

I disagree with Stagnitta's comment, "there is no editorial review of the content". I have myself edited many documents, and I have seen pages that I created modified greatly over a short amount of time.

Wikipedia is not the place to consult for original research, but then again, neither is a traditional printed encyclopedia. Wikipedia is very useful when looking for quick background on breaking news, since the chances are that someone who already knows more about the subject than you do will have been there before you and at least posted a few links.

A Wiki is a consensus builder. People who disagree on a point will keep changing each other's language until everyone is either satisfied or the dominant view takes over. A small number of dedicated geeks can have an overwhelming effect on Wikipedia. Somehow I doubt that the entry on the Amish doesn't include a lot of input from people who are living on Amish farms. It's important to be aware of that kind of bias.

Obviously, Wikipedia doesn't have the authority of a peer-reviewed academic article. I do find it useful as a research guide, though; for instance, the Wikipedia article on a particular subject may include references to names and lines of thinking that I can later use when doing library research.

Somerby's comments would seem like blasphemy in the so-called "blogosphere," but many online writers and observers agree that blogs, with a handful of exceptions, have had virtually no impact on the national conversation, mainstream media coverage of politics or large, orchestrated events like the parties' quadrennial nominating conventions. --Kevin Canfield

--Impact of blogs seen as slight (The Journal News)

The "Game Development Scholarship for Women" will help cover costs for women attending the Guildhall, an 18-month certificate program at SMU designed by noted game developers. Tuition for the six-term program is $37,000.

--School offering women's gaming scholarship (CNN/Reuters)

"Beam Me Up Scotty...One Last Time" is the quite-serious title to a three-day event at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel billed as a farewell to the actor who, as fiery Montgomery Scott, ran the U.S.S. Enterprise's engineering deck on Trek's 1966-69 flagship series and six big-screen adventures. --Joal Ryan

--Scotty Says Goodbye (E! Online)

I managed to work a reference to Scotty into my dissertation. He was my favorite Trek character, and I enjoyed his guest star appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

British university students spend nearly three times as much on drink as they spend on books, according to a survey by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which is compiling a student-living index. --Social Studies (Globe and Mail)

Part of a cornucopia of minutia, pointed out by Katja.

You know the strategy by now. Hundreds of right-wing think tanks pound the media with press releases. Newspapers and cable TV stations smell a conflict -- always a safe bet for increasing circulations and ratings -- and bring in the "think tank" experts for interviews. They pound away, repeating the same stock phrases over and over. They'[re echoed by AM talk radio, Good Morning America, and even Jim Lehrer on the goddamned News Hour, and at a certain point, you'll hear your neighbors repeat them as if they were talking about truths handed down from the Mount.

You see, right-wing extremists are the first to have figured out how to manipulate today's electronic media to modify what they call "conventional wisdom." --Bryan Pfaffenberger
--The War on Academic Freedom (Pink Bunny of Battle)

Bryan Pfaffenberger, a historian of technology at the University of Virginia, invited me to help publicize this essay. It's not the essay I would have written, but I do think it's blogworthy and relevant.

Pfaffenberger faults David Horowitz, a former liberal turned conservative, for encouraging his fellow conservatives to use emotion and position themselves as the oppressed underdog in order to gain public sympathy on issues involving the politics of the collegiate environment.

But this is basic rhetoric 101. The Bush administration has been clumsy at it, as was Hillary Clinton when she invoked the "vast right-wing conspiracy" to explain the sequence of events that led to her husband's impeachment. Michael Moore is an expert. Even liberals have criticized his one-sided presentation of the Iraqi political situation before the war.

If more voters had a basic grounding in rhetoric, such that they could identify exactly what is happening when a politician ducks a question, waves a flag, invokes a boogeyman, or engages in Orwellian duckspeak, then the soft, undifferentiated and uncommitted middle wouldn't be such attractive fodder for pundits and demagogues.

Pfaffenberger doesn't cite the source of the meme, but dismisses as "bogus" the evidence supporting the claim that Democrats outnumber Republicans in higher education by 10 to 1.

To challenge that meme, he notes that in 2000, professors gave more money to Bush than to Gore. He cites Capital Eye, which says that Bush raised "more than $1 million" and Gore raised "nearly $968,000" from "educational interests". These are "contributions from PACs and individuals giving $200 or more".

So, according to these figures, Bush raised about 5% more from educational interests than Gore did. That's hardly an overwhelming difference. One jet-setting law school or MBA professor who makes $250,000 a year might easily offset the donations of 10 granola-crunching long-haired adjunct professors of art, English, or psychology. I don't see evidence that says these funds come from individual professors; "educational interests" implies a much broader scope.

Further, Capital Eye cites Open Secrets, which also gives figures for 2004, which tell a very different story. Kerry has so far collected $3,754,189 from educational interests, and Bush less than half of that -- $1,618,667. (Dean raised another $1,260,174.) If Bush's slight edge over Gore in 2000 is presented as evidence against the claim that lefties outnumber righties in education, then Kerry's solid lead over Bush in in 2004 should be evidence supporting the claim.

In my journalism class last tear, I used chapters from Bias and What Liberal Media? to examine the issue of statistics and political slant in journalism. Reporters tend to be more liberal than the general public on social issues; the conscientious reporters may over-compensate; but Bias [sorry, it was It Ain't Necessarily So] describes how reporters tended to play up studies that had good things to say about daycare, since many reporters were part of two-career couples. This kind of bias can be subconscious.

Full disclosure: my wife is a full-time mother and home-schooler. But don't worry, feminists -- I'm the bath-giver and the dish-washer, the tucker-inner and the bedtime-story-reader. My wife handles all the finances, and she can sleep till noon every Saturday.

Reporters with the noblest of intentions are nonetheless working for huge corporations that are ultimately more interested in staying in business than in publishing the truth (and bravo to those who manage to do both). The disappearance of a blonde suburban girl gets more coverage than that of a black inner-city girl because the first story is expected to sell more papers. It shouldn't work that way, but it does. That's another form of bias. Ideally, a university should be positioned to prevent that kind of outside pressure.

Pfaffenberger is right to note that labels such as "liberal" and "conservative" shift over time. But suggesting the suggestion offered by Reees that a "conservative" opinion on the revolutionary war would have to favor the British is as far off the mark as the rightist complaint that a critical analysis of the mythology and contradictions surrounding the nation's birth is unpatriotic. A good historian of any political persuasion would have to present the competing perspectives of the groups that were involved in historical conflicts.

Since my top priority right now is preparing for the new semester that starts in a few days, I'll just link to what I wrote recently about politics in the classroom. I usually try to adopt a pose of neutrality, until some prevailing opinion arises from the class, at which point I work against it. (My colleague Mike Arnzen is better at this than I am.) There are, of course, limits to this pose. You won't catch me defending slavery -- though I will note the irony that the first black slave in America was owned by a black man, and Africans regularly sold slaves to white traders.

Pfaffenberger's indignation at the implication that he, as a Democrat, is incapable of being fair in the classroom rings a bit hollow when placed alongside his blanket statement that "conservatives can't see that there's a nonpartisan zone of scholarly debate." Pfaffenberger's own essay demonstrates some of the very rhetorical tricks that he censures, so I'm not sure how to respond. Given that his political persona is The Pink Bunny of Battle, perhaps I'm reading too much into his rhetorical critique.

On a more serious note, I heartily endorse Pfaffenberger's insistence that professors not be forced to include fringe perspectives merely in the service of intellectual diversity. Of course, the study of literature in the past 50 years or so has been pretty much been a steady unraveling of the mainstream and an embracement of the fringe, so the rejection of the fringe is actually a conservative action within English studies. Unless the idea of a received canon of literary greats is so out of date that it is, itself, a fringe view by now.

The narratologist-heavy Princeton conference on video game criticism would have been even livelier than it was, had some ludologists been on the program. But it was sponsored by the English department, a field that naturally excretes narratologists. A panel hosted recently by SHU to examine the impact of Gibson's Passion on Jewish relations would possibly have benefited from the participation of someone with a positive reaction to the movie. The panel was sponsored by our Catholic Center for Holocaust Studies; the panelists stayed on topic, which means they didn't talk about the Christian significance -- which struck some in the audience as strange, given Seton Hill's identity as a Catholic school. Was there some nefarious conspiracy to exclude opposing views? I don't think so. These scholarly events had to focus on a particular subset of possible views. That's just the nature of scholarly inquiry.

I'm reminded of The Simpsons, where a NASA announcer speaks enthusiastically of the diversity aboard a space shuttle mission: "We have a mathematician, a different *kind* of mathematician, and... a statistician!" What seems to be diverse from those within a narrow field can seem very one-sided to those on the outside.

Kerry needed to appear on The Daily Show because the American media itself has become ridiculous and he needs the endorsement of the jokers, not political pundits. The cable news shows that Jon Stewart mocks have become absurdly partisan. The print press is going through a period of self-flagellation as newspaper after newspaper apologizes and backtracks on its initial coverage of the need to go to war with Iraq.
-- John Doyle
--Jokesters now the go-to guys for U.S. candidates (Globe and Mail)

Our genes are basically the same now, as they were a hundred thousand years ago, as evidenced from the accepted theory that the more distant surviving twigs of our family tree branched off at about that time. Thus, however much concrete or how many people I am surrounded by, in my heart and in my brain I am still a Stone Age person. And as such, I do not need a crowd -- I should be with my tribe. But in today'sworld, the crowd is all I have. --Bjørn Grinde --The Garden of Eden (Entelechy Journal)

I'm always leery of the instinct to sentimentalize and idealize life in union with nature. This brief essay examines some underlying cultural tension in the modern world:

Deep inside we yearn for the Garden of Eden, for a life in tune with our genes: a life in the tribe and close to nature. But we may not be aware of the gloom taking root in its absence, like we never sensed the allergy coming.

But now, the reality of exchange rates and international income gaps has spawned a virtual version of the real-world relationship between rich and poor countries. While players in wealthier countries casually drop hundreds of dollars to buy their way into better positions in the games -- or out of tedious parts of the games -- some workers in poorer countries are playing around the clock to produce virtual goods that earn them real money.

These "currency farmers" sell their virtual goods to companies that, in turn, offer them to players who can afford to pay. --Laila Weir
--Boring Game? Outsource It  (Wired)

Games where kids chase each other - tag or even cops and robbers - are generally banned in Natomas Unified's elementary schools. No grabbing or pushing is allowed.

At Natomas Park, students can only toss and catch a football - tackling or blocking isn't permitted. But the no-contact rule applies beyond the grade-school gridiron.

During lunch recess one recent afternoon, yard supervisor Janice Hudson spotted a first-grader pushing a girl on the swing.

"Do not push," Hudson told the student. "Let her push herself, please." --Sandy Louey

--Recess gets regulated (Sacramento Bee)

I wasn't exactly the kid who was picked first for sports teams, but my height gave me an advangate in basketball and volleyball. And due to a bizarre chain of circumstances I placed second in an seventh-grade wrestling tournament. Nothing formal -- the gym teacher just paired us up over a period of several gym classes. I beat a kid who was a friend of mine, who was just having fun and didn't try very hard. Then I got creamed by a jock, and thought my wrestling days were over, but I had to keep wrestling in the tournament of losers. I accidentally hit a mid-tier jock in the nose with the back of my hand, and he forfeited the match to go to the clinic. The next jock I was supposed to wrestle was goofing off and wasn't around when it was his turn, and he forfeited that match, too. Suddenly, I realized I had won the tournament of losers, and found myself facing the alpha jock.

I immediately flopped on my back and pounded the mat three times, surrendering. That was somewhat less humiliating and a lot less bloody than being beat fair and square. It also robbed the alpha jock of the adrenaline fix he'd been hoping for.

Still, a ban on first-graders pushing each other on swings? That seems excessive.

Armed men stormed into an art museum Sunday, threatened staff at gunpoint and stole Edvard Munch's famous paintings "The Scream" and "Madonna" before the eyes of stunned museum-goers.

The thieves yanked the paintings off the walls of Oslo's Munch museum and loaded them into a waiting car outside, said a witness, French radio producer Francois Castang.

Police spokeswoman Hilde Walsoe said the two or three armed men threatened a museum employee with a handgun to give them the two paintings, including one of four versions of "The Scream" - Munch's famed depiction of an anguished figure with its head in its hands. --Munch Paintings Stolen From Norway Museum (AP/Myway)

Participants in the games may respond to written questions from reporters or participate in online chat sessions -- akin to a face-to-face or telephone interview -- but they may not post journals or blogs until the Games end Aug. 29.

To protect lucrative broadcast contracts, athletes and other participants are also prohibited from posting any video, audio or still photos they take themselves, even after the Games, unless they get permission ahead of time.
--You're Athletes, Not Journalists (Wired|AP)

The importance of classification, like any other piece of information, is that it affects the way people think and behave. Let’s say that a big space story breaks, and the editors of The New York Times want someone to cover it. Each journalist has a beat: national, local, foreign, sports, business, science, etc. Space is classified under science, so the editors choose a science journalist. The science journalist will naturally emphasize the science component of the story, and will contact scientists for their reaction to the story. During this whole process, from the editors to the journalist to the finished article, no one is deliberately promoting the science aspects of the story. Everyone simply accepts and works under the assumption that space belongs to science.

Saying that space is a region, and not a science or technology, does not mean that science and technology are unimportant. Science and technology are essential to space activities, and will continue to be so. Saying that space is a region allows other important subjects to be considered as well. --Michael Huang

--Space and subject classification (The Space Review)

The caption that goes along with this brief story is misleading: "People looking for books about space in a library usually end up in the science or technology section; should those books instead be in the geography section?"

Huang never actually mentions "geography". There's an etymological problem with suggesting that "space" is a subset of "geo-" (a root with the meaning "earth").

I suppose there's nothing wrong with terms like "Martian earthquake," since the lowercased "earth" just means "soil". Thus, "the geology of Mars" makes sense. Still, this isn't a debate Huang started -- it was inadvertently started by whoever wrote the caption.

Huang starts with a reference to Orwell, noting that the latter criticizes "the habitual use of euphemisms and opaque language for political ends". But I'm not sure that Orwell is really the right person to cite here.

On Mike Vitia's blog, I wrote recently about politics in the composition classroom. Mike noted that an attempt by an instructor to free a student from the grip of a dominant ideology is, in practice, typically hard to distinguish from the instructor's attempt to convert students to a different ideology (such as the one in whose grip the instructor happily resides). An ideology that says the composition classroom is no place for ideological diatribes is, itself, an ideology, since no human can really be completely objective, and all communication is a rhetorical act of some sort. I think Mike made a good point and I enjoyed being prodded to post a few thoughts about the subject.

So it's fair to argue that the classification of "space" as a subcategory of "science" serves a political interest, even if there is no secret cabal of experts in smoky rooms who set things up that way to serve nefarious (or noble) ends. Orwell was talking about the deliberate use of passive verbs and the invention of euphemisms to deceive. That's something a little different from the habitual use of a received metaphor. One such is the conduit metaphor, which Reddy says conditions us to think of communication as the transfer of information from the sender to the receiver. Reddy suggests a constructivist metaphor, which invites us to consider the hard work the receiver has to do in order to build a mental model to make sense of what someone else is saying.

Political Machine is more a lampoon of American politics than a celebration or critique. The game leaves no room for depth or complexity in the candidates' messages; each ad sounds exactly like the next. "John Kerry (or George Bush) opposes (or supports) drilling in ANWR. Support American values. Vote John Kerry."

The reporters all look alike, too. And newspaper coverage is as simple and sensational as can be. It's actually quite funny.

But beneath its cartoonish veneer, Political Machine offers a cynical view of American politics. Every move a candidate makes is based on polling data. Don't speechify about, say, abortion because you want to protect a woman's right to choose or save some unborn children. Do it because it'll help you in the polls. --Jason Silverman

--Campaign Game Mimics Real Life (Wired)

Many people tell stories of Giant Octopus or Squid, but I want to find out more about these "deadly" creatures and what they do. Ever since I was small, I thought how do they do all those cool things? Well, this search helped me find that information!!!!!!!! --Mike --Octopus (Orchard Hill Elementary School)

A fifth-grader posts a diary about using the internet to search for information on octopodes.

I would suggest that he post links to the exact pages where he found his information, and post those links right inside the text of his report, rather than wait for the "Works Cited" section. Otherwise, good job, Mike!

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Insensitive computer programmers with little knowledge of geography have cost the giant Microsoft company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business and led hapless company employees to be arrested by offended governments. --Paul Brown --Microsoft pays dear for insults through ignorance (Guardian Unlimited)

A Web Analytics Information Explosion

• See your website visitors as animated characters in a virtual city
• Watch visitors move from page to page and interact with your site
• See buses (search engines) deliver new visitors to buildings
• Pull up detailed 'Passports' on any visitor
• Replay website traffic from any date or time
• View dozens of professional reports in an instant
  
• Provide Live Help
• And so very much more!

--VistitorVille: Screenshots (VisitorVille)

Must... stop... analyzing... server... logs!

toronto's western skyline seen from the cn tower's lookout area. --Dark Skyline (Top Left Pixel)

Julia, a friend of mine from my Toronto days, sent me a link to this photoblog, which features the sights of a city I remember fondly. This beautiful view from what some call a skyline-dominating tourist attraction (the CN Tower) was well worth a look.

A thumbnail image doesn't do this one justice -- click the link instead.

Each post is like DNA. It carries the core of your self-hood. Never commit to the web any remark, about the goat cheese you had served to you by your comely slave, or how the grape arbor was pruned on your Sabine Farm, or how you fell off your horse, or what Pippa drew on brown paper, without considering it from within the matrix of Author/Reader, Fool/Knave, Apparent Audience/Intended Audience. Create for each post a tacit occasion, no less than did St Paul in his Epistles. And let your blog, over time, be like a Bildungsroman, the story of your gradual awakening from Dunce to Artist. Let it be a series of Parables addressed, as in St. Mark, by the Saved to the Saved, in the presence of the Damned. Let the parables be dark to the Damned, that they might burn forever and ever in hell, as God in his Infinite Goodness requires so that we might look down with Him from Heaven and gloat, like Anne Coulter to whom my work, as Fool or Knave, is meant as homage in a spirit of mutual respect. The Happy Tutor --The Art of Blogging (Horace and St. Paul) (The Happy Tutor)

Via vitia.

Campus Coming Alive Again (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The Seton Hill student blog site, blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj, has seen activity from several intrepid souls who used their blogs to keep in touch since saying good-bye in may. It's also interesting to see comments from an increasing number of visitors who don't have blogs themselves, but who obviously know the bloggers.

Now I'm seeing new faces on campus, with a stray parent or two in tow, checking out where that stairwell goes or whether it's true that there really is no shorcut from point A to point B.

I had a great summer, and am having trouble settling into a routine. I've mentioned before that I haven't been able to access the web from home for about 2 weeks now, and before that I went on a few short family trips, so my in-box is brimming and my to-do list is bursting.

Back to work.

A major change over the years has been a declining emphasis on using search to identify good sites as such. Rather than hunt for sites to explore and use in depth, users now hunt for specific answers. The Web as a whole has thus become one agglomerated resource for people who use search engines to dredge up specific pages related to specific needs, without caring which sites supply the pages.

Search engines have essentially become answer engines. Their job is no longer resource discovery, but rather to answer users' questions. --Jakob Nielsen --When Search Engines Become Answer Engines (Alertbox)

This trend has important ramifications for the kind of "find the answer" research scavenger hunts that were an important part of the way I learned how to use the library, in the days before the WWW. My instructors wanted me to use an index to find a good source, then read that source to find the answer.

But the best-quality academic information is typically not well-indexed by Google, since most of it is kept behind a subscription firewall, with tuition fees permitting students open access to those services subscribed to by their school's library.

There are many peer-reviewed academic journals that do publish their full text online, but unless those sites have blogging communities attached to them (cf. Kairos and KairosNews), an academic journal website is typically updated so infrequently that search engines probably don't spider them very often. Thus, the freshest, best info is often going to be the hardest to find, if your starting point is a general-access search engine.

It's not surprising that marketers love IntelliTxt while many journalists despise it. AlwaysOn columnist Rafe Needleman called IntelliTxt "pretty bad news" from an ethics standpoint "because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased." --Adam L. Penenberg --This Headline Is Not for Sale (Wired)

The "IntelliTxt" ad service inserts inline links into the body of a news article. I'd agree that this oversteps a line, potentially blurring what should be a pretty clear boundary between editorial content and paid advertising.

Blobjects are blob-shaped objects, because of NURBS and meshes and splines and injection molding and CAD-CAM. They're highly curvilinear consumer items designed on workstations, and then they're generally blasted into being in a burst of injection-molded goo.

Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought to the consumer shelf.

Blobjects were impossible until the early 1990s. Then they got cheap. Nowadays they're commodities. Our contemporary world is absolutely littered with these things, these blobjects. Blobjects are so entirely common now that they are passe' and showing their age. --Bruce Sterling at SISGRAPH
--When Blobjects Rule the Earth (Boing Boing)

Michael Keaton ("Batman") will join Lindsay Lohan ("Mean Girls") in Disney's "Herbie: Fully Loaded" according to Variety, but the film's writers might be its brightest spot. Herbie is a car with a mind of his own, but don't let that fool you--this is no "Knight Rider." --HERBIE: FULLY LOADED Casting News (TD)

My six-and-a-half-year-old son is a big fan of the Herbie series.

In an effort to educate the nation's neediest children on nutrition, a new project uses the familiar medium of video games to broadcast its message.

The Fantastic Food Challenge, a package of four computer games, is designed to teach people who get nutrition aid such as federal food stamps how to make better use of their food. Because so many young adults played such games as kids, they ought to be able to learn more easily from them, too, said the project's director.
--Kids, Play With Your Food (Wired|AP)

In computer and math science, holders of high school diplomas and associate's degrees make up approximately 40 percent of employees. In engineering, 20 percent of workers have less than a bachelor's degree. The proportions are much smaller (10 percent or less) for occupations in the life, physical and social sciences. --Ed Frauenheim --Many engineers lack a four-year degree (CNET\MyWay)

Thanks for another good suggestion, Rosemary.

Incidentally, I've been blogging less in the past few days because the school's modem pool seems to be inaccessible, and I can only get online when I'm at work. I'm back at work full-time now, but classes start in about 10 days, so I'll be rationing my blogging.

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet.

At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was. --Tony Long
--It's Just the 'internet' Now  (Wired)

Thank goodness. I occasionally capitalized Internet internet when used as a noun -- probably more than I wanted to, thanks to Microsoft Word's "autocorrect" feature.

The books are written by a small stable of independent authors, who receive 50 percent royalties, a rate unheard of in traditional publishing. Edited collaboratively over the Net, the books are published "within moments of going to press" as small, downloadable PDF files.

Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers -- the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.

Crucially, the books are timely. Print books, on the other hand, especially computer-oriented reference texts, are often out of date by the time they hit store shelves. --Leander Kahney --Net Publishing Made Profitable  (Wired)

Blast from the Past (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just got an e-mail from someone I knew in elementary school. She and I were often rivals for class reading contests and vocabulary quizzes and such. I remember her as mature and well above my own lowly social status. But I always thought she was nice, and often wondered what became of her.

She says she had a dream the other night, in which I was her professor, and she was sassing me and giving me attitude. When she tried to remind me that we were elementary school classmates, she says I looked at her like I didn't remember her.

She Googled me to say hello.

Isn't the Internet cool?

Of course, it's also depressing to realize that I have such vivid memories of events that happened 25 years ago. Ah, youth!

If your IF game has a story, your scene descriptions should serve the story. If you want to give your game atmosphere, broaden your use of sense details within your scene descriptions to include sounds, smells, and even textures, instead of just sights. If you want your game to have a strong narrative voice, scene descriptions are a good place to establish it. If you are using a well-defined PC, the scene descriptions can be used to reinforce your protagonist's point of view of each location. If your game has a complicated back-story, scene descriptions can provide expositional as well as locational detail. If the pace of the game quickens, scene descriptions should keep pace, becoming briefer, more active, even changing from turn to turn to sustain the player's feeling of urgency.--J. Robinson Wheeler
--Mapping the Tale: Scene Description in IF (Raddial.com)

Wheeler writes for an audience already very familiar with interactive fiction, using static quotes pulled from several well-known games and categorizing them.

My own essay on exposition in interactive fiction is intended for a broader audience (including faculty colleagues who don't know what the heck I'm talking about when I talk about interactive fiction.) My essay doesn't focus specifically on scene description, but I grappled with some of the same issues that Wheeler explores here. I also created the stub of a sample game, "Crack of Noon," to illustrate the difference between in-game text that simply announces goals, and gameplay that permits the player to piece together details that point towards a goal.

[E]ach student blog was given a set of categories. If students had already had blogs before class began, these categories could have been added to their existing blogs:

• ewriting: agenda item - outside reading
• ewriting: agenda item - student assignment(s)
• ewriting: assignment submission
• ewriting: general discussion / announcement
• non-ewriting (for students who did not create other categories)

...an aggregator (Blagg) was used to pull category-specific RSS feeds from each of the student blogs, and my faculty blog. (My faculty blog had a category for ?ewriting: assignments? as well as the ?general discussion / announcement? category.) Then we created a blog that displayed all the class'sblog posts in that category in one place. --Noah Wardrip-Fruin --Teaching with Blogs (Grand Text Auto)

I left some comments on Grand Text Auto.

One member of staff, who did not want to be named, said: "East Kilbride managers were at a training day when it was announced they would replace good morning with Mahna Mahna.

"The staff had just returned from lunch and all the managers were in a training room, sitting in a semi-circle and looking really pleased with themselves. Then one of them blurted out 'Mahna Mahna' at us without warning. We just stared blankly back at them.

"Then another manager repeated the phrase, and asked what our first reaction was when we heard it. When someone mumbled back 'do doo be-do-do', they all burst out laughing and were nodding at each other, saying, 'Told you so'."

The new store will open in December employing 250 staff. --Muppet greetings fail to fire up staff  (Scotsman)

When I first saw this, I misread that last line as "annoying 250 staff."

No two signatures by one person are exactly the same in style, so the new technique involves making a 3D model of the pressure applied when a person writes.

The model translates the writing into an image showing dips and furrows of the sample so that anomalies can be detected.

Conventionally, handwriting has been analysed by forensic experts in 2D, looking at the sequence of pen strokes in handwriting, like a signature.

But this is not entirely accurate, because the exact sequence of strokes is not always clear and can vary.

"Using virtual reality and image processing, it is possible solve two of the most difficult problems in graphology: strokes superposing and strokes direction.
--3D holograms to crack forgeries (BBC)

Suggested by Rosemary, who as I recall used to refuse to sign those digital credit-card receipt machines. I used to be very pious about refusing to do that, but nowadays when I shop I'm usually with kids, and am eager to avoid any delay at the cash register.

According to Canadian texts (six are cited), the United States planned to conquer and annex Canada during the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War and at various points in between. During the Cold War, the United States repeatedly bullied Canada into supporting its aggressive military policies. Canadian officials hoped that NATO would evolve into a North Atlantic community that would act as a counterweight to U.S. influence in Canada, but in vain: Canadian governments had to toe the U.S. line or suffer humiliation. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker, concerned that Kennedy's belligerence might lead to a nuclear war, waited three days before announcing that Canadian forces had gone on the alert. In the next election, the Americans used their influence to topple the truculent prime minister. Diefenbaker's successor, Lester Pearson, aligned Canada more closely with the United States, but in 1965 he annoyed Lyndon Johnson by calling for a bombing pause and a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War. In a meeting after the speech, Johnson grabbed Pearson by the lapels and shouted, "You pissed on my rug."

Thus have Canadian texts immortalized the Johnson vernacular.

In few countries are the texts so consistently critical of the United States as they are in Canada, but in a couple of cases the rhetoric is alarming.
--History Lessons: The View From Out There (The Washington Post (registration; will expire))

This article, a review of How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward, explains some of the knee-jerk anti-American attitude I often encountered while I was studying at the University of Toronto. I wasn't the only American student, several of my Canadian friends mentioned their dual citizenship, and some of the English faculty were transplanted Americans.

But a staff member for the graduate student union hung up on me when I told her I was American, and a few students seemed miffed that I qualified for housing in an apartment complex for international students. These were little, petty things, from people who didn't know me and didn't care. In general, the anti-Bush tone of the Kerry campaign reminds me of the anti-American tone of Canadian patriotism. There have got to be better arguments for Kerry or for Canada, but they don't speak as powerfully to the emotions (and they're not as easily lampooned, either).

I don't think this conditioned anti-American response (which, for some Canadians, serves as a substitute for patriotism) affected my relationship with any of the students or instructors that I got to know on a personal level. In a larger sense, I appreciated being asked to explain American texts to an audience of my fellow grad students that included many who, if they weren't actually overtly hostile to the U.S., didn't share the same value assumptions. As a kid, I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man, where the communists were always the bad guys; I was a bit shocked to see that the University of Toronto had posters for the "U of T Communist Club". College is a good place to challenge the assumptions that are built into us at an earlier age.

I warn my students not to freak out when they see a lot of ink in the margins of their papers. I explain my golden rule: "You put effort in, writing to me? I put effort in, writing back to you. That's the respect writers give each other."

Whenever I've watched my under-confident students in remedial courses scour returned essays for my comments, I knew it meant something to them that their work had been given real consideration, the consideration it was due. "Sarah Ben-Al"
--Don't Be That Guy (Chronicle)

"That Guy" is any of a list of bad teachers the author remembers.

As I prepare for another semester of classes, now is the time to reflect and rethink... to pat myself on the back for my recent teaching successes, and to seek ways to avoid repeating my failures.

I've found that there's never much time to do that sort of thing, once the semester begins.

WICHITA, KS?Delivering the central speech of his 10-day "Solution For America" bus campaign tour Monday, Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry outlined his one-point plan for a better America: the removal of George W. Bush from the White House.

"If I am elected in November, no inner-city child will have to live in an America where George Bush is president," Kerry said, addressing a packed Maize High School auditorium. "No senior citizen will lie awake at night, worrying about whether George Bush is still the chief executive of this country. And no American?regardless of gender, regardless of class, regardless of race?will be represented by George Bush in the world community." --Kerry Unveils One-Point Plan for Better America (The Onion (satire; will expire))

Satire, in the hands of The Onion, is a painfully funny way of making a point.

For almost an hour Saturday morning, the Associated Press reported that a 22-year-old San Francisco man, Benjamin Vanderford, had been beheaded in Iraq. The report of Vanderford's death was based on a 55-second video clip that Vanderford and two friends had faked and distributed via the Internet. The story also was picked up by the Reuters news service, and the grainy video was broadcast by two Middle Eastern television stations.

In an interview with The Chronicle hours later, two of the three filmmakers responsible for the clip said they had never expected it to be disseminated so widely, and they blamed the mass media for publicizing the stunt without making sure that the video was genuine.

--Web hoax fools news services: S.F. man fakes beheading, proves need for verification  (SFGate.com)

To those who roll their eyes at retro gamers, I say, "What is really so great about the games you are playing?" Is there really that much difference between Soul Calibur II and International Karate? We are still mashing buttons and kicking people in the groin. Why did your game take years to produce?

I can tell you what we have lost. We have lost the slapstick animation of Sam & Max Hit the Road. We have lost the hand painted sunsets of It Came from the Desert. We have lost the lush greenery in the King’s Quest series. We have lost the clever cartoon architecture in the Monkey Island series. We have lost the eerie landscapes in Out of this World.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then high abstraction was a call to all artists to do what they do best. Big budgets and big teams don't make a good game. They don't produce good art either. --Buck Feris --In Defense of Retro Gaming: A Discussion of Abstraction (Armchair Arcade)

If you can get past the wounded, tribalist tone of the first few paragraphs (which will prompt the "Go Back Click of Death" something many eye-rolling young whippersnappers), this article makes some excellent points about the function of graphics as abstractions rather than realistic simulations.

Editors say stars do their own writing but are subject to editing like any freelancer.

Keys says she tends to "overwrite. I want to get every nuance in there."

Stiles' Guardian article needed "a couple of rewrites," the actress says, "but they were good suggestions, and I didn't mind doing them. ... I have a newfound respect for journalists. It's incredibly hard to make a living at it."
--Both sides now: Stars take on new role as journalists (USA Today (will expire))

Rosemary adds, "Especially when celebrities are being given opportunities and space that had gone to journalists."

That's yet another drawback of the aggregation of media. Celebrities have a long history of hiring ghost-writers for their biographies.

At my first mock job interview with a faculty member from my home institution, I was informed that I would appear "too white." (My dissertation examined the uses of rock music and culture in American prose literature of the last 50 years, and white men have created the lion's share of the source material.)

Having been white my entire life, however, I was unsure how to amend this shortcoming in the three weeks that remained before the real interviews at the Modern Language Association convention. Am I efficient? Yes. Able to fill a niche? I think so. White? Without a doubt. --Charles A. Goldthwaite, Jr.
--Square Peg, Round Hole (Chronicle)

At first I was going to blog this article with a different quote

I'm the rare square peg that fits into a round hole -- i.e., a recently minted Ph.D. in American literature who earns his living as a freelance writer specializing in science and medical articles. I've been able to use the skills that I honed in graduate school to forge a path into the private sector.

...but that passage just affirmed something I already know. The quote I chose is much more challenging and, in my opinion, blogworthy.

Sadly, I think a name like "Charles A. Goldthwaite, Jr." probably runs the risk of triggering a "class" stigma on top of the "white" stigma and (though Goldthwaite doesn't mention it) the "male" stigma.

In the latest attempt by the scientific community to offer algebraic explanations for the seemingly inexplicable, mathematicians have come up with a formula for the best kind of scary movie.

Using the equation (es + u + cs + t) squared + s + (tl + f) / 2 + (a + dr + fs) / n + sin x - 1, researchers have concluded that The Shining, the 1980 film starring a homicidal Jack Nicholson, is the ideal horror flick.
--Music + chase scenes = new formula for fear  (Guardian)

Hmm... this project was commissioned by "Sky Movies," a British which just happens to be holding a scary movie marathon this weekend.

My colleague Mike Arnzen reports he was interviewed by BBC News to respond to this finding. I didn't know about it until it was over, though.

Schmexas Hold-em Schmipitor (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Grrr.... On blogs.setonhill.edu, over 400 comment spams for some gambling game I've never played and some drug I've never heard of. Thank goodness for MT-Blacklist.

President Bush made a simple but unfortunate mis-statment on Thursday that will haunt him in the press and on late-night T.V. talk shows for weeks to come. But what he said is not near as amazing as the blatant twists put on it by big news media to make it even more direct and daunting than it was.

Here's what he is quoted as saying:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." (as quoted by Reuters in Yahoo! News)

His apparent intent was to allude to our country's own innovativeness and resourcefulness, but he confused the referents of the second statement with the subject of the first. -- Rob Stewart
--Bushisms and Media-isms (Snippets: Rob Stweart's Blog)

Yes, that's an awkward claim. As Rob suggests, this will be added to the collection of amusing Bush mis-statements. But if Bush's opponents sieze on this statement to insist that "thinking of new ways to harm our country" is the same thing as "Bush wants to harm our country in new ways," then our political discourse has descended to the level of grammar flaming. I hope that won't happen.

I remember in the fifth grade a student gave a speech where she claimed she "believed in freedom and in justice for all." That was a gaffe, and my friend Ron and I laughed about it to ourselves (after her speech was over) but I never for a moment thought she really believed in "injustice for all".

Although Bush's statement was awkward, I don't think it was a grammatical mistake. Hijacking passenger liners and using them as piloted bombs was indeed innovative and resourceful. Regardless of who is in power in the White House, if anti-terrorism forces don't spend a lot of time and energy thinking about other creative ways of being destructive, we will be defenseless. Thus, we must think of new ways to harm the US, so that we can protect the US.

Still, "and we never stop thinking of ways to protect ourselves," would have been much better.

Boston.com buries the "neither do we" comment at the bottom of an article praising Bush's recent attempts at impromptu humor -- though he made the terrorism gaffe in a prepared speech.

A movie trailer for Halo 2 that flashed "www.ilovebees.com" for a split second led the curious to a beekeeping site that seemed to have been hijacked by a sentient virus. Puzzles at the site are so intricate that they must be solved by people working together at ARG sites like www.unfiction.com. For example, sets of seemingly random Web addresses turned out to have phrases in common that could be pieced together into a brief story.
--Blur Fantasy with Reality and Wrap It in a PUzzle (NY Times)

Rebecca Villano, who last semester was in my American Lit class, sent me the following e-mail while I was on vacation. She was hip to the "ilovebees.com" game before this article appeared.

Dr. Jerz! I totally thought of you today! Since you had us read "Pattern Recognition" I thought that I would mention a little "Pattern Recognition" of my own.

I don't know if you know, but Halo 2 has been causing such chaos due to the extreme mystery of it all. The creators refuse to show anything for the one player mode, and they are very secretive. That said:

My fiance stumbled upon a trailer for Halo 2. In this trailer, it flashes a website for a couple seconds: www.Ilovebees.com

If one would go to this website, one would begin to read and hear sound files of bees. From what is said on this site, once you break down the pictures of this lady and her bees, you'd see a text file encripted within the pictures. These text files are supposingly the story between Halo 1 and Halo 2. Also, if you were to listen to the bees, you'd hear sounds very much like Halo.

This seems very similar to Pattern Recognition where the one film piece had a hidden map inside it. Apparently, with the creators of Halo, their favorite number is 7. Seven times seven times seven, or something like that, is 343 which is also the title of the main map in which, in one player mode, in Halo 1, one descovers that the main computer system is an AI and controls everything.

Also on this women's website is a counter for 25 days. It is believed that this is the count down until Halo 2 releases a demo for one player. All through out this woman's website is Halo information, and on one spot in this site, is an anagram for when the demo will be released. However, the anagram also spells out "I love bees" or something like that.

Also, if you would e-mail ladybee777@hotmail.com it auto respons with gibberish that's almost english but not.

Personally, I could care less, but I thought of you and Pattern Recognition and laughed. So, here you go!

I know I'm not alone in committing identity theft against my imaginary selves. Since no studies exist, I took an informal poll involving 50 friends and colleagues and, although I admit it's not very scientific, it was revealing. More than half of respondents admitted they invent some or all of the information they provide to online news sites.

Some samples:

"I use a bogus identity (usually Margaret Thatcher) and a fake e-mail address. I usually list my birthday as 1/1/1970 (the beginning of the Unix era) and my ZIP code as 90210."

"I have my Yahoo spam-catcher account I use for all those things, and my nom de guerre is James Bond. Or I put Dwight Eisenhower living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. SE in D.C." --Adam L. Penenbarg --What, Me Register?  (Wired)

I'm often an Albanian woman born in 1900. I have a yahoo e-mail address that's already overwhelmed spam, because I only use it when I'm not sure what will happen to the address.

Amazon.com knows a lot about the real me, in part because of the book-rating feature that Amazon uses to recommend related books. I gain something from that service, so I don't mind giving up some personal info for it. Registering for news sites is, on the other hand, just a bother.

John Paul wants to make "the Holy See's solicitude felt in the world of sports," the Vatican said.

The pontiff has given the weeks-old department its marching orders. Among the directives, the Vatican said, is fostering a "sports culture which promotes a vision of sports activity as a means of integral personal growth and as an instrument in the service of peace and brotherhood among peoples."

Lixey said the Church and Sports department was in its fledgling stages, but he indicated it would have a broad sweep, ranging from contacts with institutions like the international soccer federation and Olympic committees to local parishes.
--Vatican Sets Up Sports Department (Newsday)

I teach at a Catholic university that was until recently a women's college, and will be starting a football team this fall. I'm not exactly a sports fan, but this story is blogworthy because it calls to mind the fact that the vast majority of people who enjoy sports do not behave like the spoiled brats who make the headlines.

When the Vatican Videogame Department opens, sign me up.

Now teens and twenty-somethings generally do not set a fixed time and place for a meeting. Rather, they initially agree on a general time and place (Shibuya, Saturday late afternoon), and exchange approximately 5 to 15 messages that progressively narrow in on a precise time and place, two or more points eventually converging in a coordinated dance through the urban jungle. As the meeting time nears, contact via messaging and voice becomes more concentrated, eventually culminating in face-to-face contact. --Mizuko Ito --Mobiles and the Appropriation of Place (Receiver)

I don't have a mobile phone. I did purchase a pair of walkie talkies (if memory serves, Bobby, didn't I buy them from you at the Sears in Eau Claire?) that I take on day trips to the museum and so forth, so that my wife and I can split up temporarily. Charlie Lowe's phone was an important part of coordinating social outings with bloggers and wikiers at the CCCC conference in San Antonio. But in general, I'm not part of a social circle of people with mobile phones.

The university is full of professionals whose relatively unstructured work days mean that it's usually possible to find someone with whom to enjoy a chatty lunch for an hour (or two, or three). And at work, I'm never far from a networked computer, and at home our social outings are visits to nearby family members or play dates.

I wonder if the mobile phone culture, which permits my students to get together without asking them to plan ahead, and permits them to back out of a social engagement at the last minute (since it is possible to let the other parties know, and therefore not make them wait around or worry needlessly) has any correlation to the difficulty some of my students have getting to my office door to sign up for an oral presentation date or to schedule an office visit, or to follow through on those plans once they are made.

When a student doesn't show up for an appointment, I rarely mind, since I just spend that time blogging or marking a paper. The problem comes when that student asks for a make-up appointment during crunch time... I can extend my office hours, shorten everyone's appointment times, or say "no". As the instructor, my job is to look at the student's overall progress, while on any given class period, a significant percentage of students are mostly focused on surviving the week.

This isn't a "kids today!" rant... I'm just pondering how a "just in time teaching" strategy might be able to tap into the flexibility that defines the social structure of today's youths. I can beg and plead students to make appointments with me or the writing center, and I can jump around and wave my hands warning them not to fall into the procrastination trap.

In the past, in my desire to help students avoid common traps, I've inundated them with too-lengthy descriptions of assignments. Some students reported feeling overwhelmed, and didn't know where to begin... thus, when I asked if anyone had any questions, some may have felt so unsure that they just said "no" in order to escape the uncomfortable feeling that they were already falling behind and they didn't want me to know.

I'll have to resist the temptation to believe that, if students aren't lining up to meet with me, then everything must be fine. I suppose the key lies in Ito's observation that, as the two parties start to approach each other, their communication becomes more frequent and more precise.

CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

CONVENT, n. A place of retirement for woman who wish for leisure to meditate upon the vice of idleness.

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
--The Devil's Dictionary (Project Gutenberg)

A handful of entries from the "C" section of this classic work.

Update, 04 Aug: Liliputian Lillith has sampled the "D"s. Anyone want to try another letter?

Two years later, the children were brought back to the laboratory and were given a number of tests of academic achievement that included a test of mathematical achievement. What O'Neill found was that those children who scored highly on the mathematics test had also scored highly on certain measures of their storytelling ability two years earlier.

"It was only certain aspects of storytelling that were related to later mathematical ability. Most strongly predictive of children's mathematical performance was their ability to relate all the different events in the story, to shift clearly from the actions of one character to another, and to adopt the perspective of different characters and talk about what they were feeling or thinking," explained O'Neill.

--UW researcher links storytelling and mathematical ability (Eureka Alert (press release))

My English-major brain is reeling with puns on "perspective" and "story problems." While I've only read the press release, and not the full academic article, I wonder whether there will be anything in it to shed light on the narratology vs. ludology debate in computer games studies.

Powers said he realized the love affair, which began in 1979 when his brother introduced him to the first Van Halen album, was over Saturday. While preparing spaghetti at his home, Powers chose silence over a TV On The Radio album his friend had burned him.

"Last week, my buddy went to see this band, but I just didn't feel like going out that night," Powers said. "I started to listen to their album, and even though it really seemed like my type of music?well, I didn't know any of the songs. I was just about to put Beck on when I realized that I'd rather be alone with my thoughts.'" --Lifelong Love Affair With Music Ends At Age 35 (The Onion (will expire))

I can't say I ever had a love affair with music. I recognize music is a huge part of the psyches of many of the young people whom I teach, but I generally prefer to spend my time and energy in other ways.

I am 35, by the way.

Maybe there was some legitimacy to banning some of the books on the list. Maybe there were lines that should not be crossed or limits that should not be tested. And so we would read the books and identify the lines and come away with a better understanding of censorship and book banning.

But, when the class started, something happened that I did not plan or expect. No sooner did I approach my first lecture on Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn than I began to think about censoring myself. --Douglas L. Howard
--Silencing Huck Finn (Chronicle of Higher Education)

I regularly teach Huck Finn when I teach American Lit, and so far I haven't been aware of students expressing a difficulty about the racist language. Although the central character is about 13 or 14 years old, the book wasn't written to be read by people who are that young. In fact, Huck often doesn't "get" the jokes that Clemens makes -- as when Huck expresses horror at witnessing a man being shot on the street, and then lets the reader know that he found a good spot near the window when he watches the man die.

I let the students know that if they feel uncomfortable saying the n-word when reading a quotation in class, they can just skip it. Of course, that doesn't address the full complexity of the language issue, but it's a start.

I will probably ask the students to write a short in-class essay on how they would feel about using and/or hearing the n-word in class discussion. I don't think today's college students are sensitive flowers that need to be protected from language that their elders find offensive. Words like "queer" and even ones with less emotional baggage like "bad" and "wicked" mean one thing to one generation, and something else to another. Consider also the literal connotations of "lousy" and "sucks".

A few years ago, a student clamped her hand over her mouth when telling me "Shut up!!" in a context that clearly meant, "I can't believe what I'm hearing," and while the class tittered, I wasn't at all offended. (I saw that exchange on TV in ads for the DVD of "The Princess Diaries" while watching cable TV during my week-long exile from the Internet.)

So I fill my answers with more disclaimers about how my schedule is very flexible and how we're always available for an afternoon here or there. Then I rob Monday night to pay for Monday's trip to the zoo with a playmate and her mom. Or more accurately, I rob January, nearly killing myself trying to finish my article for submission March 1, to pay for the June that I will spend with my kids in the park. --Julia Goode --Making Time (Chronicle of Higher Education)

I feel exactly like I felt as an undergrad, when I learned -- or more accurately, noted -- that if you take time out of a flexible schedule to relax, goof off, or just veg, you will pay for it later.

Heinz Kerry said I attempted to "trap" her. To defend her intemperance, she publicly impugned my personal and professional integrity. On national television the woman who herself raised the specter of McCarthyism with her unexplained remarks insinuated I was engaging in the same tactic....

"I hope you burn in hell," read one e-mail. "You're a (expletive) Nazi," went another. "Teresa should have told you to go (expletive) yourself," another friendly e-mailer offered. And these were among the milder communiques; those that included death threats will be forwarded to the senders' respective hometown police departments.

One of my daughters back in Pittsburgh was brought to tears by a caller to our house. The clever woman identified herself as a Washington reporter seeking to interview me but then embarked on a filthy tirade. It seems a member of the Heinz Kerry Civility Enforcement Patrol posted our home address and telephone number on the response part of my convention blog. --Colin McNickle --Killing the questioner (Tribune-Review)

It's amazing to see what people will do when they act upon what they believe are the facts.

We knew modern memory cards were durable, but had no idea they would be quite so tough... They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.

Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests. --Digital memories survive extremes (BBC News)

Given to a six-year-old boy to destroy? This is another one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" genius news features. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I took about 200 digital photos while on vacation in the last week (to Long Island, NY for a family wedding, and then a short stop in Philadelphia to see the Please Touch museum and the historic downtown), and I doubt I'll ever print more than a few dozen.