October 2004 Archive Page

Ah summer camp. It's a great time for us kids to get away from our parents and enjoy the great outdoors. Actually, it's really just something your parents are forcing you to do because they hate you and want to enjoy some privacy for a change. Still, you wouldn't mind getting away from the home front for a little while. You've grown tired of your mom's meatloaf (not that the food at camp will be any better) and your father's incessant rants about how the foreigners are taking all the good jobs. Yes indeed, some time away from that place might be just what you need. --Choose Your Own Adventure: I-Mockery Style (I-Mockery)

I haven't gone beyond the opening screen... if I get a chance to go back online before trick-or-treating, I might try it.

Ubisoft's presidential election game, "The Political Machine," is enjoyable, particularly if you're caught up in the political hoopla and just can't get enough of it. The designers have produced an entertaining game that involves making the electoral college system work for you.

By default, the game starts you off as John Kerry playing against George W. Bush, which means your first time out, you are sure to see Kerry crushed by W (at least until you figure out how the game works, or change the settings). My first time through the game, I was impressed to find George W. Bush setting up campaign headquarters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida -- exactly the battleground states that I as Kerry was targeting.

However, again playing as Kerry, it was far too easy to take Texas away from the Republicans by buying lots of advertisements trumpeting myself as the candidate who opposes crime and supports the war on terror. Likewise, as Bush, I easily took New York away from Kerry with the same message, and wrested California from the liberals by smearing Kerry's record on the environment. --Dennis G. Jerz --The Political Machine [Game Review] (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

My blog was down for a while this weekend, so I posted the full review on the New Media Journalism website.

Last month, Drs. Joshua Freedman and Marco Iacoboni of the University of California at Los Angeles finished scanning the brains of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats. Each viewed images of President Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader.

[...]

Freedman came to political brain scanning through his brother Tom, who served as a consultant to President Clinton. Tom Freedman asked his neuroscientist brother if the technology could improve on how campaigns woo voters.

"No one had done fMRI with politics," Dr. Freedman said. "So we decided to see what we could find." --Dems, GOP: Who's Got the Brains?  (Wired)

Of course, someone is going to use this advanced scanning technology to exert power, but the average person is already so ignorant about the power of media to manipulate their behavior... this is just creepy.

I like Wired because it often archives the AP stories that I want to blog... but I can't say I care much for its new sex columnist. It's not like Salon's marketing strategy (sex, politics, sex, technology, and sex) has been hugely successful.

Obi-Wan Kenobi is pretty weak. His articulation is minimal with a limited ball-jointed neck, ball shoulders, angled cut joints at the elbows, cut wrists, waist, and hinged hips. I know Sir Alec wasn’t exactly leaping around like a ninja, but c’mon! Speaking of Alec Guiness, Hasbro still hasn’t nailed a likeness with this figure, although I do appreciate the subtle paint wash in his grey hair. His softgoods cloak is a durable fabric, but a poor fit, looking way oversized. Other than the cloak, his only accessory is a lightsaber. At least the cloth skirt allows you to seat him in your Landspeeder. “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” Heh.

Oh god, I’m such a nerd. --Andrew Franks --"Don't Toy With Me": Star Wars Vintage Original Trilogy Collection (Jim Hill Media)

A sudden unexpected bit of candor in an incredibly detailed review of a new line of retro Star Wars toys.

Don't worry, Andrew, we all have our obsessions.

Traditional gender binaries such as male/female, science/nature, mind/body, are replayed and reinforced again and again in sci-fi films, in which (male) scientific creativity is continually represented as a dangerous affront to "natural" human (female) values. Supercomputers in film are created by male scientists--I can think of no exceptions--and what makes them valuable (according to their creators) is that they lack characteristics traditionally linked in our culture with the feminine: weakness, empathy, emotion, unpredictability. --He, She, It: Engendering Machines, Gendering Intelligence (Cybercinema, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

One of many short essays grouped into the categories intelligence, fear, god, love, and self.

Eve[r] wondered how low-tech we can seem in a high-tech society?

Three words: wire punching tool.

--Karissa Kilgore --Fancy Absenteeism (Sugarpacket)

"Definetly NOT a hoax! I was there when the picture was taken!!!" says Karissa.

See "Why Usability Testing Matters -- Palm Beach County Ballot Design Raises Questions about Election 2000"

"Like all games, computer and video games entertain while promoting social development, and playing and talking about games is an important part of young people's lives," said project manager Caroline Pelletier.

"Games literacy is a way of investigating how games are means of expression and representation, just like writing or drawing," she said. --Games 'deserve a place in class' (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

A typical male search query uses just two words, compared with three for women. Women are also more patient about investigating different potential routes.

While women are happy to look through six or seven results returned by a search query, men typically only refer to two or three before becoming impatient and refining their search or moving on to a new search altogether.

As a result men devote an average of just three minutes to each of the 42 searches they conduct each week, compared to the five minutes women spend on 30 searches a week. --Robert Jaques --Men talk to Google not girlfriends: Study reveals many men need to get out more (vnunet)

Hmm... so, according to the statistic I quoted above, women spend about 150 minutes searching the web each week, while men spend only 126 minutes searching the web. So... women spend more time searching Google than men do. That fact runs against the cutesy angle this puff piece adopts.

In case you hand't noticed, the headline is misleading. In addition, this "research" was conducted via a poll, which means it is not very reliable: people are not very good at estimating their own behavior.

The design of the vnunet site looks professional, but the content of this article is less than sterling. I'm blogging this for use in a future class unit on information literacy.

The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq's.

One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. --Mark Steyn
--No time for Kerry's Europhile delusions (Sun Times)

This essay, by a Canadian who supports Bush, is blogworthy not only because it presents an opinion that runs against the grain, but I lived in Canada for about six years, and my son was born there.

As an international student, I did not get free healthcare during most of my stay, but paid a small fee for an insurance policy that gave pretty much the same service that Canadians got, except there was a cap. At any rate, when my son was born in a Canadian hospital, I noted the coldness of the health care... fortunately, there were no complications during the birth, and the doctors themselves seemed fine, but the nurses and orderlies and others who were supposed to interact with the patients didn't smile (okay, maybe they were overworked), we were instructed to bring our own diapers and infant care products (which, granted, we'd have had to buy anyway), and when my son was born, they wrapped him in a pink blanket.

I tried to control the emotional impact of this violation of the signification of color and gender, but as I was getting out my camera, I sheepishly asked for a yellow blanket, or even a white towel to wrap around the pink.

I got a blank stare in response.

It wasn't even a look of horror, like Oliver Twist got after he asked for "more"... it was the look of a time-clock punching unionized government employee who has no incentive to offer "service". The nurse and an orderly made a vague show of looking at each other, but neither even bothered to shake their heads or shrug. They just stared blankly.

When I published the photo on the Internet, I photoshopped it to make the pink blanket blue (sort of... not my best digital editing job).

Perhaps my experience was unusual, but reading this article brought it all back... Yes, healthcare in the United States is costly, and yes, there are definitely abuses that need to be curbed, but my experience living with socialized medicine reminds me that Americans -- self-centered as we are -- demand good customer service, and won't stand long for the Canadian style of healthcare (should it ever be instituted here).

[P]rogressive American educators at the beginning of the twentieth century instituted a utilitarian system of education that had its roots in the anti- intellectualism of the American frontier. This funnelled large numbers of students into vocational training programmes, depriving them of the benefits of a liberal education. The Language Police offers a kind of sequel to this argument. For, where earlier educators concentrated on practical learning, their successors concentrate on moral uplift and the building of self-esteem. In both cases, this comes at the expense of critical thinking. --Paula Marantz Cohen reviews Diane Ravitch's The Laungauge Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn --Make mine a vixen (Powells)

I blogged about this book back in April, 2003... haven't gotten around to picking it up, though.

German archeologists say they have discovered the toilet on which Martin Luther wrote the 95 Theses that launched the Protestant Reformation.... "This is a great find," Stefan Rhein, director of the Luther Memorial Foundation, said. "Particularly because we're talking about someone whose texts we have concentrated on for years, while little attention has been paid to anything three-dimensional and human behind them. --Kate Connolly --Germans say they've found Luther's toilet (Sun Times)

The Onion would be hard pressed to fabricate a better quote than the one I excerpted above.

The flourishing community of Web-based blogmeisters - some of them skilled journalists, many of them fervent partisans - is transforming the climate in which ideas are floated and tested.... One recurring theme in Internet comment targets the unwillingness of journalists in mainstream media (known as MSM, generally a pejorative) to admit to having opinions of their own. If the problem is media bias, as the bloggers insist, why don't journalists simply own up to their predispositions, abandon the pose of neutrality and let audiences evaluate their work accordingly? --Edward Wasserman

--Give me truth-telling over more transparency  (Jewish World Review|Miami Herald)

Wasserman offers several good reasons why transparency isn't the magical solution to the public perception that journalists are biased. He notes that the call for transparent journalists, who dutifully disclose every personal experience and affiliation that might possibly affect the slant of a story, will lead either to a ridiculous amount of confessional disclosure cluttering up reportage, or turn journalists into politicians who reassure their audiences with "bland formulations."

When my first academic article submission was trashed by an anonymous reviewer, one of my professors pointed out that it's impossible to write an article that can't be trashed. In a similar way, it's impossible to publish anything of value without getting somebody angry. Now that angry people have ready access to online publication, the rhetoric of the rant becomes part of the public discourse. While I agree with Wasserman's call for journalists to do more professional criticism, the public at large is also served when they are trained to recognized biased rants for what they are. Teaching the public to identify hidden biases is much harder.

As a media critic, Wasserman calls instead for journalists to do more media criticism. They are better trained than most bloggers are, surely. Are news organizations really going to push out advertising-friendly celebrity, sports, and "Storm Watch" reportage to make room for a one journalist to offer a point-by-point analysis of another journalist's coverage? Is there a mass audience that will pay to consume mass quantities of up-to-date professional media criticism, at the local, national, and global level?

Sadly, no.

Wasserman writes,

If a story is skewed, buries some facts and makes corrupt use of others for polemic reasons, won't that emerge from analysis and criticism, not from some half-baked critique of the people who produced it?

Bloggers who launch ad-hominem attacks on journalists are missing the point, but it's not impossible for amateur blogs to offer salient criticism.

See also Wasserman's more recent column, Reporting Lies Gives Them Weight.

A University of Florida scientist has grown a living ?brain? that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network. --UF Scientist: ?Brain? in a Dish Acts as Autopilot, Living Computer

Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view.

(the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the "back" button...) --Neal Stephenson
--Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor (Slashdot)

Link found via MGK.

Evil, Evil, Evil (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For the past few days, this blog has been getting comment-spammed one or two times per hour, and my network of student blogs is getting hit with spams that contain URLs with increasingly crude language. I've spent over an hour today, and between the two different sites (and two different methods I have to use to despam), it seems that I've no sooner despammed one site than I have to despam the other.

My telephone hasn't been ringing with telemarketers, and my e-mail hasn't been filling up with junk. But over the past few days I've had to leave for home or work knowing that there was still spam on my blog. Keeping up is taking way too much time.

The key to a successful defense is not answering the questions they ask you, but figuring out how to give them the answers you have prepared, no matter what questions they ask.

The same, I understand now, is true of television or radio interviews. If they aren't soliciting the answers you've rehearsed, you have to find a way to solicit the questions you want them to ask. --James M. Lang --My Four Minutes (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Interesting reflection by a professor who was interviewed on Fox's Morning News. Note that the interviewer scanned a list of questions her producer had prepared for her, and then basically winged the interview.

At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh ... who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation.

Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated that it began at 6pm on Saturday October 22, 4004 BC.

[...]

The geologists selected the anniversary for a day-long conference on some of the fakes, frauds and hoaxes that have plagued geological and palaeontological research for centuries. "It's not that we think Archbishop Ussher's date was a fraud," said Ted Nield, the society's communications officer. "It's just that it was spectacularly wrong." --Tim Radford --Universe's 6,000th birthday (Guardian)

The health plan Wellpoint earlier this year provided $42 million worth of free PDAs or PCs to help entice doctors to adopt E-prescriptions or reduce paperwork by submitting claims electronically. Although WellPoint contracts with 25,000 doctors, only 19,000 physicians participated--one in four passed on the free gear. A big part of the problem is keeping the technology running, rather than the initial investment. Less than 25% of doctor offices "have any IT support at all," says Schaeffer. --Marianne Kolbasuk McGee
--Free Computers Not Enough To Get Doctors Using Technology (Information Week)

You bad, nasty, backwards physicians... it's all your fault! Thank God for HMOs like Wellpoint, who give a darn about quality healthcare!

This article reads like part of a public relations strategy designed to get patients to blame doctors for the high cost of health care, and to think of the HMO Wellpoint as the savior. Nowhere does this article cite anyone who raises the slightest criticism of the idea that society will be better served by giving $42 million dollars worth of free PDAs and PCs to doctors.

Consider this: "Overall, Schaeffer says less than 15,000 doctors in the U.S. are using E-prescription systems in their practices."

1. Any journalist would know that the AP Stylebook calls for "fewer" instead of "less" in this case. (Of course, good English grammar would call for the same, but that's beside the point.)
   
2. McGee also uses the contractions "there's", "isn't", and "would've", and quotes a source as saying "could've". While simple contractions (like "aren't") aren't necessarily bad journalism, this many -- especially "would've" and "could've" -- seem excessive.
   
3. This quote plants a concept -- "there is such a thing as an E-prescription service!" Elsewhere, the article suggests that
   
4. The quote puts a statistic into the mouth of an executive, in a context where the executive isn't asked to cite his source.
   
5. McGee writes that "the cure for doctors' reluctance to buy such technologies has been particularly elusive," which is fine, but she goes on to give the opinion that this cure "is vital to any change." It's not vital to any change, it's just vital to getting doctors to buy technology. If a company executive spoke that way, I wouldn't mind, but a journalist should be more careful.

There’s a hot concept called “stealth education” that says it’s possible for people to play a game because they enjoy it and “accidentally” learn stuff along the way. Unfortunately, the concept has yet to prove its worth with the pre-teen and teen community. But what if educational games rivaled the quality and game-play of today’s top selling video games? --Game on!  (HiddenAgenda.com)

I met the Hidden Agenda program director, Lauren Davis, at the Serious Games summit earlier this week.

Iraqi militants who kidnapped an Australian reporter in Baghdad and threatened to kill him Googled his name on the Internet to investigate his work before deciding to release him unharmed, the journalist's executive producer said Tuesday. --Mike Corder --Militants who kidnapped Australian reporter in Baghdad ``Googled'' him before deciding to release him unharmed (SF Gate)

Jim Dunnigan's Serious Games Keynote (Serious Games)

Jim Dunnigan is a talented speaker who rushed through a entertaining narrative of his own long involvement in serious games. I'll blog more extensive notes later, but two things that struck me were his reference to geeks as people who can make fortunes for other people, and his mention of an urban legend involving Eliza (namely, that the developers' secretary was fooled by the program into thinking that she was talking to a real therapist).

--Serious Games Summit (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Apparently The Washington Post has an article on the Serious Games summit, but I haven't read it. The conference is scheduled to start in a half hour. I'm glad I got here early. The printed program is alphabetized by title -- that's the stupidest organization technique I've seen. The events aren't even separated by Monday and Tuesday. I've got Monday blocked out, but I can't shake the terrible feeling that I missed something.

The NASA spacecraft that smashed into the Utah desert last month while bringing home fragile samples of the sun may have been doomed by engineering drawings that had been done backwards, an investigating board said Friday.
--Drawings Blamed for Genesis Crash  (Wired)

A graduate student has been fired after leading his class of University of Virginia undergraduates on a field trip outside the law.

Justin Gifford, who was named teaching assistant of the year by the university’s Seven Society in 2002, was relieved of his duties Monday, a week and a half after his detective-fiction class was charged with trespassing at the abandoned Blue Ridge Hospital. --Kate Andrews --Trespassing UVa teacher is terminated (Daily Progress)

I somehow missed this story when it first came out...I'm at my parents' apartment (in Oakton, Virginia, not far from where I grew up) and my mother just brought me a clipping from the longer Washington Post article, but since WashPo requires registration and the articles expire, I blogged the local Charlottesville paper instead.

I remember signing up to take a detective fiction class at U.Va. (this was 15 or more years ago). It was a popular course, with far too many people hoping to sign up for it than there were open slots... the instuctor gave us a scavenger hunt as a way of winnowing out those who were less devoted.

I think there was another class that I needed to take right after the first meeting of the detective course, so I didn't rush off and start scavenging, so I didn't end up in the course.

Dungeons & Dragons players gathered in game stores around the country Saturday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the grandfather of fantasy role-playing games -- a pop culture phenomenon that has influenced myriad video games, books and movies. --Gamers mark 30 years of Dungeons & Dragons (CNN|AP)

Dungeons & Dragons was one of the influences on Will Crowther's creation of Colossal Cave Adventure, the first interactive fiction game.

Only one school of contemporary art has retrieved an idea of geometrical harmony, reminiscent of the aesthetics of proportion, and that is abstract art. By rebelling against both subjection to nature and to everyday life, abstract art has offered us pure forms, from the geometries of Mondrian to the large monochromatic canvases of Klein, Rothko or Manzoni. But who has not had the experience, on visiting an exhibition or a museum over the past decades, of listening to visitors who - faced with an abstract work - say "But what is it meant to be?", or come out with the inevitable "They call this art?" And so even this "neo-pythagorical" return to the aesthetics of proportion works against current sensibilities, against the ideas ordinary people have about beauty. --Umberto Eco --Notions of beauty  (Guardian)

Visitors enter the museum, which is located at 1937 Spam Blvd., through a wall o' Spam, a display of nearly 3,500 cans of the pork luncheon meat. A sign by the wall helpfully notes that if you manage to restrict yourself to eating only one can of Spam a day, the contents of the wall could feed you for 10 years. Since Spam has a shelf life of several years, this isn't as far-fetched as it may sound. --Michelle Delio --A Tribute to Spam, the Meat  (Wired)

One of the recurring problems that users face is that computers...well...don't always work quite as well as expected (and sometimes not at all.) But that doesn't make it any easier for developers and vendors to fix computer problems.

For developers to fix the problems, they need to understand what the problem is. Here's where the error report comes in. When a vendor is willing to address a problem, a report that describes the problem well can be the difference between a quick turnaround and a quick runaround. --Peter Seebach

--The cranky user: To err(or) is human (IBM)

Via Tomalak. Seebach also hosts my academic community weblog, at blogs.setonhill.edu.

Since the dotcom bust in 2000-2001, nearly a quarter of California technology workers have taken nontech jobs, according to a study of 1 million workers released last week by Sphere Institute, a San Francisco Bay Area public policy group. The jobs they took often paid less. Software workers were hit especially hard. Another 28 percent have dropped off California's job rolls altogether. They fled the state, became unemployed, or decided on self-employment. --David R. Francis
--Endangered species: US programmers (CS Monitor)

Google's desktop search is integrated with the familiar Web search, with a new Desktop tab appearing at Google.com, and results culled from a search of the local drive are added to the top of any search through the Web. The local results are displayed at the top of the list, marked with a new logo and tagged with the phrase, "stored on your computer."

One of its key features, Price says, is its ability to search through previously viewed Web pages. Google Desktop Search searches through Internet Explorer's History file and displays matches, including thumbnails of the relevant page in many cases. --Google Debuts Desktop-Search Tool (Information Week)

I've already installed Google Desktop on my office computer (after unticking the box that gave Google permission to send generic data and feedback to Big Brother). I produce so many documents on a daily basis, and keep them in so many different places (my thumbdrive, an expansion card, in e-mail, in various work and archive folders) that I frequently don't remember where I keep what. Sometimes I come up with a good idea that I leave in a comment on someone else's blog, or I e-mail it to myself, or I tap it out in a textfile and tuck it in an obscure directory.

With Google's desktop search, it's completely irrelevant where I put it. Google is now one more step closer to realizing the "memory" component of Vannevar Bush's "memex" (memory-index).

I spend a lot of time sorting my mail by category, but if it turns out I can depend on Google Desktop, I might just start leaving my e-mails in a big "filed" archive, without breaking them down by subjects.

I was uncomfortable letting GMail archive so much of my data, but I find the search capabilities of Google Desktop at least worth a look. I'll let the alpha geeks figure out whether Google is honoring its promise not to steal any of my data.

Since students are turning in midterm papers and portfolios left and right, I was pretty busy Thursday afternoon and didn't get much of a chance to play with it... but while waiting for it to download, I stumbled across Google's photo-viewing tool, Picasa, and was extremely impressed. I have several free photo editing tools on my laptop, including ones that came with my computer, with digital cameras, or with Windows. None of the dumbed-down consumer products offer the power that a real photo editor offers, but most of the time I don't need a real photo editor -- I just need a way to crop, rotate, and resize photos (and maybe adjust the contrast). Picasa does all that, without forcing me to think in terms of "projects" and cluttering up the screen with menus or pestering me with "Are you sure you want to do that?" dialog boxes.

Analysis, interpretation, literary research and explication all have their own pleasures, of course, but these are intellectual rewards which often come -- students are quick to say -- at the price of "enjoying" stories, poems, etc. The students would prefer to be blissfully entertained.

In the hallway after my most recent class, a student told me he no longer enjoys his favorite band because of me. Mea culpa. --Mike Arnzen --Poetry and the Pleasure of the Text (Pedablogue)

I'm very conscious that, for many students in my American Lit survey class, this might be my only chance to introduce them to the pleasures of literature. When I became aware of the "poetry slam" scene, I decided to work one into my survey course last term. It was a smash hit, so I've worked two into this year's term. The first, the "Retro Poetry Cover Slam," had students doing oral interpretations (not memorized) of works by Poe or Dickinson. For the next Slam, I'm going to have students work in small groups to create a program, with the full text of the poem and a few notes; I'll distribute this program in advance, and students will have it to consult after the Slam is over (when I'll ask them to write and/or blog a response).

Part of me wants to jump up and start analyzing the works in great detail, but there will be time for that, should these students take an advanced literature class. If not, then at least I hope when they look back on their time in Jerz's American Lit class, they'll remember the poetry slams (if nothing else).

What exactly happened to the link-and-node hypertext novel? We don't have to carry out that much of an investigation to see what'sgoing on with Flash poetry, or the network novel, or interactive fiction. But what'sup with the venerable form used by the soi-disant wunderkinder authors of The Unknown, the one in which Victory Garden took root, in which Shelley Jackson stitched together her Patchwork Girl? --Nick Montfort --Two Hypertext Bookmarks (Grand Text Auto)

This summer, sitting in the Tank and reading campaign blogs, you could sometimes get a half-giddy, half-sickening feeling that something was shifting, that the news agenda was beginning to be set by this largely unpaid, T-shirt-clad army of bloggers.

A few blocks down Eighth Avenue, thousands of journalists with salaries and health benefits waited for the next speech and the next press release from the Republican campaign. Here in the Tank, Jesse and Ezra sat resting on the futon with some dumplings. Moulitsas was crashing on a friend's floor for the week. Atrios had just quit his job as an economics professor, and Armstrong could fondly look back on stints in his 20's as a traveling Deadhead, a Peace Corps volunteer and a Buddhist monastery dweller.

Like almost everyone in the Tank, Moulitsas started blogging to blow off steam. He seemed as surprised as anyone to find himself on the verge of respectability. --Matthew Klam --Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail (NY Times)

The print version of this article was forwarded to me by my university president.

As our hard drives fill up with thousands then tens and hundreds of thousands of digital snapshots, we're all going to face the same basic challenges as the Bettmann Archive. Of course, you won't haul 19 semitrailers full of your decaying family photos into cold storage, as the Bettmann did in 2001. But you can expect to go clicking through folder after folder of pixelated images, trying to find the one where Aunt Rose put on a silly inflatable life preserver in the summer of 1999.

A digital camera is an enticement to take more snaps than you can keep track of. Why not shoot a few more pictures of Aunt Rose to see if you can get one that's slightly more flattering to her - how to put it? - irregular profile. You don't even need to carry a camera; you can squeeze off a stream of shots with your cell phone and send them to your inbox. With the price of digital storage plummeting even as our time seems to become ever more valuable, it's cheaper to store the lot of them than to weed out the clunkers. --David Weinberger --Point. Shoot. Kiss It Good-Bye.  (Wired)

The most important ingredient for a journalist – you have to feel it in your gut, you have to really believe that this is a calling, that conveying information to people is among the most important of professions. You have to understand that in a free world we have a free press, and when freedom falls, the first target is the press and the ability to convey unfettered the news of the day. --Franklin S. Prosnitz --Journalism: Clowning around with Assignments (The High School Connection)

My main workstation has a standard keyboard, with the slight rise and the stadium keying layout, where each row rises a little above it. The kind I've used since I got my first Packard Bell in 1990. The natural shape one can even remember from Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, and probably even abacuses.

But the eMac has a concave keyboard; that is, it's curved, with the tops of the keys actually turning toward your fingers like flowers to a star.

But the Dell workstation has a convex keyboard; that is, it's bowed outward, like its keys are employing centrifugal force to fling my software-destroying fingers into space. --Brian J. Noggle --Steve Jobs and Michael Dell ARE IN MY HEAD! (Musings from Brian J. Noggle)

Too much information.
Students who understand how to navigate the web.
Teachers who do not.
Students who have no one to show them what is good and what is bad.
A system of education in which students and teachers do not connect. --dcannell --Are we entering a dark age of information? (Teaching and Developing Online)

Via Weblogg-ed

One thing that has struck me is that many, if not most, of the people I've met from the community who are involved in managing Wikipedia seem to be women. I haven't conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out that ratio of men at conferences on blogging and ratio of men who have loud blog voices seems to be quite high. I wonder what causes this difference in gender distribution? --Joi Ito --The gender profile of Wikipedia (Joi Ito)

Thoughtful speculation. Via Clancy on KairosNews, who traces the meme back further.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world's information isn't yet online, we're helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results.

To use Google Print, just search on Google as you normally would. For example, do a search on a subject such as "Books about Ecuador Trekking," or search on a title like "Romeo and Juliet." Whenever a book contains content that matches your search terms, we'll show links to that book in your search results. Click on the book title and you'll see the page that contains your search terms, as well as other information about the book. You can also search for other topics within the book. Click "Buy this Book" and you'll go straight to a bookstore selling the book online.

Right now we're just testing this program, so you may not see books in your results for every search. But you can expect to see more and more books popping up in your search results in the coming months.

--About Google Print (Beta)  (Google)

Technology has come a long way since the washing machine, but somewhere along the line it lost relevance to women. Now gadget makers are striving to win back the female market....

[O]ne can pick up lipstick memory sticks, mini iPods in pastel hues, mobiles with mirrors in them, and slim cameras, all intended to pull at the purse strings of women.

But there is a fine line between making technologies appeal to wider audiences and patronising that audience with devices that look pretty but do not do much. --Jo Twist --Technology's gender balancing act (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

P.S. Jo Twist... really?

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells. -- Rowan Hooper --People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid  (Wired)

The San Francisco-based Breast Cancer (news - web sites) Action (BCA) group is counter-attacking this onslaught of commercialism with its campaign "Think Before you Pink."

The group decries the lack of coordination and transparency among federal agencies, private foundations and pharmaceutical companies funding research on breast cancer.

"No one knows exactly how much money is being raised and spent every year, or where all the money is going," said group executive director Barbara Brenner, herself a breast cancer victim. --Pink ribbon masks discord in the fight against breast cancer

I blogged about the breast cancer controversy back in April, when I found Mary Ann Swissler's "The Marketing of Breast Cancer." The local media coverage of breast cancer fund-raisers is typically "soft" -- that is, the focus is on personal survival stories, rather than on the accountability and efficiency of the organizers.

Derrida's prolific writings, criticised by some as obscure and nihilist, argue that in literature -- but also in fields such as art, music, architecture -- there are multiple meanings not necessarily intended or even understood by the creator of the work. --French philosopher Derrida, father of deconstruction, dies at 74

Interesting... this is filed under "Entertainment" on Yahoo!

Information Literacy: One Faculty View (Moveable Types of Information Literacy)

My interest in information literacy, as a teacher:

• The credulity with which students accept what they read online.
• Their uncritical use of the Google search engine.
• Their over-reliance upon online sources of questionable value.

I lead the program in New Media Journalism at Seton Hill University . The program appears in the university catalog as "Journalism New Media," because, I am told, parents and high school counselors will habitually look under "J" for "Journalism," not "N".

In the early 20th century, Vannevar Bush saw that the publication of new scientific information was overwhelming the old tools for information storage and retrieval. His Memex was an attempt to solve that problem. The scholarly publication crisis has now extended to distribution (economics), and will soon impact production, if the dying genre of the scholarly monograph retains its position as the gold standard for academic rank and tenure decisions. (See "Heft vs. Googlehole: Scholarship and the Print Pit.")

Writing in 1945, Bush lamented the increasing volume of scientific knowledge, noting that researchers were forced to spend an increasing portion of their time searching for relevant information, which left less time for reading. (The Atlantic Monthly posted a reprint of Vannevar Bush's ground-breaking 1946 essay, "As We May Think." That posting seems to have been recently composted -- buried behind a subscription wall. For the moment, it is available through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.)

Bush's solution, the Memex (a neologism from "memory" and "index"), is a theoretical machine that might be what you get if you cross a photocopier with a microfilm storage and access device. A Memex user would create links between documents, annotate those links, add those annotations to the filing system, and share the resulting "trails" with other researchers.

The temptation to see the Memex as a precursor to hypertext is tempting; elsewhere, I have suggested a few of the many reasons why that would be an oversimplification:

[T]he smallest unit Bush works with is a facsimile of a page; thus the medium Bush described was not hypertext, but hyperbinding. Finally, the term “memex” reveals its retrogressive gaze. Bush’s proposal was a tool for accessing those documents a researcher has already decided are worthy of purchasing and adding to his or her personal library, not for identifying texts which have not yet been connected to the user’s personal matrix of intellectually associations. "On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy" Dichtung Digital

Since most people interact with HTML as readers rather than authors, what Vannevar Bush was trying to accomplish with his free sharing of annotated "trails" is not well implemented via typical web pages. Its usefulness has been approximated through the weblog genre (in subgenres such as the research blog or edu-blog).

I give personal weblogs to students. They can keep them once the class is over. My goal is to get them to see themselves as online writers, in order to get them to think more critically about the online texts they encounter. (For more about blogging at Seton Hill University, see "The Blogosphere: What's In It for Me? (An Introduction [for Faculty])."

(Note... being one of only a handful of faculty members at the conference has been an enlightening experience... as soon as I have the chance, I'll blog some personal reactions.)

See: Outline

Whispering the News to Marian: Libraries on Fire (Moveable Types of Information Literacy)

Librarians get furious when someone from the outside tries to suppress a text. A library must have order. A patron reshelve a book? Never!

"Heaven help us, if the library caught on fire," sings Harold Hill "and the volunteer hose brigademen / Had to whisper the news to Marian."

Imagine a library with the doors open 24 hours a day, where patrons can reshelve books whenever they want to -- and wherever they want to. Where patrons can write in the margins, rip out pages from one book and stuff them somewhere else. The result would be chaos! How would patrons find what they want? How would it be possible to cope with holdings that change overnight? And the dancing -- teenagers dancing on the tables! Who could get work done in that environment?

What if, instead of unqualified chaos, the result would be an information system organized by the users, reflecting their use patterns, their interests, and their goals. Such a system would be inherently populist. In certain areas, it would be more mirror than window, so users would need to be trained to recognize and account for weaknesses and look beyond them.

Librarians would have to learn to read these systems. If they did, the might notice new trends, as a new subcategory suddenly appears, and fills up with new entries and cross-references, all supplied by patrons (who are simultaneously authors). Such a system would be constantly changing, but not necessarily constantly degrading; it would be self-updating. Should vandals break in, an army of volunteers would break in at the heels of the vandals, picking up and reshelving the books almost as quickly as the vandals emptied them.

Vannevar Bush imagined such an expert system, not so much in the Memex itself, but n the culture of professionals who would exchange not just results, but also the "trails" of associations that led them to those results.

Students who are far less rigorous about their trailblazing use another such system -- Google. The PageRank formula calculates the value of an individual web page by counting the number of inbound links, and weighting the value of those inbound links according to the relative value of the referring page. So anyone who can create a web page (or fill in user-friendly web forms to create a blog entry) can affect, to some small but recursive degree, the rank of a page. Large groups of like-minded users can hack Google, as evidenced by "googlebomb" pranks (such as "french military victories" and "miserable failure").

If you are a blogger, you probably know about "blog spam" -- the automated creation of "fake" weblog comments designed to affect the PageRank of a site not affiliated with the spammed weblog.

Now that Amazon.com offers whole-text search, it offers some of these services. Books on Amazon.com are filed according to the traditional subject headings, but they are also grouped in different ways -- people who bought this title also bought these. Each user who makes a purchase adjusts the weighted network slightly. Amazon.com users can also create annotated lists, which turn up in the search fields. (See "Information Literacy" via the Amazon interface.)

Even more radical is the Wiki, a form of electronic authorship that completely decentralizes authority and encourages all readers to annotate, expand, edit, or completely revise a common text.

Wikipedia, the best known wiki, is an open source encyclopedia. Any user can create, expand, or modify a "topic". While the personality-driven blogs are often considered valuable because of the explicitly-stated biases of the blogger, a core value of Wikipedia is the "neutral point of view." Authors who create or edit articles because they have an axe to grind are quickly neutralized -- that is, a small army of volunteer editors will sweep through a newly posted text, removing loaded words and jargon, commercial plugs and disinformation, as well as vandalism (such as deleting an entry or posting copyrighted material). As you might expect, Wikipedia does an excellent job covering the interest of libertarian computer geeks. Its offerings on The Simpsons and Star Trek are truly masterpieces. That kind of selection bias is harder to counteract (though some Wikipedians are attempting to do so, via the Crossbow project).

On the other hand... see "Librarian: Don't Use Wikipedia as Source".

Veteran blogger-baiter Andrew Orlowski is among those who have raised serious doubts about the value of Wikipedia. Wired magazine, which has a great reputation for identifying emerging technological trends has on several recent occasions linked, without comment or qualification, to the Wikipedia entry for a technical term. Given Wired's technophiliac history, Orlowski would probably consider this as evidence to shore back up his opinion.

See: Outline

Specificity vs. Abstraction: The Library as Mediator of Humanities and Technology Values (Moveable Types of Information Literacy)

While deconstruction and postmodernism have challenged the traditional dusty-tome humanities methodology that aims to construct a specific "correct" text, by continuing to react against the ideal text, contemporary humanities scholarship reveals its dependency upon the central ideal. That ideal was itself made possible by a technological advancement -- the invention of moveable type, which systematized the production of numerous identical copies of fixed works.

Computer science -- the discipline that generates the technology under the hood of our information literacy efforts -- aims instead for increased abstraction. In the open source software development model, particularly as described by Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," individual programmers contribute their labor freely to a common project made available to the general public for free. Raymond writes that he once approached programming with reverence:

I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like Emacs) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

But the striking success of grass-roots programming efforts that produced the Linux operating system (an alternative to Windows and the Mac OS) resulted in a striking paradigm shift:

release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity... No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here -- rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

Given the financial pressures publishers of journals exert upon libraries, and the brewing rebellion against what some activists characterize as a cabal of print publishers (a roomful of Librarians hissed on Friday when the name Elsvier came up at the conference), some emerging electronic forms have radically altered the dynamics of the scholar-publisher relationship -- without necessarily reducing the filtering value provided by peer-review.

The collaborative culture of librarians, who seem to swap and re-use each other's ideas far more freely than composition or literature scholars might do (we're so darn methodical about citing, citing, citing), seems a close kin to the open source philosophy. But isn't collection development a filtering process, that establishes value at least in part by exclusion?

See: Outline

Postmodern Peer Review and Emerging Genres (Moveable Types of Information Literacy)

We find it quaint that Vannevar Bush would try to do hypertext with an automated, user-writeable microfiche. It is similarly quaint that a library database be optimized to deliver PDF documents or other facsimiles of the printed page.

Native electronic journals offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship, sometimes on a timeline of weeks. For example, the content of First Monday is mostly traditional, though the accelerated timeline of the peer-review process changes the relationship of the scholar to scholarship.

In new media studies, online delivery not only permits the easy inclusion of multimedia, but instead of static graphics, the illustrations can be data files and computer programs that let the user interact with the new media objects being discussed. For example, new media scholar Nick Montfort published a review of Espen Aarseth's monograph Cybertext. The review includes java applets that let the reader interact with some of the cybertexts Aarseth represented via static transcripts. (See "Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star".) In 1997, I published an article on a computer simulation of the motion of pageant wagons through the streets of the medieval town of York, via a web collection that included a working version of the simulation software.

The scholarly monograph remains, for now, and for good reason, the gold standard of academic authority. The ongoing crisis in scholarly publication suggests that the traditional book will be valuable precisely because of its scarcity. But not all knowledge is constructed via the methods that lend themselves to a linear presentation.

Popularly-edited online texts (such as Wikipedia) typically summarize general knowledge, rather than offer a forum for the presentation of new knowledge or controversial opinion; further, emerging electronic genres also typically over-represent particular opinions espoused by technorati who manipulate the system ("googlewashing," illustrated by the online prank that causes a Google search for "miserable failure" to point first to George Bush's official biography on the White House web site).

Our students are already using Amazon.com to look up quotations in books they do not want to buy. They are addicted to Google, which searches the free web and is blind to material behind paid access firewalls. But there is value in teaching students to "read" grass-roots, populist knowledge -- for example, the reputation-tracking transaction feedback function of eBay or the consumer reviews in ePinions.

In the emerging electronic genres, peer-review (in the form of inbound links, e-mailed or posted corrections/refutations, revision, or even deletion) is expected to happen after a text is published, thus making the process of peer review visible, instead of simply the product. Developing strategies to compensate for the anomalous effects and weaknesses of these grass-roots knowledge systems is a vital skill for 21st Century information literacy.

See: Outline

Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Presented Oct 9, at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

• Information Literacy: One Faculty View
  
• Whispering the News to Marian: Libraries on Fire
  
• Specificity vs. Abstraction: The Library as Mediator of Humanities and Technology Values
  
• Postmodern Peer Review and Emerging Genres

Children as young as two are the target audience of a new software that will enable toddlers to both surf and send e-mails safely without help from their parents.
--New software lets toddlers e-mail and surf (BBC)

So... who's going to develop the blogging plug-in?

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Heft vs. Googlehole: Scholarship and the Print Pit (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I love the heft and feel of a book. So do academic tenure and promotion committees, I am told.

In "The Book as the Gold Standard for Tenure and Promotion in the Humanistic Disciplines," Estabrook notes that only in history departments do a majority of faculty members support preserving the lofty position of the scholarly monograph. Further, a majority of faculty across divisions feel that their own scholarship does not need to be published in book form in order to be effective. Libraries spend more money on expensive databases, which must (unlike a book) be renewed annually (see "Use It or Lose It: The MLA Bibliography Database"), the print runs of scholarly books drops to the hundreds, and The Crisis in Scholarly Publication continues. Meanwhile, my own handful of printed publications sit on my shelf, patiently waiting for members of a future tenure and promotions committees to thumb through them.

When I had to cancel my trip to BlogTalk (billed as the first European international conference on weblogging), I considered sending my orphaned paper ("Meme(X) Marks the Spot") to Into the Blogosphere, an online peer-reviewed collection. But the proceedings of BlogTalk would appear as a physical book -- something that will add heft to the milk crates in which I plan to put my tenure and promotion review materials when my time comes. My free copy of BlogTalks -- with my adopted paper in it -- arrived from Europe a little wrinkled on the spine, but it looked nice on the shelf next to my dissertation and a few other printed publications.

I contacted the publisher because I wanted to use BlogTalks in my Writing for the Internet course. This summer the contract for the bookstore changed hands, which caused a bit of chaos. For whatever reason, after four months and dozens of e-mails and consultations with the bookstore manager, here we are, six weeks into term, and BlogTalks still isn't in the bookstore.

Meanwhile, the full text of every peer-reviewed article in Into the Blogosphere -- which I initially rejected as a less-prestigious venue -- is readily available for my students and me to consult online (and link to, if desired). The site is run with weblog software, which means that visitors can post comments and the authors can respond.

While my decision to submit my article to BlogTalks rather than Into the Blogosphere had consequences, the online-print relationship is not a simple binary opposition.

I was asked to help peer-review Into the Blogosphere (something that wouldn't have happened, had I contributed to it). When the collection first came out I posted lengthy reactions to several of the articles. As a result, I have insinuated myself partially into the permeable boundaries of Into the Blogosphere.

About half of the authors of the BlogTalk papers chose to publish their work on their own websites. But, as viewed through Google, online presence of the collection is not as strong. While this might be a momentary glitch, a Google search for "BlogTalks" turns up links to blank pages on my own online syllabus (indicating days I plan to devote to talking about BlogTalks, if the copies ever arrive in the bookstore) before it turns up the table of contents that features the list of those BlogTalk contributions that are available online.

After blogging about how humanities professors aren't reading and citing the works their tenure committees and chairs reward them for writing, I admitted I am apparently part of the problem. Because I use my blog as a research tool, I am more likely to pursue a particular line of inquiry if I know I can make the full text of the source available for further discussion on my blog. The articles in a library database of journal articles are available for free to almost anyone with a library card, but I can't post a working link on my blog that calls up the article. The linkable and the Googleable ascend -- probably faster than they should. (See "Digging for Googleholes," Johnson's critique of Google's inherent pro-geek bias.)

Proprietary methods of online delivery (such as the PDFs served through EBSCOHost) use formats and methods that may not stand the test of time. For all but the small handful of academic authors whose work has crossover mass-market appeal, publishing scholarly work in a print-only venue makes it harder for readers to locate, consult, and cite.

Well, unless those readers are on a tenure and promotions committee... in which case, milk crate technology is extremely useful for delivering that desired heft.

Use it or Lose It: The MLA Bibliography Database (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In "Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing," Cathy N. Davidson makes the case for preserving traditional university presses. If scholarly publication was financially lucrative, she points out, then there wouldn't be university presses to subsidize the cost of producing monographs. She sees the symbiotic relationship between libraries, academic scholarship, and university presses.

If you are a provost trying to save money by asking your university press to bring in more revenue (making cost a major goal in book acquisition), then you are in an untenable position if you are also trying to maintain quality-based publishing standards for your faculty.

Matt Kirschenbaum points to John Unsworth's "The Crisis of Audience," which ponders the troublesome fact that humanities scholars aren't consulting the very monographs their chairs and administrators expect them to produce.

Just a few hours ago, my boss forwarded an e-mail to the English faculty, warning that, because the university library had recorded only 119 hits on the MLA Bibliography during the month of September, our subscription to that service might be dropped. I recognize that library funds are limited, and that good steward of library resources will naturally try to cut those services which are least in demand... Still, the message is -- use it or lose it. If I have to make a mental note to force my undergraduates to use the MLA Bibliography, is that perhaps a sign that I might be able to get by without it? But this is the first week of October -- my 200-level literature students haven't even submitted the first draft of their "close reading" paper. Should I rush their introduction to literary research, just to pump up the number of hits to the MLA database? Probably not.

It's not simply a matter of laziness... the library of the small liberal arts school where I teach simply isn't as well-stocked as those of the University of Toronto and the University of Virginia, where I studied. It's simply easier to access those online materials (particularly for someone whose subject area and personal habits mean I spend a lot of time online). Which brings us back to Davidson's point -- I am, it would seem, part of the problem.

From the Call for Papers:
[W]orkshops and presentations that address the following themes and issues:

• Strategies for teaching information literacy to students and/or faculty across the curriculum
  
• Empirical studies on the effect of information literacy initiatives on student retention and/or learning
  
• Learning communities and information literacy
  
• Creating teaching partnerships between reference librarians and instructors
  
• What constitutes information literacy in the 21st century
  
• Encouraging lifelong learning through information literacy
  
• Technological developments and their impact on student research
  
• Strategies for evaluating sources
  
• Information Literacy and the Sciences
  
• Computers in the writing classroom: how the research paper has changed
  
• Developing learning outcomes for information and technological competence
  
• Preparing students for the modern University

--Georgia Conference on Information Literacy (Georgia Southern University)

My presentation, Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review, is on Saturday... if I can find a ride from the Savannah airport to Statesboro, that is.

"As soon as he was shot, he started talking his head off," Holder said. "He began to have a conversation with the robot, telling it, 'Hey little buddy,' and then began talking to us through the robot." --Holed-up suspect talks to robot for five hours, then gives up (Kentucky.com)

Those Kentucky robots sure are amazing.

The floodwaters carried silt, debris, sewage, and diesel fuel. Every pinball machine was submerged at least up to the backglass, and every surface within five feet of the ground, including playfields and inside cabinets, has been coated in the floodwater sludge. The sludge is a sanitary hazard and will have already destroyed sensitive materials... Two hundred and thirty-two pinball machines have been destroyed, as well as a handful of classic video games, the extremely rare Tattoo Assassins prototype, a sitdown Omega Race, some great dancing games, et cetera. --Flood Destroyes PAPA [Professional Amateur Pinball Association] Headquarters (PAPA)

My former student Matt Hoy called this to my attention. It was just days after the end of the PAPA 7 World Pinball Championships.

My Alternate Life (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My colleague Lee McClain recently published My Alternate Life, a young adult book that features an amazing computer game that lets adopted children live the life they lost when their birth mothers gave them up for adoption.

If you pass by my office door this time of year, you might see me leaning over a stack of papers, struggling against the powerful urge to blubber "I coulda been a contender!" This feeling usually surfaces when I take a break from grading in order to ponder the remarkable scholarly achievements of others in my field, causing me to imagine what life might be like if I were a faculty member at a big research institution.

Teaching assistants to do most of the grading. Just two courses per term, rather than four (or, counting an overload, five). Time to prepare witty and stunning lectures on cutting-edge topics, which would be the basis for my next book. A faculty club with a fireplace, where I and my colleagues would start gathering around two in the afternoon, lounging on overstuffed wing chairs and familiarly calling each other by our last names.

When I was on the job market the year before last, one of my campus visits was to a huge institution with ambitious goals and ample support for faculty research. At a meeting with a group of top-level administrators, I was asked how I expected my blogging and other electronic activities would be received.

Since I was at the time the author of a brand spankin' new baby monograph (if I hadn't been, I doubt I would have made it that far), I was feeling fairly confident in my abilities. I replied that the gold standard for academic achievement would continue to be the scholarly monograph, but that in the area for which I was being hired, alternative methods such as open-source and open-access modes were having an effect on the professional discourse.

Moving to a more specific question, one of the administrators asked, "Is your blog icing on the cake, or another cake?"

"I'd prefer to think of it as a different kind of dessert, somewhere off to one side," I replied.

I didn't end up getting that job.

Were I a certain filmmaker with a talent for making politically charged documentaries, I might juxtapose the previous two factual statements in such a way that my readers infer a causal connection. But that exchange about blogging was just one of many opportunities for me to make an impression. Before I left campus I was told that in the same pool of candidates was an essentially unbeatable affirmative action recruit; further, I already had several other interviews lined up -- one of which led to my current position, where I am very happy. Not getting an offer from Big Ambitious University didn't sting for long.

Still, as midterm papers start to pile up, I daydream.

"What," I asked, "are we to make of Plato's attempts to define justice?" A chill descended. Noses burrowed into The Republic. One student hesitantly volunteered a comment; another offered a passing observation. Something resembling a discussion followed, but most of the remarks betrayed the superficiality of the students' engagement.

They were eager to discuss their favorite movies and books, censorship, or the problem of date rape, but they shrank from the seeming irrelevance of Plato to their lives. Often the brightest students were the most subdued. Their occasional remarks showed intelligence and sophistication, yet every gesture and tone of voice conveyed boredom. --Mark C. Carnes
--The Liminal Classroom (Chronicle)

I've had magical classroom moments like this, but I can't always manufacture them on demand. Fascinating!

Examples of systemic bias:

• Because so many Wikipedians do their research on line, topics not already well covered on the Internet tend to be under-covered in Wikipedia.
  
• Because so many English-language Wikipedians live in a very small number of countries, topics pertaining strongly to those countries are disproportionately covered.
  
• Because so many Wikipedians are interested in technology, technological topics are disproportionately well covered. Ditto science fiction. Ditto libertarianism. Conversely, and presumably for parallel reasons, there is very little on (as Xed points out) contemporary events in Africa or (as I'd point out) even on African-American history or Native American history: most of our articles on Native Americans are written from an anthropologist's point of view, whereas our articles on (for example) punk rock or grunge rock or the science fiction fandom are consistently written with insider's knowledge.

This list is, at best, illustrative. I do think we would do well to look at the systematic biases in the Wikipedia. I think some of them can be covered by adding to the efforts at translation from other languages. Others really would require recruitment to correct, and that recruitment may depend in part on a positive community decision that the recruitment is importans, accompanied by a long, hard look at what aspects of our internal culture are not seen as welcoming by certain groups. Wikipedia is disproportionately white and male, and I don't think that is good. --Crossbow [Systemic Bias in Wikipedia] (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia is an online, community-authored encyclopedia. Some members of the community are attempting to address the inherent bias that arises from the demographics of those people who have the time and expertise to volunteer to write articles in a collaborative hypertext environment.

Link via Clancy, who is pondering an abmitious effort to update Wikipedia's materials on scholarly research methods.

Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture). --Chris Anderson
--The Long Tail  (Wired)

Wired being Wired, it's not surprising to see yet another glowing celebration of technology; still, this is an interesting spin on the effect of big business on media consumption habits.

SpaceShipOne needed to reach 100 kilometers, or about 62.5 miles, twice within a two-week window to take the X Prize. The other principal requirement was to carry a pilot and either two passengers or their weight equivalent in ballast. --Dan Brekke --SpaceShipOne Wins the X Prize  (Wired)

High-school student Jillian Clarke investigated the scientific validity of the "5-second rule" during her apprenticeship in Hans Blaschek's University of Illinois lab this summer. You know the rule: If food falls to the floor and it's in contact with the floor for fewer than 5 seconds, it's safe to pick it up and eat it. --If You Drop It, Should You Eat It? Scientists Weigh In on the 5-Second Rule  (University of Illinois)

One of the winners of the 2004 Ig Noble Prize. See also "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."

[A]academic training can sometimes compete with this sense of "adventure" by giving you detailed maps to the treasure, complete with complex keys and dotted lines. I find books now by following footnotes more often than I do by browsing shelves. --Caleb McDaniel --Used book stores (Mode for Caleb)

More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web. There they met life at second or third hand, peering eagerly, taking in the passing show, but staying remote, apparently untouched by it. So conditioned, they found it almost natural to come at the rest of life with a sense of aristocratic expectation: "What have you to show me that I haven't yet seen?" --Mark Edmundson [actually credited as "Mark Edmunson" on the website] --All Entertainment All the Time (Poets & Writers)

I agree with Edmundson's points about the entertainment culture that is prevalent on college campuses... but I disagree that the World Wide Web is part of spectator culture. Students who blog, even if they blog about popular entertainment, are at the very least voicing opinions and (if they are involved in some sort of online community) possibly learning how to defend their positions when challenged. I recently blogged an article by Douglas Rushkoff, who claims that families with internet connections spend nine fewer hours a week sitting in front of the TV; he says blogs give people an alternative to participation in consumer culture.

Next week, I plan to show the PBS Frontline documentary, "The Merchants of Cool" to my freshman seminar. While the pop culture figures it examines are rapidly becoming dated, I think enough time has passed that I can usefully ask my students to extend to the latest rising pop phenomena the argument of Merchants of Cool -- that youth culture is not really something that youths own and control; that corporations invest hugely in the commodification of trends (that is, turning emerging and fringe teen fashions into products to market to the mainstream teen).

I'm a bit uncomfortable with how Edmundson uses the colloquial term "cool" in close conjunction with Marshall McLuhan's term "cool". It's not clear to me that McLuhan's hot/cool terminology has any direct connection to the colloquial use of the term "cool"... this essay is a selection from a longer work, so perhaps Edmundson covered that elsewhere in his text.

There's apparently a typo in the punch line to the story about the teenaged student of the Viennese music instructor. It should probably read, "What that young man lacks is inexperience."

Hey... that sounds like Yoda's rejection of the young Annakin Skywalker. Hold on a second... (Google, google.)


Mark Edmundson, left. George Lucas, right.

Could it be...? Nah.

The games begin: you can now download entries in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition. --Nick Montfort --IF Comp 2004 Unleashed (Grand Text Auto)

Emerson and Thoreau on Laundry Night (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It's past midnight and I can't sleep. In a few days, I'll be teaching Emerson's "Self Reliance" and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience." With two small children in the house, an the usual full roster of "quality time" activities scheduled this weekend, I know I won't get any work done over the weekend. I have a few uninterrupted hours of quiet ahead of me... maybe I should start reading.

On the other hand, I'm down to my last clean shirt. I really need to do laundry.

Do I spend three or four hours rekindling my relationship with the founders of a movement that defined the post-revolutionary American spirit, and so resign myself to teaching in my cleanest, least-wrinkled used shirt?

Do I fall to the allure of foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of little minds, and give myself a headache trying to match the twenty assorted dark blue socks that I own? If I can't tell the difference after squinting at them for a minute, why am I worried that a stranger who glimpses them for a second will mock my mismatched hosiery?

I do a little reading, the book propped open awkwardly before me, while putting shirts on hangars. "All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it," I read in Thoreau, "a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it."

I almost fail to notice the missing button. I disrupt a stack of neatly folded washcloths, as I flip through Throeau looking for the "foolish consistency" quote because I can't remember whether it reads "little minds" or "small minds". Stupid me, that was Emerson, not Thoreau, no wonder I can't find it. I shouldn't put that shirt on a wire hanger.

Grr... this isn't working. Transcendentalism or laundry? Laundry or transcendentalism?

* * * *
I download copies of "Self Reliance" and "Civil Disobedience." I fire up Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

"Action from principle--the perception and the performance of right --changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine."

As the voice drones in the early morning stillness, I collect into a large ball all the socks that I can't instantly match. The twelve pairs of identical white tube socks and the six pairs of identical black dress socks will stay in the drawer. The rest get tied up (with one of the longer socks) into a little ball, and tossed aside.

"Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?" the voice continues. It seems disinterested with Thoreau, but is professional enough to give him a fair shake. "Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."