December 2004 Archive Page

According to the United Nations, as of 2002, 70 percent of the world’s nations were holding multi-party elections. Fifty-eight percent of the world’s population lived under a fully democratic system of governance. Both of these figures are at their highest points in human history.

The Freedom House (search) think tank gave 89 countries containing 46 percent of the world’s population a ranking of “free” in the 2003 edition of its annual Freedom of the World report (search). Both figures are at their highest in the 30-year history of the survey. Freedom House also reports that countries moving toward more freedom have outpaced countries moving away from freedom by three to one. Radley Balko --2004: The Good News (Fox News)

This is one of several "good news" bits in the article. I'd find the article more convincing if the online version included links to the sources for all these claims, (though I have no particular reason, other than healthy skepticism, to complain).

IN THE span of 18 months, Isaac Newton invented calculus, constructed a theory of optics, explained how gravity works and discovered his laws of motion. As a result, 1665 and the early months of 1666 are termed his annus mirabilis. It was a sustained sprint of intellectual achievement that no one thought could ever be equalled. But in a span of a few years just before 1900, it all began to unravel. One phenomenon after another was discovered which could not be explained by the laws of classical physics. The theories of Newton, and of James Clerk Maxwell who followed him in the mid-19th century by crafting a more comprehensive account of electromagnetism, were in trouble.

Then, in 1905, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein found the way forward. --Miraculous visions (The Economist)

The MASSIVE database (last updated on 12-7-04) contains information on over 1700 science and math songs. Some of these songs are suitable for 2nd graders; others might only appeal to tenured professors. Some songs have been professionally recorded; others haven't. Some are quite silly; others are downright serious. --MASSIVE (Math And Science Song Information, Viewable Everywhere)

Lame acronym. Cool concept.

You awaken to news of a morning traffic jam. Leaving home early for a doctor's appointment, you nonetheless arrive too late to find parking. After waiting two hours for a 15-minute consultation, you wait again to have your prescription filled. All the while, you worry about the work you've missed because so many other people would line up to take your job. Returning home to the evening news, you watch throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East, and a feature on disappearing farmland in the Midwest. A telemarketer calls for the third time, telling you, "We need your help to save the rain forest." As you set the alarm clock for the morning, one neighbor's car alarm goes off and another's air conditioner starts to whine.

So goes a day in the life of an average American. It is thus hardly surprising that many Americans think overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. --Phillip Longman --The Global Baby Bust (Foreign Affairs)

Bloggers at the scene are more deeply affected by events than the journalists who roam from one disaster to another, said Xeni Jardin, one of the four co-editors of the site BoingBoing.net, which pointed visitors to many of the disaster blogs.

"They are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that other media just can't," with an intimate voice and an unvarnished perspective, with the richness of local context, Ms. Jardin said.

That makes blogs compelling - and now essential - reading, said Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and a blogger. Once he heard about the disaster, "Right after BBC, I went to blogs," he said. --John Schwartz --Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster (NY Times)

I also found Wikipedia's entry on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake impressive.

The recent popularity of "eBaying" -- the sale of seemingly fictive "property" within MMORPG -- has raised numerous questions about the nature of MMORPG play. In particular, many have asked why players choose this practice, and how it might affect the game. This paper addresses these issues by examining some of the motives that drive MMORPG players and developers, and by outlining the economic forces that constrain or coordinate those motives. It concludes by showing how wages and preferences might determine a player's role in the game property market. It also shows that, in a strictly economic sense, and subject to certain stringent assumptions, such trade benefits players, increases player population, and ultimately, increases MMORPG revenue. --Jeremy Neal Kelly --Play Time: MMORPG Play as an Economic Activity (Anthemion)

Mr. Komarnitsky gave radio interviews to stations as far away as Australia. Web sites from NYTimes.com to geek hangout Slashdot.org linked to his site. An Associated Press item about his site was picked up by newspapers from Los Angeles to Columbia, S.C. As of midday Monday, according to Mr. Komarnitsky, the "Web cam" was asked by online visitors to snap a new picture in the same spot 334,832 times. The lights had supposedly been changed 91,978 times. But instead of a live camera, komar.org is really showing off 32 high-resolution digital photographs, taken in four sets with different amounts of snow on the ground. A sophisticated computer program, which Mr. Komarnitsky wrote with input from a friend skilled in digital imaging, serves up a section of the appropriate photo, depending on actual weather conditions and what lights the online Web visitors expect to see. -Charles Forelle --High-Tech Holiday Light Display Draws Everyone But the Skeptics (WSJ Online)

But it was all fake.

Journalists are human beings, and they do sometimes make mistakes.

If you could assign a reading list to the world, what books would you want people to read, and most importantly, why? --Moira Richardson --Calling All Readers! Contest! (Literary Tease)

I'm still recovering from whatever it is that has struck me down this week... but Moira's blog entry got me thinking.

Even though Moira's original post included many non-literary works, I won't ponder what non-fiction reading I'd require.

One of the coolest things about being an English professor is that you get to assign reading lists all the time... I always try to put a work on each list that I've never read before, or that I never encountered in a classroom before, so that I can discover it along with my students.

But... responding not as a teacher, but as a reader, I'll list a few books that had a big effect on my youth; they made me think about writing and reading (or performance) in ways that have stayed with me over time. They aren’t in any particular order (and this is not the syllabus for "Intro to Literary Study," just in case you wondered).

Ender's War (Two books in a thoughtful science-fiction series by Orson Scott Card; originally the novels Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I haven't read the rest of the series.)

Lord of the Rings (With The Hobbit thrown in as an appetizer. I made sure to re-read all the books before I saw the movies, just so I could enjoy the original books one more time without having the movies dictating how my imagination interpreted the text.)

The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner's story of the collapse of a once-grand Southern family. The story is told out of chronological order. When I finished the book, I immediately read it again in chronological order.)

Wuthering Heights (I loved the layered narrative format, which got a bit ridiculous, especially when Nelly Dean, while relating a story to the primary narrator, just happens to have in her apron pocket the letter she needs to consult.. when she reads it aloud, we hear the author of that letter quoting somebody else, who relates yet another story…)

A Man for All Seasons (A play by Robert Bolt, about the political struggle between Henry VIII and Thomas More. I initially read it as part of a "Religion in Modern Drama" course, and later I had a work-study job in the scene shop during a year that the University of Virginia drama department put it on.)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard's subverted look at Hamlet, from the perspective of two minor characters.)

Our Town (Thorton Wilder; yet another play. This one is a bit corny -- Emily's goodbye speech to the butternut tree is a bit hard to take. But the play holds a special place in my heart because I played the narrator ("Stage Manager") my senior year in high school.)

1984 (Since I was low on the social totem pole in high school, especially as an underclassman, I would eat my lunch as quickly as possible, and head up to the library, where I worked through a stack of paperbacks lined up along the windowsill. I don't think I ever checked 1984 out, but I read it 40 minutes or so at a time. I think I started it in November 1983, with the idea that I wanted to read it before 1984. I was blown away one day when I opened up the page and read Winston Smith writing something like "November 13, 1983" in his journal. I don't remember the exact date, but it was just one or two days off from that date when I read that page.

Rossum's Universal Robots (Karel Capek's play, first produced in 1920, that introduced the word "robot" to languages around the world. It's the original "artificial servants created by short-sighted humans rebel and destroy their creators" story, which has been done to death in the science fiction genre... but the original play was more of a social comedy than anything we would recognize as science fiction.)

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller's thickly woven WWII satire; I believe it was the source of the term "Catch-22," which in the original context meant that no sane soldier would want to stay in the army, so any soldier who requested a discharge on the grounds of insanity must be sane after all. This book is often credited as an inspiration for M*A*S*H. My high school English class read through an abbreviated -- and sanitized -- play version; I was curious about it and went looking for the full novel.)

Frankenstein. (While the movies created the idea that the monster is stitched together with parts dug up from graves, I recall that the book is actually quite vague on how the body is created… I remember being quite surprised at how much the novel focuses on education --- that is, Dr. Frankenstein has to educate himself in order to continue his work, and the monster also has to learn, with no mentors or associates, how to function in society.)

That’s more than 10.

If I weren’t an English professor now, and conscious of my function as an arbiter and former of literary taste, I might bump a few of the more overtly literary titles off the list to make room for The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series (it was a trilogy at the time I was following it ardently), and my second-hand copy of The Star Trek Technical Manual (which I bought in 1977 for a couple bucks from my friend Dean Weigh, who wanted to raise money to buy more Star Wars toys).

GM famously learned this lesson in the early 1980s with the introduction in Mexico and Spain of its Chevy Nova coupe. "No va" in Spanish means "won't go." --What's in a name? For cars, everything (Detroit News Auto Insider)

And the editors at The Detroit News Auto Insider area about to learn a lesson about urban legends...

I've Been Sick... (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I finished posting all this semester's grades just before the annual Christmas Mass and faculty/staff lunch on the 21st. That's the most organized I've ever been, when it comes to grades.

I was feeling very proud of myself, and very happy to be here at Seton Hill, doing a job that I love with really great people. At one point, I got a little emotional, and blubbered something that came pretty close to "I love you guys..."

I felt like a responsible dad when I put all my raffle tickets towards winning a parent-friendly prize package that consisted of two passes to Sea Base (an indoor play facility), two free ice creams, and... uh... something else that was equally kid-friendly. Anyway, I won that prize.

I was looking forward to spending a couple hours unwinding by playing Deus Ex 2 on the office computer (hey... it's research, honest). But for some reason I couldn't focus... I kept finding other things to do, and for a while I just found myself staring at the wall.

Then I noticed that my head was starting to hurt.

That night my wife took my son to a movie, and I had good quality time with my daughter. But by the time my wife came home, I knew it... I was sick, and it was going to be a doozy.

I basically spent four days in the master bedroom, while my wife took care of the kids and brought in food, in the vain hopes that doing so would keep the kids from catching the flu from me.

I had my laptop computer, which has a DVD player... so I watched the entire Lord of the Rings expanded trilogy over two days (though I kept falling asleep and having the weirdest dreams...). And I played through most of Riven (thanks to a walkthrough). And I read blogs and left comments, though I really wasn't feeling up to posting anything here.

I'm still sick but on the mend. I can be up and about for a couple hours at a time, but my ability to multitask is affected. By multitask, I mean brush my teeth, listen to my son's latest Star Wars adventure, ask the baby why she just said "uh-oh" and notice the fact that my wife, who is behind two closed doors and on the other side of the house, has just called my name. Typical domestic survival skills.

Now everyone else in the house is sick. I'm still only operating at about 40%, but at least now I don't have to walk around with the corner of a tissue stuffed up each nostril.

I haven't shaved in a week and I'm overdue for a haircut, but on my wife's request I've switched to a center part. I fancy that I look a bit -- just a bit -- like Sean Bean as Boromir.

Vasconcellos argued that raising self-esteem in young people would reduce crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, school underachievement and pollution. At one point, he even expressed the hope that these efforts would one day help balance the state budget, a prospect predicated on the observation that people with high self-regard earn more than others and thus pay more in taxes. Along with its other activities, the task force assembled a team of scholars to survey the relevant literature. The results appeared in a 1989 volume entitled The Social Importance of Self-Esteem, which stated that "many, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many of the people who make up society." In reality, the report contained little to support that assertion. --Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger and Vohs --Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth (Scientific American)

For way too long, it has been the mainstream media (MSM) that's played God with the American public, telling everyone what's news and what's not, what to play up and what to downplay. But 2004 was the year the power started shifting, that the Little People, if you will, started to tell the gods of media what the public really wanted. -- Mark Glaser --Bloggers, Citizen Media and Rather's Fall -- Little People Rise Up in 2004 (Online Journalism Review)

Researchers singled out the deaths of more than 300,000 cancer patients, because deaths from cancer are usually more predictable and less sudden than those from heart attacks, strokes or other ailments. There was no increase in overall mortality after Christmas. --Liz Szabo --Terminal Patients Don't Hang on Until After Holidays (TechNewsWorld.com)

That probably won't put that meme to rest.

I often have to struggle with students who persist in citing their freshman-level textbooks in research papers. Authors of textbooks have to simplify, since their primary audience is obviously people who don't know anything about the subject yet.

Here's a list of more scientific fallacies that are often considered "common knowledge": Recurring Science Misconceptions in Textbooks.

--Buttered Mashed Potaotoes Classic Filled Candle (bathandbodyworks.com)

I'm sorry, this seems... wrong.

Thanks for this link, Rosemary. It has disturbed in me in ways that I would prefer to forget.

In the bowels of the British Library, the first object the conservator showed Seales was a manuscript that was so mangled, he says, "We almost ran screaming from the room, because there was nothing we could do. We had no tools that could help."

Seales tells me such manuscript fragments exist in the nooks and crannies of almost every archive. "Exactly how many? It's hard to tell," he says. "In the old days, these kinds of manuscripts were cracked open and painstakingly laid out on paper with tweezers and a magnifying glass. Libraries stopped doing that with all of these damaged objects because they didn't have the manpower to do it, and they weren't getting the results they wanted." --Alicia P. Gregory --Digital Exploration: Unwrapping the Secrets of Damaged Manuscripts (UK Odyssey)

Via MGK.

Washington Post Co. on Tuesday said it would buy Microsoft Corp.'s online magazine Slate, whose mix of politics, news and culture has built a loyal following but failed to yield significant profits. --Martha Graybow --Washington Post to Buy Web Magazine Slate (Reuters)

In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies--workers make, on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium--contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

To make this model work, Wal-Mart must keep labor costs down. --Liza Featherstone --Down and Out in Discount America (The Nation)

An interesting analysis of the relationship between poverty and Wal-Mart.

"Sometimes you do everything right and you still die," Mr. Wade said. "So you pick yourself up and start again."

I can live with that message, even though I can't shake the feeling that it was designed to sell books to conflicted parents like me. --Learning Early That Success Is a Game (NY Times)

An interesting review of Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever.

My son used to hate losing any game... but that changed when I introduced him to a "how to play chess" CD, that uses cartoon characters and creates an epic quest, not just for a single game, but for the whole goal of improving your skills so you can defeat King Black.

Peter will often hit "reset" when a game -- almost any game -- isn't going well for him. When he invited me to race against him in Lego Stunt Rally, he found it difficult to resist the urge to "reset" automatically when one of the computer-controlled drone cars passed him (I didn't even come close to threatening him... he's got a lot of practice time on that game). The trial-and-error method works for some professions, but students who turn in five polished pages of a rough draft, then jettison their whole paper topic when I suggest revisions, aren't really learning the writing process. (I've attempted to compensate by splitting the larger assignments up into many small ones, but in my lit survey course, with 30+ members, students sometimes objected to being asked to sit through so many oral presentations from peers who either still roughing their ideas out, or reading directly from their previous draft.)

This link was suggested to me by my boss's boss (who is not a blogger herself, but must like having them work for her.)

As Web logs proliferate -- Technorati, which tracks 5 million blogs, estimates that 15,000 are added each day -- the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by journalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach and live. And as blogs continue to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record. --Jeffrey Rosen --Your Blog or Mine? (NY Times)

My boss, who is also a blogger, sent me this link. Thanks, John.

Because government schooling is so bad, and dissatisfies such a gigantic amount of people, as represented in ?survey upon survey,? it therefore follows that they cannot be held liable for their faults! Imagine this being said of a private company?an auto maker, or a toy manufacturer, produces products that are so extremely bad that they are charged in survey after survey with massive social problems; their quality is so poor that they are regarded with contempt by every social stratum?therefore the auto maker or the toy maker cannot be held liable for their wrongs? Because it would be too expensive to do so? Such a conclusion would be rejected as utterly ridiculous if advanced by a private enterprise; why should the rules be any different for a government-run enterprise? --Timothy Sandefur --Suing Schools for Negligent Science Education (The Panda's Thumb)

Thanks for the suggestion, Ron.

Tips

• Using blurbs with headlines rather than headlines-only seems to help disperse interest throughout a homepage (down the page). Recognize that a list of headlines-only high on the page might not get people to look as much on lower portions of the page.
• The use of blurbs does not appear to affect the number of clicks per headline -- it just redistributes the clicks. If you have some stories that you want to get people to more than others, you might want to use blurbs with those headlines and place those stories near the top of the homepage.
• If you're going to use blurbs, remember that the first few words may matter most. Our findings indicate that very few people go to the trouble of reading all of even short blurbs. Most people don't invest much time in deciding whether or not to click through to an article, so keep head/blurb combos succinct.
--Eyetrack III (Poynter)

On my to-do list: update my "blurbs" page with results from this study.

I know who the murderer is, Kevin blogged. --S. Kurruk --The Lyttle Lytton Contest (Adam Cadre)

One of the "winners" in the Lyttle Lytton contest, Adam Cadre's alternative to the Bulwer-Lytton contest.

(Cadre is also an accomplished interative fiction author.)

Exams: Hard vs. Unfair (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

As students got their first look at the final exam for "American Lit 1800-1915" the other day, a few gasped, "This is hard!"

One student shushed the others. "It's not all that hard if you think before you write."

Our classroom culture was open and friendly enough that the gasping and the shushing was just normal banter. The shusher had obviously figured out that the identification questions weren't testing memory, but testing your ability, knowing what the major themes and narrative characteristics of the works we studied, to deduce which passage came from where.

For example... a passage full of slang and dropped g's is probably not from Emerson or Thoreau. A passage full of long, philosophical words is probably not from the legend of John Henry.

One student, when adding her paper to the stack near the end of the exam period, said: "I'm a chemistry major, and that was the hardest exam I've ever taken."

She wasn't glowering or complaining. I don't think she was trying to suck up. She was just stating an observation.

I took it as a compliment. "Thank you!" I beamed.

She returned my smile with a friendly wish for a good holiday.

I figure it's my job to challenge students. While nobody is perfect, here was an affirmation that I'm doing well in that area. Our exchange would have had a completely different tone if she he'd said the test was "unfair" -- in student speak, often a synonym for "hard".

I'll curve the exam, of course... but students who work hard all term deserve the chance to demonstrate just how good they really are. They all deserve an intellectual challenge, and I'm happy to give it to them. It's only fair.

"She's somewhat neurotic," he confides, "but she is bright, organized and conscientious--the type who'd get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu." He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old "couldn't see the big picture." That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT. --Hara Estroff Marano --A Nation of Wimps (Psychology Today)

This is the kind of article that many of my students will mistake for a scholarly research paper.

Here's a very interesting quotation, but since this is an article for a general audience, it does not refer to any evidence to back up its shocking claims.

American parents today expect their children to be perfect--the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can't get the children to prove it on their own, they'll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are.

Of course I'm not challenging the veracity of this article, I'm just noting that it's not written for the convenience of a researcher, because the sources aren't cited. Journalists are professional communicators whose readers are generally willing to trust the authority of the journalist; a scientific paper is written for an audience of peer scientists, so the author has to back up every claim.

On both micro and macro levels, drawing from the research of others and my own, this proves true for both teachers and students: for some, particularly those with access, the blog is relevant to their lives both within and outside the classroom; for others, though, the medium remains irrelevant. This means that the quest for literacy cannot end with or be subsumed by any one medium. This extended but heavily revised entry represents a moment or opportunity for discovery. --Austin Lingerfelt --The (Classroom) Blog: A Moment for Literacy, A Moment for Giving Pause (Essence Renewed)

A well-done, richly linked graduate student project.

Nuclear Family (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Will you sit with the baby while I read the boy a good-night story?"

"I'm so dead," the wife sighs. "You put them both to bed tonight."

The six-year-old parades past holding the book he's chosen.

Nuclear Energy.

Husband and wife exchange glances.

"Look!" the boy beams. "It has a whole chapter on protons!"

Wife staggers off to the baby's room.

Actress Sharon Stone has filed a liable suit against an LA plastic surgeon for comments he made about Stone having had plastic surgery. Stone adamantly denied the claim and is suing. --Freddie Mooche --Sharon Stone sues doctor for liable (Axcess News (tm) News for the X generation)

Earth to copy-editors... that should be "libel," shouldn't it?

From the story: "Arturi Barens, was quoted in an ABC News story as saying the suit was not well thought out by Stone's attorneys before they filed it."

The author, Freddy Mooche, cites ABC News as the source of a quotation, which is ethical. But the quote singles out the lawuit as "not well thought out," while the headline and body of the Axcess News article refers a "liable" suit?

Hmm... I know that I make occasional typographical errors on my site, so I shouldn't flame others for being human. But this isn't a single instance of a mistyped word -- it's the same mistake in the headline and the story, which suggests someone doesn't know what the right word is supposed to be.

P.S. Freddy Mooche? Really?

Improve Your Students Grammar Skills

That was the subject line of a marketing e-mail I recently got from a publisher.

I didn't bother to check whether that publisher has any punctuation and proofreading titles.

You've heard of "Myst," "Quake" and "Tomb Raider," but how many people remember "Obsidian," "Grim Fandango" and "Under A Killing Moon?" --Gene Emery --A Visit to the Museum of Underappreciated Games (Yahoo|Reuters (will expire))

One presumes this museum is somewhere near The Island of Misfit Toys. Of course, there is also The Underdogs, a site devoted to games that have disappeared from commercial shelves (or games that never were released commercially... there's a healthy section on interactive fiction, including recent releases from the present, post-commercial era.).

Grim Fandango is on my list of "games I've read about and really should take a look at," because I've seen it mentioned in games scholarship.

I've got "Obsidian" in a small stack of retro CDs in my office. "Under a Killing Moon" must be in a box somewhere.

Just hearing the name of the latter two titles makes me think of the taste of the Keebler wafer cookies that my sister and I would load up on when I spent a weekend away from graduate school, at her apartment, catching up with her and playing games.

According to an e-mail sent today to Harvard students, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system, which is second only to the Library of Congress in the number of volumes it contains. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. --Google to Digitize Much of Harvard's Library (Slashdot)

Stealing someone's words isn't the same as stealing someone's television. The original author doesn't have to run to Best Buy to get a new paragraph.

But ideas and words are professors' stock and trade. Unlike the company president who steals sentences for a Rotary Club speech, or the congressman who pilfers phrases for a campaign brochure, the professor who plagiarizes undermines his very profession. --Bartlett and Smallwood --Four Academic Plagiarists You've Never Heard Of: How Many More Are Out There? (Chronicle)

During the fall semester of 2004, I drew from my previous experiences in Writing for the Web with Dr. Jerz from the Fall 2003 semester. The class has changed, and so has my perception of what writing for an internet audience entails.

This section assesses what I have learned working with the class, as both a student learning new concepts that were implemented this year, and as an instructor, drawing from my freshman experience in Writing for the Web with Dennis G. Jerz. --Amanda Cochran --Writing for the Internet: Independent Study Fall 2004 (Girl Meets World)

I'm very proud of Amanda's work. She's been in more than half of the classes I've taught at Seton Hill, including the version of "Writing for the Internet" that I taught last year.

I've been carefully ramping up my expectations for Amanda with each encounter. She continues to prove that she's up to the challenge.

More links to Writing for the Internet student projects coming soon...

"When I told my daughter that I was going to a presentation on blogs, she said 'NO! You can't do blogs in schools! Blogs are OURS!'"
--Barriers to Entry (Weblogg-Ed)

While I still encounter many students who have never heard the word "weblog" before I introduce it in class, I've been increasingly encountering students who already use LiveJournal or some other blogging software for social purposes, and who encounter a brief "woah!" moment when they are asked to use a familiar medium in an unfamiliar way.

Journalism, Education and Failure (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I blogged about Ailee Slater's Oregon Daily Emerald student entitlement essay before reading any of the discussions that raged on the internet.

Clancy was moved to react against the gendered response to Slater, and invoked sympathy for Slater based on her [Slater's] apparent alienation from university culture.

The sexist and ad-hominem attacks on Fark and elsewhere on the internet were unhappy reminders that there are far worse sins than writing an incoherent editorial.

But I was far more struck by the following comment on the Oregon Daily Emerald site:

The funniest thing about this article is that someday you will apply for a job and your potential employer will google you to see what you've done and they will find this. Then they will laugh heartily and throw your resume in the recycle bin.

The student journalism I wrote when I was an undergraduate is not available online. One would have to look it up somewhere in the library stacks at the Unviersity of Viriginia. I'm sure my own early work included a fair share of howlers. For instance, I remember once suggesting the headline, "Virginia Valley Vinters: Veni, Vidi, Vino."

Students -- even student journalists whose work gets spashed across the internet -- should be permitted to make mistakes and to learn from them.

I think most employers understand that producing a student paper is an educational venture. Slater is a textbook example of a sophomore -- the "wise fool" who has had just enough experience to begin noticing patterns, but not enough wisdom to understand fully their significance. This is not a bad thing -- this is part of education, and part of being human.

So, future potential employers of Ailee Slater, don't throw her resume into the trash -- at least, not until you've seen how she responds to the public attention her editorial receives.

Will she become bitter and defensive, lashing out at opinions that differ from hers?

Or, faced with new evidence and new perspectives, will she investigate the issue fully, modify her views to account for her findings, and report the truth fairly, without bias, to the best of her ability?

In a follow-up editorial, will she look into the fate of institutions that have actually tried a grade-free education plan?

Will she examine and critique the connections between her own consumerist mindset and the culture that creates a market for services that will sell an MBA to a cat?

Will she reflect on why she did not do this kind of research herself in the first place, before she published her article?

Does she get a grade for her work on the Oregon Daily Emerald? Does she think the quality of her articles would go up or down if an instructor graded her contributions?

(The school paper I worked on at the University of Virginia paid commission to its ad sales staff, but eveyrone else was a volunteer; the older, larger, and more financially secure paper against which we competed paid its contributors a small amount for each article. Nobody got course credit for their work. I don't know what the system is like at the Oregon Daily Emerald.)

"You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript English town. Like most any other non-descript English towns, there's not much to see or do here, but maybe you'll find something amusing and enjoyable to do.

A shiny metal phone booth sits in the center of the square." -- Moira Richardson --This Ain't No American Phone BoothJoin This Cult)

My Writing for the Internet student Moira Richardson presented this as her final project today. It was inspired by "Pick up the Phone Booth and Die," a silly but legendary work of interactive fiction that I find very useful for introducing the concept of command-line cybertext.

Moira informed the class that, embedded within this hypertext, is a hidden link that leads to yet another work of literary hypertext (it's a collage of images and text relating to roses). The rose project itself would have fulfilled the assignment requirements...

I couldn't keep myself from interrupting Moira's presentation to blather praise to the effect that she has not only written an amusing postmodern work of literary hypertext, she has also built not only the picture frame, but the wing of the museum where it is housed.

I'll post a link to all the other student projects once I've assembled an index. Meanwhile, I also recommend Chris Ulicne's IF game "Elementia" (playable via a web browser). It's very short but polished. I wasn't able to spend much time teaching Inform (the programming language I use for text adventure games) in this class, so Chris learned quite a lot on his own.

Blogging is good. So is school. This we know. And when you put them together, they create something even better. This is the main point in Terra Williams and Charles Lowe's article, Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom.

The article makes the argument that blogging can be an effective classroom tool. I agree. Not only does blogging provide an outlet for student creativity and expression, but it just makes more sense. In my Writing for the Internet class (which we all know and love), Dr. Jerz uses a class weblog to do basically everything. What makes a class weblog so useful is that students can access important information easily. Simply by clicking on the different levels of the blog, I can see the syllabus, my assignments, and important due dates. Without the blog, I would be completely lost. --Vanessa Kolberg --Classroom Blogging (Special K)

Vanessa wrote this a few weeks ago and submitted it as part of her blogging portfolio. It attracted comments from one classmate who heartily agreed, and one who was less convinced.

I hate it when people say I was exploited. If language really does have power, then calling me exploited turns me into a powerless cog in a brutal machine. I'd rather be called a fool. At least that leaves open the possibility that I am in control of my own life, however irrational my choices seem.

The whole idea that academe exploits Ph.D.'s is based on the belief that we aren't being paid what we're worth. But who determines what we're worth? The tough reality is that it's the market, and in the market academics are a dime a dozen. So that's about what we get paid. --Paul Rohrer --Not Exploited (Chronicle)

He notes that if academics had to bid for jobs, like construction contractors have to compete with each other to offer the lowest price, "I'm sure there's someone out there who is just as good a teacher or researcher as I, but who is even more desperate than I am."

This Wal-Mart-inspired philosophy of setting faculty salaries probably wouldn't have a noticeable effect on most entry level and survey courses, particularly in the humanities -- where researchers need little equipment other than a library. Still, the stability of a long-term job contract is good for long-range planning such as curricular reform, mentoring, and the general pedagogical development of the teacher.

Does anyone remember the cattle-call Doonesbury cartoon of a few years back, where a dean stands in front of a crowd of desperate Ph.D.s and calls out the jobs he has available?

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school. --Paul Graham
--Why Nerds are Unpopular (Wired)

This popular raced through the blogging community back in Feb. 2003. Looks like Graham sold that essay as part of a collection, which Wired has excerpted. More evidence that giving your stuff away online for free can lead to paying contracts. Good for him.

The essay is a good read.

On other occasions, students have surfed the Net during class and found Web sites that supplement the discussion - though Jones also jokes that he's never had his students' undivided attention thanks to the laptops, cell phones and other gizmos they carry.

"There is a real power there, a kind of technological power. But also I think there's a kind of intellectual power that can be harnessed. They are so curious about using these technologies. And I'd really like to be able to regularly marshal that curiosity," Jones says, noting that students - not necessarily universities - are the ones who often drive the use of technology on campus.

He also thinks that young workers will continue to push technological advances in the corporate world, partly because they are able to handle "multiple conversations and juggle better than the previous generations." He says the Internet - and other forms of communication - play very much into this generation's wish for flexibility at home, work and during down time. --Martha Irvine --Generation Raised With Internet Grows Up (AP/My Way)

Young people may know that just because information is plentiful online doesn't mean it's reliable, yet their perceptions of what's trustworthy frequently differ from their elders' - sparking a larger debate about what constitutes truth in the Internet age.

Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project.

She wasn't prepared for the response: "Someone raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?'" --Anick Jesdanun --Online Research Worries Many Educators (AP/My Way)

Collier has never met most of his guild mates in person, but he knows two of them very well. They are his roommates, Adam Traum and Owen Nelson, both buddies he met in art school in Florida a few years back who are now his compadres in the real and virtual worlds.

In real life, the threesome lives in what Collier jokingly refers to as the "nerd tree house," an apartment chock full of mismatching furniture, stacks of pizza boxes, ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts and empty bottles of beer and Diet Coke. The walls are mostly empty, save the Jesus action figure that's tacked up near the kitchen - plus an Elvis cutout, a girlie calendar and a poster of martial arts star Jet Li.

Amid all of it, the focal point is the hardware: four TVs lined up in front of the couch - and 11 computers, with various computer parts scattered about. A cardboard box near the TVs holds just about every game console ever made - and a few duplicates, just in case. --Martha Irvine --Web Gaming Changes Social Interactions (AP/My Way)

We are currently paying a large amount of money to attend this University and receive an education. If I have paid to be taught something, shouldn't there be a repercussion for the teacher rather than, or at least as well as, the student when knowledge has not been taught? --Ailee Slater --Grading system gets an F (Oregon Daily Emerald)

I especially enjoyed this author's telling use of "toilet-cleaner" as a metaphor for a university instructor. And then the toilet would be... --

Whoops, a student has just come in the door (during my scheduled office hours), so I've got to spend some time listening to "the boss".

Update: Just kidding, of course.

I have heard faculty colleagues lamenting the creeping consumerism that leads students to think that they are buying an A, but I've never seen that consumerist attitude so starkly and blithely displayed as in Slater's essay. I *have* had students tell me that they thought my course was one of the first times they felt they were paying for the chance to learn, rather than buying credits to apply towards a degree. (Of course, I have also had students blow off my class, for whatever reason.)

Towards the end of Slater's essay, she suggests that, if faculty paid less attention to grades, and didn't spend much time generating assignments that forced students to keep up, then faculty would have more time to mentor the brightest students; letters of recommendation that approving faculty write to excellent students would replace the need for grades. I don't think there's a faculty member on Earth who wouldn't prefer to teach a small course of intimately devoted students, rather than a huge section of disinterested students.

But what if a faculty member simply refused to write a letter for a deserving student? Perhaps the faculty member is just too swamped to write more than a perfunctory letter... perhaps the faculty member makes an arrangement with the student -- babysit my kids for free and I'll write you a better letter of reference. While grades are hardly foolproof, they can be externally verified more fairly and accurately than an individual professor'sletter-writing whims.

A student has the option of dropping a course if they think the instructor is too hard (or they otherwise don't like the instructor's methods). An instructor can't simply drop a student from a class simply because they think that the student will be too hard to teach. I think this is a good thing for student education (though it's not always a good thing for the instructor's record, if a student who wasn't prepared for the class blames the teacher for not being good enough).

Entry-level courses at large research institutions are typically taught by graduate students who may have a solid grasp of the subject matter but not much experience in the classroom. Slater might be better suited to the academic environment at a teaching university.

I don't know what to make of Slater's suggestion that it is somehow unfair for the teacher to be able to decide whether or how much the student has learned. According to the article, Slade is a sophomore English major who would like to publish her own creative work. If she were studying French, wouldn't it make more sense to let a native French speaker (or someone who has spent 10 years studying French) judge her work than to let her come up with her own opinion about how much French she has learned? If she were studying history, should she be the judge of the facts?

I've blogged before about variable credit pass-fail grading system; that is, a student who does exactly what the syllabus requests gets three credits of "pass". A student who goes above and beyond the requirements can get up to six credits. Students who don't meet the course requirements can get fewer credits. Such a system would make education more expensive for students who take up a lot of instructional resources without doing their fair share of work.

Slater uses a passive verb in the excerpt quoted above... "when knowledge has not been taught". Slater seems to be basing her understanding of education on the conduit metaphor, rather than the constructivist metaphor.

Her solution -- punish the instructor instead of, or along with, the student who does not perform -- assumes that learning is something that is delivered from instructor to student, like water through a pipe, or packages on a conveyor belt. If the student doesn't end up knowing enough, it must have been because the instructor didn't distribute enough knowledge, right?

Regarding the conduit metaphor, Reddy writes that in English, the language we use to discuss communication share a pervasive metaphor that conditions us to think of communication in exactly the way Slater seems to use -- as a conduit, like a conveyor belt or a pipe, carrying quantifiable bits of knowledge from the source to the destination. According to Reddy, we don't actually exchange pre-packaged knowledge; we exchange signs and symbols, and that in order to fully learn anything, the receiver must work hard to use those signs and symbols as blueprints, to reconstruct the image or concept that was in the mind of the sender. (See "The Evil Magic of the Conduit Metaphor", part of an article I wrote for BlogTalks.)

To blame the teacher for information that is not learned assumes that teaching is a matter of putting the right information into a package and sending it down the conduit to its destination. It assumes that learning is as simple as opening up that package.

I forget where I found this link, but I came across a discussion on Metafilter.

From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced in November that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home. And while students seemed to benefit from limited use of computers at school, those who used them several times per week at school saw their academic performance decline significantly as well. --G. Jeffrey MacDonald --Contrarian finding: Computers are a drag on learning (CS Monitor)

Dude, you've got to read this. A linguist from the University of Pittsburgh has published a scholarly paper deconstructing and deciphering the word "dude," contending it is much more than a catchall for lazy, inarticulate surfers, skaters, slackers and teenagers.... Kiesling says in the fall edition of American Speech that the word derives its power from something he calls cool solidarity - an effortless kinship that's not too intimate. --Mike Crissey --Linguist Deciphers Uses of Word 'Dude' (AP)

I do wish articles like this, that summarize scholarly publications, would give the full citation information, or at least the URL of the journal's home page.

For a librarian who has even a modest sense of either posterity or professional responsibility, entertaining any thoughts about a decline in the importance of books is painful. After all, books are how we speak to one another across generations, and one of the ways we can subvert the limitations of culture, class, gender, and personality.

But not all books are priceless additions to our heritage. Bad books cascade off the world's presses in a torrent of never-ending intellectual sewage. Amid the constant babble, the best books have trouble attracting attention. --Dennis Dillon --College Libraries: the Long Goodbye (Chronicle)

The last 200 years have driven centralization and changed the human experience in ways that conflict with evolution. The Internet will reestablish a more balanced, decentralized lifestyle. --Jakob Nielsen --Undoing the Industrial Revolution (Alertbox)

In the universal, ritualistic adulation, it was no surprise that Google's latest service received publicity that was as wide as it was shallow. The blogorrhea and avalanche of e-mail was as if a free, magical cure for cancer had been announced by the National Institutes of Health. I like and use Google a lot, but not with the "nothing-but-Google" zealotry of its fans. --Google Scholar Beta (Review) (Gale Group)

A critical review of Google Scholar. My former student Matt Hoy notes the review is hosted by Thompson Gale (which sells, among other things, online resources, some of which may see Google as competition).

The Sims 2 now has a patch that fixes a few bugs. If only real life was debuggable like this. Here's a few highlights:

• Fixes a problem with Sims' jobs not functioning properly when 3 or more Sims go to work in a helicopter.
• Visitors will no longer kidnap a baby or toddler by leaving the lot while carrying them.
• An adopted baby no longer snaps to the ground when the social worker that delivers it puts it in a crib.
• A Sim whose fiancé dies can now become engaged again.
• Fixes the problem where the teddy bear would occasionally float after being put down.
• Teens no longer get the unsatisfiable "Write a Novel" want.

-- Andrew Stern --In Debugging the Sims, Fiction is Stranger than Truth (Grand Text Auto)

They reported that the more someone heads a soccer ball, the lower that player will score on tests measuring attention, concentration, and general intellectual functioning. Lezak is unsurprised. “I know what happens when you bat on the brain,” she says. “Given what we know about boxing, it would have been surprising if we hadn’t found anything. In soccer, people are punishing themselves in much the same way boxers do.” --Barry Yeoman --Lights Out: Can contact sports lower your intelligence? (Discover)

Yaah! My six-year-old son wants to play soccer this spring. He wanted to do it last spring, but he injured his foot while on vacation, and practices started before we knew how serioulsy (not very, as it turned out).

Hmm... we just started a swim class. Maybe I can subtly encourage him there... but then there are those pesky diving boards that can smack you on the back of the head on the way down.

Oh the conflicts of parenthood!

Minorities who complain of underrepresentation might want to consider this still rather arcane problem. Television doesn't just represent you; it usurps you. In this respect, to be underrepresented might be seen as a kind of privilege. It means that those bright and literate tv people haven't really discovered you yet and set you going like a windup doll on the screen. You - as an individual, a family, a community - remain outside the soul-consuming vise of video.

I find the demand for ?positive role models? on tv funny too. Of course plenty of these already exist, and other writers on this subject have pointed out that it'sa sign of maturity to tolerate some negative racial and ethnic representations. But this is beside the point. The
point is that the bright and literate tv people will be only too happy to accommodate you here, and soon enough all significant American subgroups will find not only compelling but also flattering versions of themselves all over the screen. --Margaret Soltan --Tragedy of Addiction (University Diaries)

In August of 2003, I spent $280 on X-rays and $400 on laptop repairs. I was in between fellowships and had no health insurance. I had slid down the steps of my charming two-floor walkup, resulting in an injury to my arm and, more painfully, damage to computer files containing my dissertation-research notes.

Those charges reflect a moment I have tried hard to forget: sitting in my apartment, immobilized by pain, staring at a gross lump on my wrist and a computer that refused to respond. Thankfully, a friend of a friend from college worked in an orthopedic surgeon's office and was able to pull a few strings so that I could avoid the expense of an emergency room. The fall (luckily) cost me a total of only $680 but scared me enough to wonder how I could afford to remain in this career. --Elizabeth Tatem --A Career in Adaceme (Chronicle)

I was pretty fortunate in the student-debt department. As an in-state student at The University of Virginia, with the support of my parents and various part-time jobs, I had no debt as an undergraduate or MA student, and I think I only had to take out a loan for one or two years while I was at studying for my Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. When there weren't enough university teaching jobs to go around, I collected unemployment benefits. Happily, I accepted a full-time job offer, which paid the bills but slowed down my completion of the Ph.D. a bit. Once I was done with the Ph.D., I took on a couple of extra classes, and put all the money towards paying off my student loans.

At the time we were renting a duplex. While it felt good for a while to be debt-free, it feels even better now that we're putting money into our own house.

I'm blogging this because I remember a discussion between grad students of different disciplines at the University of Toronto. The students from the sciences, whose professors brought in grant money that they used to pay their students to staff their labs, were able to treat their graduate work as a job. They complained that they had to spend most of their time doing the work that their adviser wanted them to do, rather than the work that they needed to do in order to finish their own research. But most would not consider doing the work at all if they weren't paid for it.

The same is apparently not true of us nutty English types.

Santa, enraged, kills Ensign Jones and attacks the Enterprise in his sleigh. As Scotty works to keep the power flowing to the shields, Kirk and Bones infiltrate Santa's headquarters. With the help of the comely and lonely Mrs. Claus, Kirk is led to the heart of the workshop, where he learns the truth: Santa is himself a pawn to a master computer, whose initial program is based on an ancient book of children's Christmas tales. --John Scalzi --The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time (Whatever)

I'm a sucker for a Star Trek spoof. This list also pokes fun at Ayn Rand, Noam Chomsky, and Orson Wells.... and The Muppets.

At home, dads read to their daughters and throw footballs to their sons. In elementary school overwhelmingly female teaching staffs naturally teach in ways that connect better with girls. Fidgety boys are quickly defined as suffering from reading disabilities. In middle school, teachers - still unattuned to the boys' disadvantages - take no action to correct swelling reading gaps.

That brings boys to the pivotal ninth grade, the first year when they run up against the heavily verbal, college-track curriculum that school reforms demand of most schools. And the boys flounder.

The trend holds through the remaining school years: Girls shine; boys fade. --Pay closer attention: Boys are struggling academically (Yahoo/USA Today (will expire))

My son is doing his best to pay attention to a collection of Beatrix Potter stories that my wife wants to read to him. Naturally, the Peter Rabbit tales are of interest to my son (whose name is Peter), but in the latest story in the Beatrix Potter collection, a little girl who has lost three handkerchiefs and a "pinnie" goes looking for them and encounters a hedgehog who does laundry for all the forest animals. Thrilling. Peter listened dutifully, but didn't ask a single question.

Halfway through the story, I realized that a "pinnie" is probably a "pinafore," but that didn't really help Peter understand the story very much.

I'm much more interested in reading to him from the Young Jedi Knights series (which is pure entertainment, but deals with character issues such as friendship, loyalty), or adventure/education hybrids like The Magic Treehouse or The Magic Schoolbus.

While the teacher in The Magic Schoolbus books is Ms. Frizzle, she is a science teacher, which breaks the stereotype somewhat. And all these books, including the Jedi books, feature problem-solving boy/girl teams (two friends, a brother and sister, a whole class) as protagonists.

During an English faculty meeting at my previous school, when some female faculty members were promoting a program to make the sciences more interesting to girls, I offered the suggestion that one way to get more girls in the sciences is to make English and the humanities more interesting to boys. What followed was an awkward moment of silence.

--MSN Spaces = soylent green (BoingBoing)

A good introduction to the online reaction to MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging service.

Note particularly the terms of service that says anything you post using the service becomes a product that MSN can sell without reimbursing you.

Lycos Europe has shut down its screensaver, makelovenotspam, which delighted many Internet users with the opportunity to flood spammers' Web sites with junk e-mail. ISPs and anti-virus developers objected to the tactic, and at least one spammer found a way to turn the tables.... One Web site reportedly spammed by the screensaver simply forwarded its traffic back to makelovenotspam.com, according to security Latest News about Security firm F-Secure. --Lycos Shuts Down Controversial Screensaver (CIO Today)

Well, that was quick.

How indulgent is World of Warcraft? The game actually rewards you for not playing it. If you log out of the game in an inn, you get double experience for a while when you return later. According to the documentation, staying away from the game for a week should give you about a level and a half worth of experience point bonuses, the better to catch up with your more obsessive online friends. --Lore Sjöberg --A Kinder, Gentler Type of War  (Wired)

A fascinating concept... I've never tackled EverQuest becuase I'm intimidated by the time requirements (that is, if I want to keep my job and have a family at the same time).

--Subjects > News > Colleges and Universities (Alexa)

The web indexing service Alexa rates my academic site (jerz.setonhill.edu) as the fifth most popular in the "News > Colleges and Universities" category.

Then again, there are only five sites in that category... so "Alexa puts my site in last place" is another way of looking at the data.

I remember the story about the Russian news service that supposedly reported "Soviet car finishes second, American car finishes next to last" when covering a race that had only two entrants. The statements were true, but deliberately misleading.

Three major network television stations - NBC, CBS and ABC - have provided news and entertainment to American television viewers for decades. Each network broadcasts the evening news at 6:30 p.m., and for many American families, gathering around the television set to watch NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, CBS anchor Dan Rather, or ABC anchor Peter Jennings has become a tradition. But some media experts say that era may be coming to an end, with the retirement of NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw on December 1 after more than 40 years on the air, and the recent announcement by CBS anchor Dan Rather that he plans to step down early next year. --NBC News Anchor Tom Brokaw Retires (Voice of America)

I'm not sure that the Voice of America's description of the centrality of the nightly TV news is as true today as it used to be, but the international audience that listens to VoA would benefit from that bit of cultural information.

"Troops crossed the line of departure," 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. "It's going to be a long night." CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun.

In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert's carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation -- or "psy-op" -- intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials. --Mark Mazzetti --PR Meets Psy-Ops in War on Terror (LA Times (registration))

A spokesman for the Oxford University Press said that the word was now being put into other dictionaries for children and learners, reflecting its mainstream use.

"I think it was the word of last year rather than this year," he said.

"Now we're getting words that derive from it such as 'blogosphere' and so on," he said.

"But," he added, "it's a pretty recent thing and in the way that this happens these days it's got established very quickly." --Why 2004 was the year of the blog (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Worth noting: Blood's Law of Weblog History: The year you discovered weblogs and/or started your own is 'The Year Blogs Exploded'.

In justifying this nightmare society [Orwell's 1984], Winston's torturer, O'Brien, explains: "You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable." Fortunately, O'Brien, like the Director in Brave New World, is wrong. People are immensely malleable, more so, in all likelihood, than any other species. But infinitely? Absolutely not. And it is precisely such asserted distortions of biological reality that make 1984, as with Brave New World before it, so deeply troublesome. --Barash and Barash --Biology, Culture, and Persistent Literary Dystopias (Chronicle)