January 2005 Archive Page

Q. Who is responsible for the high cost, high visibility nature of intercollegiate sports?

A: You are. Every time you or your family or friends watch a college game on television, buy college apparel with logos, purchase a ticket to the game, or otherwise participate in a college sports activity, you vote for the current system because the current system reflects the active and engaged enthusiasm of Americans for their college sports. --John V. Lombardi --Reality Check: The Enemy Is Us: Cost Reduction in College Sports (Inside Higher Ed)

Not guilty, as charged.

A good, no-nonsense FAQ.

Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether current copyright law imposes inappropriate burdens on users, including subsequent creators, of works for which the copyright owner cannot be located (hereinafter referred to as ?orphan?' works). The issue is whether orphan works are being needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination inhibited. If no one claims the copyright in a work, it appears likely that the public benefit of having access to the work would outweigh whatever copyright interest there might be. Such concerns were raised in connection with the adoption of the life plus 50 copyright term with the 1976 Act and the 20-year term extension enacted with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.

The Copyright Office has long shared these concerns about orphan works and has considered the issue to be worthy of further study. --Orphan Works (Copyright Office, Library of Congress)

I chose the literary period 1920-1950 for my dissertation because, under the law at the time I entered grad school, works that were published during those years would come out of copyright one by one during my leisurely scholarly march towards retirement, and I imagined that I could while away the years producing inexpensive annotated editions (online, if necessary).

But the law changed.

The copyright office is calling for written comments as it considers what to do with orphan works.

It seems that 25 years would be a generous time period for all authors. To get another 25 years of protection, I think authors ought to make some non-token payment to get another 25 years of protection, followed by increasingly more expensive fees for increasingly short periods of time. My idea is that charging Disney a million bucks to keep its control over Winnie the Pooh for a sixth or seventh decade would support quite a lot of copyright title searches and the activities of quite a few common-domain lobbyists. There ought to be some cap, beyond which no amount of money would extend copyright. At present, the law designed to work for incredibly lucrative properties like Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh is ridiculous when applied to obscure content without megabusiness value.

When I recently asked a group of librarians how they thought Google organized its search results, the first suggestion was that Google counts the number of clicks on the links, and adjusts its rankings accordingly.

Most of the people in the room seemed satisfied with that answer, but one person volunteered the clarification that Google counts the number of links pointing to a page. That second answer is closer to the truth.

We know our students use Google, and we ourselves use Google to prepare for classes. We should know how Google works, so we can accommodate its weaknesses. --Dennis G. Jerz --Assessing Google as a Teaching & Research Tool (Jerz's Online Resource Room)

This friendly and basic introduction to using Google for routine class prep and research seems to have gone over fairly well. I wish the copier hadn't jammed between classes, or I would have had handouts. Since the internet is not only a tool that I use but also the subject I teach, I was happy to have the chance to talk about it.

At any rate, I gave this presentation at lunchtime today, to a packed audience of faculty and staff (boy, that food went quickly). I started by asking my colleagues whether their students used Google. Just about everybody's hand went up. I asked whether they themselves used Google. Again, just about everybody's hand went up. I then asked whether anybody knew how Google worked. All the hands went down.

I'm sure that some of the people in the audience knew perfectly well how Google works, or at least had a inkling. But they were just playing along so I could have my dramatic little moment. (Thank you!)

One faculty member admitted to never having seen Google's home page. Plenty of others thanked me on the way out, or e-mailed me to request a copy. So I feel like I've been useful today. That's always a good thing.

And I certainly didn't mean to sound as if I were picking on librarians! After a year and a half on campus, the other day I had to ask where the fiction shelf was. So there's plenty I have to learn from librarians.

If you're a slideshow kind of person, here is the PowerPoint version (93k).

When a sheet of paper covered in doodles was found on Tony Blair's desk at the Davos World Economic Forum, handwriting experts delighted in analyzing it, concluding the prime minister was stressed and under pressure. Experts who examined the tangle of boxes, circles, loops and notes on debt and trade variously described Blair as "struggling to concentrate" or "not a natural leader" and "stressed and tense."

But there was a problem. --Doodle Mix-Up Confuses Blair with Bill Gates (Reuters|My Way)

I'm not a big fan of handwriting analysis.

"People who are savvy about how the Internet works don't even try to find breaking news on the Net." -- Richard W. Wiggins --The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine (First Monday)

Wiggins made this throwaway statement in an article published October 1, 2001. How quickly things change!

In his defense, Wiggins was very quick to publish a thoughtful analysis of the ways Google changed during the crisis, paving the way for the introducton of Google News.

Wiggins was not wrong. I didn't expect to be able to find breaking news on the internet until I first used Google News.

So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation of images. But here are some main themes to emerge from this first day. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --Technologies of Writing Seminar (1) (MGK)

I'm eagerly awaiting the next installments. Fantastic source material, and a wonderful report.

The story goes that in the first half of last century one Ata Owoo was well-known for making magnificent chairs to transport the village chief on poles or the shoulders of minions.

When Owoo had finished one particularly elaborate creation, an eagle, a neighbouring chief wanted one too, this time in the shape of a cocoa pod. A major crop in Ghana.

However, the chief next door died before the bean was finished and so it became his coffin.

Then in 1951, the grandmother of one of Owoo's apprentices died.

She had never been in an aeroplane, so he built her one for her funeral.

And a tradition was born. --Nicky Barranger --Ghana's fantasy coffin attraction (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

--Grammar and Punctuation Tests (The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation)

Nifty little grammar and punctuation/capitalization online tests. Via MetaFilter.

While it was once believed that Marxism would overhaul notions of ownership, the combination of capitalism and the Internet has transformed our ideas of property to an extent far beyond the dreams of even the most fervent revolutionary. Which is not to say that anything resembling a collectivist utopia has come to pass. Quite the opposite. In fact, the laws regulating property?and intellectual property, in particular?have never before been so complex, onerous, and rigid. --Righting Copyright: Fair Use and 'Digital Environmentalism' (Bookforum)

Any syllabus is fated to yield to the messy circumstances of its course, with results that cannot be predicted. This is reason enough to be against syllabi; their presentation of a course as a fully reasoned, systematically organized thing is spurious. A course that is only its syllabus, day after day, is a course where spontaneity, improvisation, and risk have been banished. The loss is too great. --Terry Caesar --Against Syllabi (Inside Higher Ed)

I'm sick of syllabi... for now. I've spent all last week and much of this week tweaking them. A student e-mailed me to point out that I scheduled an exam in the middle of a break. Oops.

It turns out our Thursday evening courses only meet thirteen times this year... The last time I taught the course, I would have sworn it was fifteen.

Web publishers and bloggers are already stealing readers, advertisers and classifieds. Particularly for young people, journalism has become, in the words of NYU professor and PressThink.org blogger Jay Rosen, more of a conversation than a lecture.

That conversation, at least for now, almost always begins with a traditional news story, which is then subject to annotation and dissection on blogs, which are now read by 27 percent of the U.S. adults online, the Pew Internet and American Life Project says.

The sovereignty of Big Journalism is eroding. --Frank Bajak --Memo to media establishment: Ignore blogs at your peril (SiliconValley.com)

1.) J-School as School of Theology
2.) The Journalist's Creed
3.) The Orthodoxy of No Orthodoxy
4.) Practicing Journalism But Not Understanding It
5.) The First Amendment as Press Religion
6.) The God Term of Journalism is the Public
7.) A Breakaway Church in the Press
8.) Interview at the Axis of Evil

--Jay Rosen --Journalism Is Itself a Religion: Special Essay on Launch of The Revealer (Press Think)

Another link for the journalism major who was considering a religion minor...

Rosen also has good coverage of a recent conference on weblogs, journalism and credibility.

"The ideal of objectivity, properly understood, is vital not only for responsible journalism but responsible scientific inquiry, informed public policy deliberations and fair ethical and legal decision. The peculiar Western attempt to be objective is a long, honorable tradition that is part of our continuing struggle to discern and communicate significant, well-grounded truths and make fair decisions in society," [UBC journalism professor Stephen J. Ward] writes in his book [Invention of Journalism Ethics].

Can these lofty ideals can be translated in the rough and tumble of the workaday world of journalism? --Judith Ince --Journalism's 'Ethical Vertigo' (The Tyee)

Thanks for the link, Jim!

A computer that learns to play a 'scissors, paper, stone' by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers.

CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children's game by searching for patterns in video and audio of human players and then building its own "hypotheses" about the game's rules.

In contrast to older artificial intelligence (AI) programs that mimic human behaviour using hard-coded rules, CogVis takes a more human approach, learning through observation and mimicry, the researchers say. --Machine learns games 'like a human' (NewScientist.com (will expire))

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Literary critics who never use but one approach remind me of a child who, playing with a piece of transparent red plastic, has just discovered this effect. ?Look, mommy,? she says, ?the refrigerator is red!? ?Look, mommy, the stove is red too!? ?Look, mommy, the dish towel is light red and dark red!? ?Look, mommy, the floor is dark red with bright red spots!? ?Look, Mommy, my green socks are black and my legs are red!? And so on. Nobody but a doting parent could put up with such talk for very long. Well, maybe a grandparent too. But since I count none of today'scrop of literary critics among my descendants, my patience quickly wears thin. -- August Rubrecht --Reading and Seeing (University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire)

Google greatly advances its web search by raising the word limit to 32 words. Previously, only up to 10 words were allowed. --Google Raises Word Limit to 32 (Google Blogoscoped)

The casual user probably won't notice a difference. It was really hardly any trouble to cut out some of the words in a string that Google truncated, but the blog entry notes some situations where the added capacity could be useful.

After 130 years of typing the same way the keyboard has finally grown up. [Who or what was doing the typing? The subject of the sentence is "the keyboard". The word "typing" is a dangling modifier.] Standard Keyboards of Santa Maria, California announced [missing word -- "an"] "alphabetical" keyboard that offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry for any level user. New Standard Keyboards debuted [stylistically awkward... "introduced" would be a less-pretentious alternative] a patented USB-interface [bravo -- a correctly hyphenated compound modifier] computer keyboard at CES 2005. This keyboard has just 53-keys [whoops -- if that were a "53-key design" then it would need a hyphen, but in this case the hyphen is spurious] and offers many advances over QWERTY and DVORAK designs. --53-keys New Standard Keyboard (Tech-Blog.org)

I'm bleary-eyed from catching typos in the syllabi that I've been posting online this past week, but I can't turn it off. Nobody's perfect, but where is the verb in that headline? Sheesh.

Some of the well-known details about the QWERTY layout have been attacked as myths. (Maybe we can export some of these keyboards to Nigeria.)

The article that Slashdot featured is obviously based on the company press release, which is of course what the company was hoping would happen when it released its news. But the press release opens with the cringeworthy line, "New Standard Keyboards will debut a new patented design in computer keyboards at the CES show that the company claims has been 130 years in the making."

130 years... boy, those guys at CES sure take a long time putting their show together, don't they?

The press release is overly possessive. Do we really need to know in the third graf that the keyboard has been patented in the US and the UK?

But the writer omitted a possessive when editorializing that the new design "differs from other manufacturers failed attempts."

I know what a hunt-and-peck typist is, but I'm not so sure what "hunt and peck typists" have to do with each other.

Okay, I'll stop. I do have a weakness for criticizing misguided marketing efforts. (But I've also blogged kudos to Hormel's SPAM.com.)

Sure, blogging can serve as a corrective to the ideological blind spots and commercial orientation of the corporate media monopoly, Fact Checking Their Asses and Working the Ref and restoring some semblance of balance in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine.

But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab a clue from Chris Allbritton and haul their larval, jack-studded flesh up out of their Matrix-like pods and do some goddamn reporting instead of just getting all meta about Instapundit’s post about The Daily Kos’s post about Little Green Footballs’s post about the vast left-wing media conspiracy’s latest act of high treason. It’s the Yertle the Turtle syndrome: Pundits stacked on top of pundits on top of pundits, all the way down, and, at the very bottom of the heap, the lowly hack who kicked off the whole frenzy of intertextuality: the reporter who dared venture out of the media airlock to collect some samples of Actual, Reported Fact. --The Being John Malkovich Effect (Shovelware)

Interesting how Derry uses references to two movies, Dr. Seuss, and McDonalds in order to make a point about the blogging echo chamber. Of course, Derry's pop culture references are part of the style that makes this rant amusing -- they're not the substance of his post. Still...

A great find from MGK.

A Columbia University study released Tuesday suggests that viewing fewer than four hours of television a day severely inhibits a person's ability to ridicule popular culture.

"An hour or two of television per day simply does not provide enough information to effectively mock mediocre sitcoms, vapid celebrities, music videos, and talk-show hosts?an essential skill in modern society," said Dr. Madeleine Ben-Ami, a professor of cognitive science and chief author of the study. "The average person requires a minimum of four to six hours of television programming each day to be conversant on the subject of The Apprentice or able to impersonate Anna Nicole Smith.

[...]

"Because the ridicule of pop culture comprises the bulk of today's social discourse, a non-viewer is at a distinct disadvantage in the workplace, on campus, and in the dating scene," Ben-Ami said. "An employee who can't participate in jokes about Ashlee Simpson's disastrous Orange Bowl appearance will sit dumbfounded while a more able coworker ingratiates himself to the boss by laughing. And just as the bird with the most colorful plumage attracts the most attention, so too does the bar-TV viewer who yells, 'Have a sandwich before you faint!' when Mary-Kate Olsen appears on screen."
--Study: Watching Fewer Than Four Hours of TV A Day Impairs Ability To Ridicule Pop Culture (The Onion [satire... will expire])

Once I was talking on the phone to my toddler, who said that Mommy was watching a TV show with ladies that sit around talking. When my wife came back on the phone, I said, "So I understand you're watching 'The View'."

We don't subscribe to cable, so there were only a limited number of shows that could have been on at that time. Still, I was fairly proud of myself for making that connection.

Blogs are my Cliffs Notes to television pop culture.

Until a few months ago, the attention paid to web logs, or blogs, focused mainly on politics and the media business.

However, many in academia followed the web-diary of Salam Pax, the famous Baghdad blogger during the build-up to the war in Iraq.

Now, the technology that has been an alternative source of news to many academics is being incorporated more fully into university life.

Blogs are giving departments, staff and students the freedom and informality of tone impossible in scholarly journals or even the student newspaper.

Blogging lecturers say the technology provides them with easy online web access to students and improves communication outside of the classroom. --Shola Adenekan --Academics give lessons on blogs (BBC)

There's nothing really new in this article, but it's still good to see the mainstream media acknowledging the fact that blogs aren't all about sex and politics.

In many cases, children's literature and game studies are growing in non-traditional ways by including an emphasis on the culture of their readers and players. As two emerging fields, children's literature and game studies have more in common than the two fields realize. --Taylor and Martin --E for Everyone -- A Call for Interdisciplinary Studies (IGDA)

See also the brisk discussion launched by Nick Montfort on Grand Text Auto.

To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. "Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood," he says. "But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented." --Gladiators fought for thrills, not kills (New Scientiest)

Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or "sponsored" results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they presented paid results. --Online Activities & Pursuits (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Interesting... the study also says "92% of those who use search engines say they are confident about their searching abilities, with over half of them, 52%, saying they are ?very confident.?"

Another good example of why it is dangerous to rely on user-reported opinions of their behavior. If you actually put people in front of a computer and gave them a searching task, measured how long it took them to find an answer and whether that answer was correct, you'd have a very different picture.

On average, people tend to overestimate their success at performing a task, so perhaps usability testing would show that people are even worse at differentiating between paid advertising and unpaid search results. But that depends on how the question was asked... since I have been tricked into clicking on a paid link, I can't say that I am 100% able to differentiate between paid content and legitimate search results.

Link goes to a summary of the full PDF report.

The model is:

[W + (D-d)] x TQ
M x NA

The equation is broken down into seven variables: (W) weather, (D) debt, (d) monthly salary, (T) time since Christmas, (Q) time since failed quit attempt, (M) low motivational levels and (NA) the need to take action. --Jan. 24 called worst day of the year (MSN)

April may be the cruellest month, but British psychologist Cliff Arnall calculates that Jan 24 is the most depressing day of the year.

Let's hope that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that, as Mike Arnzen notes on Pedablogue, that's the day we go back to school.

The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer. --Elizabeth Judge --Google gears up for a free-phone challenge to BT (Times Online)

The acronym BT isn't explained in the article... from the context, I'm assuming something like "British Telecom"?

An interesting detail from midway through the article...

Around the world, thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable remain unused because the amount of speculative development vastly exceeded demand. Such capacity would be available at rock-bottom prices today.

The author speculates that Google may use this underutilized resource, thus helping it connect two forms of user behavior -- searching the web (where Google gets more than half the world's business) and telephoning.

A man who went missing five weeks ago in south-western France has been found alive in an underground cave system where he had got lost. --Hugh Schofield --Man found after weeks in cave (BBC)

What's French for XYZZY?

In a move students protested last year, Princeton became the first elite college to cap the number of A's that can be awarded.

Previously, there was no official limit to the number of A's handed out, and nearly half the grades in an average Princeton class have been A-pluses, A's or A-minuses. Now, each department can give A's to no more than 35 percent of its students each semester.

Princeton's effort is being monitored closely by other hallowed halls, and some expect to see a ripple effect in coming years. --Geoff Mulvihill --Princeton Cracks Down on Grade Inflation (AP|MyWay)

Is not rhetoric, taken generally, a universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments; which is practised not only in courts and public assemblies, but in private houses also, having to do with all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike, and is in all equally right, and equally to be esteemed-that is what you have heard? -- Socrates, as channelled by Plato --Phaedrus (Georgetown University)

While my parents are watching the kids this morgning, I'm down here in the den, gettin' my classical freak on.

Socrates is trying to back Phaedrus into a corner here. Is all argument equally to be esteemed? Through Socrates, Plato prepares to make the argument that excellence in the spoken word is more valuable than excellence in the written word. The author of a written text cannot argue back against people who disagree with what is written. (See my earlier blogging on "fisking"). A written text is recited by those who do not understand the subject, but who wish to enforce the document's conclusions.

This is one of many resources at James O'Donnell's site (to which I will certainly return).

Orality, Literacy, and Writing Technology (U Penn)

Images of Orality and Literacy in Greek Iconography of the Fifth, Fourth and Third Centuries BCE -- compiled by Andrew Wiesner, who also points to James O'Donnell's Some manuscript images of the technology of the word in the Middle Ages

I'll look through these in more detail later.

--I Love Forms: ''Discussion Reflection Worksheet.rtf'' (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Will a form like this – filled out in the last five minutes of a class period, and then compiled and resubmitted in a portfolio -- help students recognize and develop the critical thinking skills necessary for participation in college seminars? Or will they blow it off as busywork?

Last term in my freshman composition class, I put more than the usual amount of effort into making sure that each student contributed to each class discussion or workshop. I’d call on students, asking them to share the "agenda item" they had prepared for the day's discussion, or to share an interesting agenda item they read on a peer blog. I’d help the student get a discussion going, and ask a few probing questions of my won. Then I'd jot down a mark from 0 to 4 (to be factored into the class participation grade), and move along.

I didn't always get through the whole class each period, but the students who were regular contributors (and who might otherwise have dominated the conversation) learned to hold their thoughts until I had called on a good chunk of students, after which I would usually throw the floor open for general discussion.

I had students blog their agenda items before class started. Shortly before class started, I would check the blogs, noting who was actively participating in an online discussion and who hadn't yet posted their agenda items. That helped focus our discussion time, though it didn’t exactly result in riveting blogging. And that’s OK with me… I have plenty of other opportunities to focus on blogging as a subject of academic inquiry, and they will more frequently be called upon to produce traditional college essays.)

Given that I deliberately tried not to sound too enthusiastic about blogs in this class, I was surprised that, in response to an open-ended question such as "What assignment or class activity helped you the most?" students mentioned the agenda items most frequently -- followed closely by the comments I made on their rough drafts.

I'd like to think that my comments on their drafts helped them more than they realized; and I’d like to think that my attention to getting students to bring agenda items to the floor was also a useful strategy. They did perceive value in the blog/agenda/discussion interactions, so naturally I’ll try to emphasize it a little more this term. Still, I wouldn’t want create an environment in which students only contributed when the structure calls for it.

Being the blog geek that I am, naturally I'd be happy asking them to use their blogs to reflect on their classroom participation, but I don't think it's fair to expect students to criticize themselves in a public forum -- hence the old-fashioned paper worksheet.

[March 20, 2000]

I turned to the lady next to me and said, ?excuse me, I just got my sight back last week after being totally blind for 43 years. Could you help me figure out what I am seeing??

[May 8, 2000]

I was mesmerized by the glint of the sunlight on the crest of the waves just before they broke. Then everything would crash into white bubbles and come rushing toward my bare feet. I wanted to run into those waves, clothes and all. The smells and sounds of the ocean have always drawn me. Couple them with the visual beauty and I was bound to get wet.

The waves rolled toward each other from either side, like stereo merging into monaural. Just as the sunshine glinted on the wave crest, the wind made a quick whipping sound that was followed by the crash. It was so amazing to piece the visual images together with the audible images, which I know, and love so well. The connection was surreal like the first time skiing, everything so familiar and so much more unfamiliar at the same time.

When I would take a break and tare my eyes from the ocean, I enjoyed looking at the colors of the sand, very wet, wet and dry. When I noticed dark patches behind me, it didn't register right away that these were my footprints. I never thought of footprints as images other than when reading about them in an old west novel. To me, they were the thump; pivot push and the texture of the sand on my foot not dark splotches following me around like a shadow. It was intriguing to watch the waves slowly wash those prints away. Still these impressions remain indelibly in my memory. There will be lots to learn from the ocean...

[January 21, 2001]

I have been seeing little things recently and having to explore and ask to find out what they really are. For example, I was looking at my laptop computer and kept seeing sparkles and flashes of light. Turn on the Star Wars music. I would tilt my head, lean closer to the computer screen and rub my eyes. I guessed that maybe something in the room was reflecting the sun into my face. Finally my co-worker Kim explained to me that these sparkles of light were actually particles of dust flying through the air.

I think of dust as an annoying smooth substance, which collects on equipment and on top of doorways. I had no concept of dust visually. It was so bright and so fleeting. Obviously dust has to travel through the air in order to land on a surface. I just never pictured that anyone could see the dust moving through the air. The fact that the sun was poring through the window certainly made it more visible than it might otherwise have been. It is just such a new concept, not to mention a new sight, that I was quite captivated by this sparkling dust.

[June 22, 2003]

The smaller white specs are either birds or large bugs, I never know which. It is either a bird far away or a bug up close. With my poor depth perception, I can't tell the difference.

Besides all this natural beauty, there are quite a number of sun bathers of every sort imaginable. I have been to beaches before where shirts were optional and I wondered how nonchalant I would be if I could see. I now have somewhat of an opportunity to know. It is not how I expected.

Most of the topless bathers are evenly tanned, meaning that there is very little contrast for me to see with my low vision and poor acuity for details. I sadly would have to stare far too long and close at a chest before I would know if it was a male or a female chest. Bright colored bikini tops however, make for a wonderful contrast, letting my imagination and tactile experience fill in the details.

[...]

The truth is that I am looking at everybody, enjoying all aspects of this island paradise. It is a multiple sensory, multiple cultural orgy: color for the eyes, sun oil mixed with ocean scents for the nose, German/English/Spanish/Catalan and the pineapple seller's song for the ears the taste of cerveza, and embracing it all, the warm touch of the sea-breeze and island sunshine. -- Mike May --Mike's Journal (The Sendero Group)

An abridged version was published in the Guardian.

I didn't find any links to the individual entries, so here are excerpts from passages that I found most interesting. The April 10, 2001 entry also contains May's responses to case studies in medical literature.

With all the online references to Raymond Carver's story "Cathedral" online, I'm surprised nobody seems to have linked that story with this journal. I can also imagine using it for a comparative study with "Flowers for Algernon."

Buffy has introduced new slang terms and phrases in nearly every episode, many of them formed in the usual ways, some of them at the crest of new formative tendencies. The show incorporates familiar slang, too; the familiar and newly coined slayer slang together compose a particularly vivid snapshot of current American teen slang. --Michael Adams --Slayer Slang (Do You Speak American?)

I'm trying to incorporate more grammar and study of the English language into my Intro to English Studies course, and this website (the companion to a PBS show) looks very promising.

"If you're looking for a job with instant and guaranteed success, this isn't it." -- David Atkinson, scientist whose 18 years of work on a space probe experiment were trashed when someone forgot to turn the thing on before the probe's 1997 launch. --Professor's Saturn Experiment Forgotten (AP/My Way)

Welcome Back, Blog (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Dear blog,

I missed you while you were down.

Let's take this opportunity to thank Will Gayther for helping me bring you back, and to thank those who e-mailed me to let me know you weren't well.

Welcome back.

While acknowledging that the new nofollow tag will not do anything -- immediately -- to stop comment spam, I think most of the criticisms are off-base in one way or another. --More on the Google nofollow tag (Dave Does the Blog)

One blogger's reaction to the new "nofollow" tag, which is aimed at denying spammers the PageRank benefit they get when they bombard websites with links to the products they are hawking.

Also check out the pictures running down the left hand side of Dave's blog, showing him regress from a bearded, bespectacled man, to a moustached, bespectacled youth, to a bespectacled child, to a baby.

The sonneteer is the wedding singer of modern poetry: a member of the bride's party by way of technicality, he is never embraced and rarely photographed. More entertainer than poet, more trickster than artisan, he welcomes the casual onlooker and --in a supreme affront to the "vitality" of the art-- will don a bright red nose and big floppy rhymes to provoke a laugh. Freed of the prerogatives of the tradition, he is the dumb, plodding beast laboring beneath critic Harold Bloom's?burden of belatedness." --Norman Ball --Why I Write Sonnets: An Apologia (NormanBall.com)

This appears to be from the liner notes to a CD called "Return to One."

I like the essay, but the site is a perfect example of why web designers should avoid HTML frames.

In probably the biggest break from tradition, the paper may solicit content from readers, asking them to write their own stories about topics that interest them, whether it be a Scout leader writing about a volunteer activity his scouts undertook or a local politician writing an alternative story about a government program the paper's reporters have already covered.

That breaks the traditional model where newspaper reporters and editors serve as gatekeepers, deciding what information actually makes news. In the virtually unlimited space on the Web, such constraints are no longer an issue. And with readers contributing content, the paper's Web content is no longer limited by the size of the staff. -- Mark Tosczak --N&R looks to break tradition with Web changes (The Business Journal)

Via Dan Gillmor.

The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life. --Alan Williamson, citing a Google employee. --An evening with Google[']s Marissa Mayer (Java / cfml / + others)

Several interesting Google factoids, including the claim that the founders thought they were properly spelling "googol".

Is that really the blog's name? That's not exactly aesthetically pleasing.

You wouldn't buy a car or a house without asking some questions about it first. So don't go buying into someone else's data without asking questions, either.

Okay, you're saying... but with data there are no tires to kick, no doors to slam, no basement walls to check for water damage. Just numbers, graphs and other scary statistical things that are causing you to have bad flashbacks to your last income tax return. What the heck can you ask about data? --Robert Niles --Data Analysis (RobertNiles.com)

Boring title for a very handy guide for developing a healthy scepticism of statistics.

--Web Site Usability (Mind Tracks)

A good collection of links introducing usability and web design. I'll keep it in mind for the next time I teach "Writing for the Internet".

Administrations and faculties need to stop caring how much someone writes or publishes or says, or even how important what they?ve published is according to some measurable or quantifiable metric. Not only because trying to measure productivity in terms of scholarship destroys scholarship, but because it detracts from the truly important kind of productivity in an academic institution.

What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives? --Timothy Burke --Production and Overproduction (Easily Distracted)

A thoughtful reflection on the scholarly publishing hamster wheel and its role in humanities education.

Via scribblingwoman.

The Internet has been providing people who have religious convictions -- the vast majority of Americans -- with a home long denied them in mainstream media. But there are signs of change in the MSM. --Daithí Ó hAnluainedia --Religion is Big News on the Net (Online Journalism Review)

The other day I spoke briefly with a journalism major who's picking up a religion minor... I recalled seeing this headline some time ago, and so I'm blogging this for her.

Most instructors of USC's online editing and design courses rely on Dreamweaver for Web page production in their classes, as do most other online instructors I've met at industry conferences and in online discussions.

Instead, my students create their Web pages by hardcoding HTML and style sheets using nothing more than a basic text editor like Notepad. Yes, it's difficult. Creating Web sites takes more time without Dreamweaver, and students often get frustrated when a single keystroke renders their work unintelligible.

But the extra effort earns rewards. --Robert Niles --From the Teaching Trenches: Hardcoding is Harder, but Results are Worth It (Online Journalism Review)

I've been mulling over this possibility...

When I teach writing for the Internet, I teach blogging first, which I find gets students writing faster. When I then moved to HTML authoring, there was a terrible backsliding... that is, students who were initially nervous about the course's technical requirements were put at ease by the simplicity of blogging.

But when it came time to move to the next step, teaching them to make web pages with FrontPage Express, several students were very frustrated by some very basic things. I chose FrontPage Express because it’s free, and also because it doesn’t offer many of the distracting, non-standard bells-and-whistles that used to distract my technical writing students when they used Front Page 2000 or 2002.

But even using the simpler version of the program, some students couldn’t find the folder in which the program had saved their files, or when they accidentally downloaded a file from "subdirectory/index.html" over top of their root directory "index.html", they didn’t think of recovering the "missing" page by downloading a copy of the version they had most recently uploaded.

While saving frequently, working on one thing at a time, and working backwards to recover from a mistake are second nature to hackers, even they had to learn the importance of those techniques the hard way. Add to that the fact that some students in “Writing for the Internet” are also learning the basics of how to write, and suddenly the course content becomes overwhelming.

I started out giving them two weeks to publish a simple website, with plenty of in-class workshop time. As the semester progressed, I gave them shorter timeframes -- one week, then two or three days, and then finally the end of the class period. Most of this work was ungraded – that is, they got credit for doing their best and showing progress. But there was a long period when I felt some students simply weren't putting in the effort to learn these details.

Once it became clear the final exam would require them to use these skills on their own, that caused a few students to perk up. But there was still a lot of what I felt should have been unnecessary stress during the final, as students struggled with a skill for which I had spent months preparing them.

Of course, my class was mostly first-semester freshmen, who are generally not used to being responsible for their own learning.

Since Niles can be confident that his students will have plenty of opportunity in other classes to learn the stylistic and cultural details of writing for the web, perhaps he can better afford to spend more time on teaching raw HTML.

I do teach the basics of interactive fiction programming, using a set of example games that I've tweaked over the years... those classes are more like fill-in-the-blank exercises than programming, but the process does introduce students to the gory details that go into writing an interactive fiction game, which makes them more informed critics (and more helpful peer evaluators for those students who choose an IF term project).

When I next teach "Writing for the Internet" (in the fall of 2006) I'll have to think about all this.

A great introduction to a medium near and dear to my heart. --Writing Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. "Text Adventure Games") with the Inform Programming Language (IndieGameDev)

Then Jimmy Joe Jenkins's DNA proved he was the primary descendent of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible. At first, Jimmy was satisfied with ten percent of the price of every KJV sold and 10 percent of every collection plate passed by any church that used the KJV. But when some churches switched to newer translations, Jimmy sicced his lawyers on all translations based on the KJV. That got him a cut of every Bible and every Christian service in English. Some translators claimed their work was based on older versions and should therefore be exempt, but none of them could afford to fight Jimmy in court. -- The People Who Owned the Bible - a story (it's all one thing)

The story needs some editing, but it's a good concept.

Textbooks: Spring 2005 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Classes start the week after next. I'm teaching the regular full teaching load -- four courses -- plus an overload.

Students are starting to ask what books they should buy. I won't be able to get the syllabi up online until next week, but I thought I'd post the reading list here so I can send the URLs to students who e-mail me with questions.

Seminar in Thinking and Writing
No new books if you had me last term.

EL 150: Introduction to Literary Studies

Required Purchase

Clarvoe, Pick Up Ax 0881451037
Edson, Wit 0571198775
Farrel & Koch, Sleeping on the Wing (modern poetry anthology) 0394743644
Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor 006000942X
Gibaldi & Franklin, MLA Handbook (6th ed) 0873529863
Shakespeare, The Tempest 0451527127
Stephenson, The Diamond Age 0553380966
Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves 1592400876
McBride, The Color of Water 1573225789
Miller, Death of a Salesman 0140481346

EL 267: American Literature from 1915-Present

Required

Academy of American Poets, Fifty years of American Poetry 0440218772
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 0684801523
Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees 0142001740
McBride, Miracle at St. Anna 1573229717
Rice, The Adding Machine 0573605084
Treadwell, Machinal 1854592114
Updike (ed), Best American Short Stories 0395843677
Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire 0451167783

EL 355: Media Aesthetics

Required

Clarvoe, Pick Up Ax 0881451037
Laurel, Utopian Entrepreneur 0262621533
Powers, Galatea 2.0: A Novel 0312423136
Thorburn & Jenkins, eds. Rethinking Media Change 0262701073

Optional

Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 0451526015
(You can opt to download a free copy of this out-of-copyright novel, but if you don't like the idea of reading a novel from a screen, this inexpensive paperback is an option.)

EL200

Required

Associated Press, The Associated Press Stylebook 0465004881

"He was keeping a journal of sorts to put together for future history," John Ellsworth told BBC News. "He wanted to make sure that his generation, as well as following generations, have actual words from somebody who was there."

But Mr Ellsworth Snr was shocked when Yahoo! turned down a request to release his dead son's e-mails, on the basis of privacy.

Recognising the emotions involved, Yahoo! says it must nevertheless honour the terms of service which all 40 million US Yahoo! account holders must agree to. These state that survivors have no rights to the e-mail accounts of the deceased. Yahoo! accounts are deactivated after 90 days if they have not been used. -- -- Who owns your e-mails? (BBC News)

I should really write down my passwords and such and leave them in a safe place, just in case...

Most people's expectations of robots are driven by fantasy. These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore's law, doubling in quality every 18 months, and lead to a Jetsonian utopia. Or, as pessimists fear, humanoid bots will reproduce, increase their intelligence, and wipe out humanity.

Both visions are wrong. --By Jordan Pollack --Ethics for the Robot Age  (Wired)

A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history. -Howard Fineman --The 'Media Party' is over (MSNBC)

Fineman's final point is the assertion that "Blogger Nation" is the new opposition party that replaced the American Mainstream Media Party.

"Gamers are everywhere and they?re everyone. They are your friends, neighbors, co-workers, relatives, and kids, they lead responsible and caring lives, balancing their enjoyment of interactive entertainment with many other activities important to a well-rounded lifestyle," said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the ESA, the trade association representing U.S. computer and video game publishers. "Indeed, those who continue to portray the game population as single-minded loafers are living in their own fantasy world." --New Data Shatters Video Game Player Stereotypes: Gamers Regularly Involved in Community, Church, and Athletics (Entertainment Software Association)

A press release from the Entertainment Software Association.

Aarseth, bringing up an overgeneralization in another recent article, his piece in First Person, goes on to admit that ?most proper narratologists, who actually have to think about and define narratives in a scholarly, responsible, and accurate way, are not guilty of this overgeneralization.? I have to wonder, then: Why is most of Aarseth'sNarrative across Media article devoted to picking off straw-man pseudo-narratological arguments rather than advancing his potentially interesting quest model or addressing how to improve the valuable scholarship that has been done on the relationship between narrative and games? --Nick Montfort --Aarseth's Anti-Quest (Grand Text Auto)

Montfort puckishly trolls for responses from the ludologists.

He suggests that Aarseth is "camping" -- a strategy employed by online players of massively multiplayer games, wherein the player stays in one well-hidden location, waiting for hapless victims to stroll by or resources to appear.

I don't generally approve of trolling (and certainly didn't intend to drive a wedge between narratologists and ludologists when I blogged about the absence of the ludological viewpoint in evidence at the Princeton videogame criticism conference). Montfort had to do some explanation and clarification in his comments, slightly adjusting the trajectory of his salvo after he fired it.

But I always find Montfort's ideas fascinating, along with his sometimes unorthodox ways of communicating them.

All my life I have struggled to succeed. I have toiled at the wheel of journalistic ethos, logic and wisdom. And do I get any credit for this? Oh, no. All I get is, "Hey, better call Tim because there's a streaker at Wal-Mart."

I have a mind, folks. I can talk intelligently about Social Security reform, I can list the known carcinogens in coal-fired generating plants, I know the latest archaeological findings at the ancient city of Nineveh. And you care about none of this.

But my goodness, let some fella go wagging his way down the sidewalk in a retail district, and you can't hear from me fast enough.

Well, from now on, it's going to be different. No longer am I going to stoop to your level. I hereby resolve to use this space only for discourse that has some modicum of intelligencia, to use the power of the print to elevate, not debase, the human condition, to educate, to enlighten, to...

Oh, all right fine, here's your freaking streaker column. --Tim Rowland --Writing just to keep the 'streak' alive (Herald-Mail)

Ten years ago Eric Korte, vice president and music director at the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, was commissioning original music for 90 percent of the company's campaigns. This year, more than half of his workload involves licensing published songs, and the trend is only gaining momentum.

"The jingle," Korte says, "is dead." --Joan Anderman --The irresistible, singable, stick-in-your-mindable jingle is dead (Boston Globe)

Already under duress from years of budget cuts, poor ratings and reduced influence, CBS News suffered a crushing blow to its credibility yesterday because of a broadcast that has now been labeled as both factually discredited and unprofessionally produced. --Bill Carter --Post-Mortem of a Flawed Broadcast (NY Times)

This article describes the fallout from the apparently forged memos on Bush's National Guard service.

If the notion of hacking DNA sounds like genetic engineering, think again. Genetic engineering generally involves moving a preexisting gene from one organism to another, an activity Endy calls DNA bashing. For all its impressive and profitable results, DNA bashing is hardly creative. Proper engineering, by contrast, means designing what you want to make, analyzing the design to be sure it will work, and then building it from the ground up. And that's what synthetic biology is about: specifying every bit of DNA that goes into an organism to determine its form and function in a controlled, predictable way, like etching a microprocessor or building a bridge. The goal, as Endy puts it, is nothing less than to "reimplement life in a manner of our choosing." --Oliver Morton --Life, Reinvented  (Wired)

This is exactly the premise behind R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the 1919 Czech play that introduced the word "robot" to languages around the world. The author, Karel Capek, wasn't interested in the technical details of how his synthetic humans were created -- he was more interested in writing about how big business changes the human relationship to work.

Many high school and college students accustomed to sending unlimited instant messages on their computers do not adapt easily to text messaging's pay-per-message format, and end up with unexpectedly high bills when they get involved in keypad conversations that involve hundreds, even thousands, of messages a month. The results are angry confrontations with parents, long-term payment plans and the loss of cellphone privileges.--Lisa W. Foderaro --Young Cell Users Rack Up Debt, a Message at a Time (NY Times)

I had dinner with two big name photographers in L.A. recently. These are folks who’s name you might recognize even if you are not in the photography industry. I asked them both under what circumstances could use their images without paying them, they both immediately responded emphatically “under no circumstances!”--Jason Calacanis --Fair use of photos on blogs… the photographers speak out. (The Jason Calacanis Weblog)

The "fair use" doctrine indicates that it is permissible to use copyrighted material as part of a scholarly critique or review, so these photographers are mistaken.

I frequently encounter student web authors who use images without citation (let alone permission), despite my repeated reminders that this use is unacceptable for my course.

If I do reproduce a photo from someone else's site, the blog entry includes a link to the original source, and the excerpt on my site provides context that makes it clear I am not claming credit for the image. In addition, I am always discussing the photo and/or the site itself. This is completely different from, for example, snagging someone else's photo in order to provide atmosphere for the poem you have just written.

I also deliberately resize the image, so that the copy on my site is smaller, thus protecting the value of the full-size original. Of course, if the source image is a small graphic or only a thumbnail is available on the original poster's site, that's a different matter.

Something to think about the next time I want to use a picture for my blog...

The Bush administration paid an African-American pundit $240,000 (£127,000) to promote its education policies to the black community and urge other black journalists to do the same in the run-up to the presidential election.

In an effort to promote its controversial education reform programme, No Child Left Behind, the education department paid Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts" on a nationally syndicated television show.--Gary Younge --Bush paid TV pundit to push education plan  (Guardian)

Celebrities like Michael Moore, Richard Gere, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and former Minnesota governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura shamelessly use their celebrity clout to advocate their political agendas, none of them pretend to be objective.

While Armstrong was a columnist, not a news reporter, and thus was never expected to be unbiased, this is still a very awkward situation.

I love the quote from the education department official who referred to the pay-for-content program as a governmental "outreach" effort.

The problem with Italy's antiquities and culture is that there is simply too much.

How do you conserve ancient and priceless artefacts at the same time as letting people come and see them? --David Reid --Technology rescues Italy's art (BBC News)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I've toyed with using VR to reconstruct the interior of a chapel that was destroyed in WWII...

Adventure - based on the classic text game of the same name - was the first game ever to contain an easter egg. --Is That A Dragon or a Duck? (Metafilter)

It's great to see Adventure get a mention, but no, the Atari version was a graphics game that really shared nothing besides the name with the Crowther/Woods text originial.

I see that Metafilter credited Memepool.

--The Blogosphere By the Numbers

Nothing terribly quotable, but a good source of statistics relating to weblogs.

I don't have many positive associations with any sport, beyond lots of "quality time" with Dad in kiddie leagues.

In high school I once accidentally caught a pop fly ball in my baseball cap. I somehow managed a flabby toss to a teammate, who tagged a passing runner for a double play. But traumatic run-ins with a few testosterone-for-brains Neanderthals (including the batter of the aforementioned pop fly) loom far more powerfully in my memory. --Dennis G. Jerz --Football Slouches Toward a Former Women's College (Inside Higher Ed)

In England it is called the "Graveyard Grannies'' problem, in France the "Chere Grand'mere," while in Bulgaria it is inexplicably known as "The Toadstool Waxing Plan" (I may have had some problems here with the translation. Since the revolution this may have changed anyway.) Although the problem may be international in scope it is here in the USA that it reaches its culmination, so it is only fitting that the first warnings emanate here also.

The basic problem can be stated very simply: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.--Mike Adams --The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society. (Biology Department, Eastern Connecticut State University)

I'm reminded of a flashback scene in Wit, where the protagonist, a crusty professor named Vivian Bearing, relives an incident in which a student asks for an extension, she grumpily guesses, "Your grandmother died?" and the student, dumbfounded, responds, "How did you know?" So a spoof article like this could hit a student at a very bad time.

As for the results of the study, it's possible that student family members die at a constant rate year-round, but when students don't have a pressing exam, they simply don't bother to tell the instructor.

IF as a genre, fundamentally unchanged for more than twenty years, evolved in a world of gaming where graphics were non-existent and words were the sole medium of expression. The game described locations, objects, and actions in text, and the player controlled the story's protagonist by typing commands in English (or any other natural language in which the story was written). As a player, you had to rely on your imagination to fill in the gaps.

In the time since, technology has allowed designers to create games that realize their visual ideals. And many of these games have captivating stories and excellent puzzles, just like good IF games. --Frank Pape --Interactive Fiction: Words vs. Pictures (FrankPape.com)

A good introduction to interactive fiction.

--Weblogging Software Leader Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal (Biz Yahoo)

There's really nothing quotable in this rather dry press release, but I'm linking to it as a reference anyway. SixApart is the company that makes MoveableType, the software I use for blogs.setonhill.edu. An increasing number of my students are familiar with the LiveJournal style of personal blogging before they start learning how to use blogs as an academic tool. There is some friction between the two modes of blogging, and some students who have thrown themselves into the SHU blogosphere also feel the need to maintain a more personal blog elsewhere.

LiveJournal's nickname is "teenangst.com", since many of the users are adolescents who blog about personal topics, rather than professionals or college students who might write about academics, current events, technology, etc., in stead of (or in addition to) keeping a personal diary.

After checking blodgex, I see that this posting on apophenia resonates with many bloggers:

Movable Type is a product; LiveJournal is a community. Six Apart is seen as a community that provides tools, not culture. I suspect that if LJ goes to SA, there will be discontent from LJ users even though the media and blogosphere will hail it as an exceptionally [insert business rhetoric here] deal. Even if Six Apart doesn't change a damn thing, i suspect that LJers will feel wary, unloved and co-opted by The Man. I can't imagine them going anywhere fast but i can't see them being happy either, nor can i see them continuing to contribute economically.

The X-Monkey comes from a line of monkeys originally bred by the military for the purpose of driving tanks. It's a good fit, because the modern Apple sedan is actually a tank in a fancy shell. The X-Monkey's only drawback is that he can only drive a car from Apple. Show him any other vehicle, and he won't even know how to operate the door lock.

Meanwhile, the free-thinking Linux people, displeased with genetic engineering, have created their own smart monkey chauffeurs through a massive international breeding program. Unlike the X-Monkey, the Linux Monkey is capable of driving any car, including the Apple sedan. If you could install a steering wheel on a log splitter, the Linux Monkey could drive it for you. The catch is, you have to train the Linux Monkey yourself. Fortunately there are experts everywhere who will help you out, and the Linux Monkey trains easily.

The Microsoft Gorilla, on the other hand, cannot be trained. Instead, you must keep rephrasing your directions until the MS Gorilla can comprehend them. He consumes both front seats, lowering the mileage of your car, and blocking most of your view. --Garrett Birkell updates Neal Stephenson's classic In the Beginning was the Command Line --The Command Line in 2004

Anders Jacobsen is offering to donate $1 for every blog posting a link to his page and the following tsunami relief organizations. You can add mine to the list, Anders!

I tell you what I'll do. I'll add my own $5...

--Okay, I'll Bite [Tsunami Relief Links] (Wordmunger)

Link-whoring with a social conscience. This I like.

Anders Jacobson

International aid organizations:
UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund)
United Nations’ World Food Programme
Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (donate!)
CARE International
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies



UK/Europe:
Disasters Emergency Comittee (DEC) - comprises a raft of aid agencies, including the below and others
British Red Cross
Save the Children UK



North America:
American Red Cross
Canadian Red Cross
Save The Children

Oxfam America



Word Munger: Webloggers: Give to tsunami victims and I’ll give too!

A few months into my new job as a "new media journalism" teacher at Seton Hill University, a small liberal arts school in southwestern Pennsylvania, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event, where the university president was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I heard her relate a slightly off-color anecdote about a local celebrity. After the punch line, as the laughter was fading, I asked for the celebrity's first name again.

"So, is this for your blog?" asked a colleague.

We all chuckled - but the president's deflector screens went up. --Dennis G. Jerz --The Bane of the President's Existence (Lore)

I understand the need for the editors to revise all the texts so they conform to a uniform style, but I dislike the conversion of "weblog" to "Web log".

That editorial decision introduced the term "community Web-logging space" into my article.

Bleah!

At the Marine base several miles southeast, high-speed wires snake down hallways, through doors and out windows. The Navy engineers play "Half-Life 2." At the gym, where seven Playstations get heavy use, Marines wage "Madden NFL 2005" tournaments. "Neverwinter Nights" reigns in the public affairs office. --Troops stationed in Iraq turn to gaming (MSNBC/AP)

While the number of new blogs is rising, readership is growing even faster. --Dan Gillmor --A Medium Coming Into Its Own (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism)

Gillmor is commenting on a datum from a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Ultimately, it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the project--beginning with Jimmy Wales, who hired me to start a free encyclopedia project and who now manages Wikipedia and Wikimedia--were decidedly anti-elitist in the above-described sense.

Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they will--at least if they are editing articles on articles that are subject to any sort of controversy--be forced to defend their edits on article discussion pages against attacks by nonexperts. This is not perhaps so bad in itself. But if the expert should have the gall to complain to the community about the problem, he or she will be shouted down (at worst) or politely asked to "work with" persons who have proven themselves to be unreasonable (at best).

This lack of respect for expertise explains the first problem, because if the project participants had greater respect for expertise, they would have long since invited a board of academics and researchers to manage a culled version of Wikipedia (one that, I think, would not directly affect the way the main project is run). But because project participants have such a horror of the traditional deference to expertise, this sort of proposal has never been taken very seriously by most Wikipedians leading the project now. And so much the worse for Wikipedia and its reputation. --Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism (Kuro5hin)

One of the creators of Wikipedia reflects on some of the serious flaws of the mass-edited encyclopedia.

Leading British computer games maker Peter Molyneux has been made an OBE in the New Year Honours list.

The head of Surrey's Lionhead Studios was granted the honour for services to the computer games industry. --Call of honour for UK games maker (BBC)

OBE = "Order Of the British Empire".

The article's last paragraph:

"Being an absolute geek I've got no idea what I'm going to wear when I go and pick it up," he said.

Crichton doesn't like the idea that someone else is better placed to make judgments than he is. He seems convinced that global warming is largely an invention of careerist scientists abetted by a partisan press.

And he seems to find something smug and stifling, if not dishonest, about consensus: "the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus", he says. "If it's consensus, it isn't science." --Philip Ball
--Brought to Book (Nature)

A skeptical review of Michael Crighton's latest book, in which the villians are alarmist environmentalists.