April 2005 Archive Page

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. --Samuel Clemens --The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

I recently mentioned playing "The Obedience Game" instead of watching TV. Mike Arnzen asked for the rules.

The game itself isn't all that complex. It's like Simon Says, without the potentially confusing part about having to say "Simon Says" first.

So, a typical session of The Obedience Game involves commands such as "sing a song," "go stand against the wall," "recite a poem," "hug your sister," "jump up and down five times," and "say three nice things about Mommy."

I might occasionally slip in some tasks such as "Practice your recital piece" or "Put away three pink toys," and healthy routines and good behavior become part of an enjoyable communal activity, not a terrible chore. (Hence the quotation from Tom Sawyer).

What really makes it fun for the kids, however, is that they get a turn to order Daddy around, too. Carolyn, who turned three this month, particularly enjoys the sense of power.

Peter is also starting to experiment with practical requests, such as last night, when it was his turn, but he was tired of the game, so his command to me was "Play hide and seek."

The game developed when Peter was a toddler out on the playground. I learned that, if I periodically called him over for no reason other than to give him a hug and tell him he was good, he was far more likely to listen to me when I needed to redirect his behavior.

When we're waiting in line in the grocery store or at the DMV, invoking The Obedience Game is usually good for about ten or fifteen minutes. Sometimes Carolyn will request it herself. I try not gloat at the expressions of strangers who marvel at how much my kids enjoy taking orders.

On the other hand, when he's feeling particularly obstreperous (a word he's known since he was three), the boy has gotten pretty good at passive resistance, minimal compliance, and various forms of psychological warfare ("I wish Mommy were in charge today.") (And yes, he actually did use the subjunctive "were" instead of "was.")

None of these dedicated reporters and editors is paid for their efforts. In fact, most of them don’t know the first thing about professional journalism. All however are as passionate about their craft as the top earners at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News or the BBC. What’s more, they’re convinced they can offer better journalism than anything professional news organizations currently supply; one stripped of all bias, covering areas long ago neglected by a mainstream media and produced by thousands of committed citizen correspondents all over the world. This is the dream of Wikinews.

Objectivity, no political agenda and the puritanical pursuit of truth? Surely that’s a pipedream? It’s certainly not a historical trait of American media. Yet if the lessons of the last year have taught us anything, it is that we dismiss citizen journalism at our peril.

[...]

“We were both kinda addicted to Star Wars Galaxies,” explains Ilya a little defensively. “I would travel [in the game] and claim I was with the press so they shouldn’t shoot me. But they still did.”

It’s not being glib to say that Ilya’s Star Wars Galaxy experience translates well to Wikinews. All the interactive and community skills that today’s 20-somethings have learned online provide the underpinning of this new participatory media. And given all the time and effort Ilya spent “practicising” being a journalist – learning style guides and how to structure a news story, who’s to say he’s any less equipped to start plying the trade than many journalism graduates? --Matthew Yeomans
--The Birth of WikiNews (Citrizens Kane)

Professors see the world in terms of experts and students: "We are smart; you are dumb." That's the Infantile American Principle in a nutshell. Now go play with your toys and don't bother me. --David Gelernter --The 'We're Smart, You're Dumb' Principle (LA Times (will expire))

The article is really a critique of Democratic philosophy, but I thought I'd post this quote about professors as a reminder that I should stay humble.

I don't agree that professors should behave this way, but because our job regularly places us in the front of a room of bright people who nod and write down things that we say, it's important to remember the artificiality of the situation. I mean, if civilization collapses, and we're all scrambling for food, who's going to care that there's a typographical error on the last non-radioactive can of soup? I sure won't. So let's keep things in perspective.

Gelernter himself is a professor, so he's not just lobbing missiles randomly.

Robert Pittman, who created MTV, attributed the station's success to the ability of viewers in their late teens and early 20s to process multiple facets of information simultaneously. In television, success brings imitation....

"When Mary Lynn Ryan, who was CNN's producer at the time, did this the news ratings skyrocketed," Grimes said. "So it appeared as though Robert Pittman was correct: if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that."

Bergen, however, hypothesized that Pittman's theory was not correct.... "The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed," Grimes said. "We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago. So this notion that Pittman had that people have learned how to do that is nonsense." --Distracting visuals clutter TV screen; viewers less likely to retain content (EurekAlert!)

We'll be starting our own TV turn-off week, one week late.

Tonight, my son asked to watch The Incredibles again, but I told him we'd play together instead. While my wife took a nap, the kids and I read books aloud, played hide-and-seek, "Simon Says," and a game of my own invention -- "The Obedience Game." Just about anything can be fun if you enjoy the people you're with.

Computer turn-off week? I'm not ready for that...

AP started as a cooperative. Today, it is a cooperative in name only. It’s time to take a lesson from music swappers and invent the new AP – a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service.

The 21st Century news business needs a peer-to-peer network that lets local operations drive cost out of their non-local news packages, divert resources to local web content creation and operate on a level playing field with bloggers, citizen journalists and internet pure plays. --Bob Benz and Mike Phillips --Time for a change: The Associated Press as Napsterized news (Online Journalism Review)

This is a reasonable attempt by the mainstream media to "get it" when it comes to the internet. Another detail that caught my eye:

Confronted with the rapidly growing need for web-specific content like Flash files, audio clips and other multimedia elements, AP has chosen to spend more of its members’ money to create that content rather than facilitate content-sharing among its members.

I'm planning to introduce a Flash unit in an upcoming (Fall 2006, if memory serves) New Media Projects course.

Pick Up Ax Link-O-Rama (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This year, I've taught Anthony Clarvoe's play Pick Up Ax in two of my courses -- Intro to Literary Study and Media Aesthetics. If you're just itching to find out what my students had to say about this play about geeks who listened to rock music that was recorded before they were born, here's a Google search for 'Pick Up Ax' on blogs.setonhill.edu.

A few years ago, I wrote a brief article on Pick Up Ax in the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

The publisher's website features a brief Clarvoe bio.


Some reviews:

Pick Up Ax reveals how distant such ideals now seem. Its protagonist—far from feeling heat, let alone compunction, for swimming with (past) a school of very nasty sharks—is rewarded for his less-than-ethical actions; and not just in the outcome of the plot, mind you: we actually kind of like and admire this guy, in spite of the fact that—or, more disturbingly, maybe because—we recognize in him the soulless signposts of our recent Age of Greed (NYTheatre.com)

Here's a mostly positive review that praised the production more than the writing.

The company says that its plays are chosen ``for their fiery vitality and thought-provoking topics,'' and this play was very often fiery; but thought-provoking? Well, yes, if the message was that the meek shall inherit modern technology or that the nerds will get their revenge. It seemed unsure, too, as to whether it was a morality play or a realistic one. (Off-Off Broadway Review)

Just today I found a delightful Pick Up Ax photo gallery, featuring photos of the mood room in action.

A gauzy Skein of Propylene --
That sways with slightest Breath --
This bag holds smocks -- and Bread and Milk
But -- in its folds -- lies Death.
It sways and puffs -- this Thistledown, Balloonlike in its joy --
Each tiny mouth a perfect fit -- This bag is not a toy.

-- Emily Dickinson --Rewrite some banal instructions in the style of some famous writer (Washington Post)

Not. From an oldie-but-goodie Washington Post Style Invitational. (Via So you want to start blogging...)

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new 'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers.

Many children enjoy reading books, of course, and no doubt some of the flights of fancy conveyed by reading have their escapist merits. But for a sizable percentage of the population, books are downright discriminatory. The reading craze of recent years cruelly taunts the 10 million Americans who suffer from dyslexia—a condition didn’t even exist as a condition until printed text came along to stigmatize its sufferers. --Steven Johnson
--Everything Bad Goes Public (StevenBerlinJohnson.com)

Johnson's satirical thought piece reminds us that our experiences and surroundings determine what we think of as "normal".

The game scene is resorting to faddish ideas from years ago to try to appear original. I'm surprised they haven't come out with Pet Rock software yet.

None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?

That time is drawing near. We are already getting pre-hype for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 2, as well as the new Nintendo. All this will do is make the visuals more lifelike and the blood and gore more realistic and nauseating. While the kids who are used to this "progress" may not be put off by it, newcomers may be repulsed and skip these new generations of machines altogether.

If that doesn't flatten the market, the never-ending need to satisfy the demanding full-time game-player should do it. --John C. Dvorak --Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?  (PC Mag.com)

Predictably, Dvorak's getting trashed by twitch-thumbed gamers on Slashdot, but Dvorak's curmudgeonly demeanor is only endearing to a point.

Telling ourselves we have "so much" to do and that it is "so hard" and that we'll "never get done" is conterproductive. Instead of talking about these things we should just haul off and do them!

And don't let friends that don't get this concept to drag you down with them. Let them list their tribulations, if they must, but tell them you're sure they'll get it done and that they'll be fine. Because they will. And so will you; but you are much better off not trying to play "anything-you-have-I-have-it-worse" game. That isn't getting anyone anywhere. --Karissa Kilgore --We're all working hard... comparatively.... (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

I've had Karissa as a student in several classes. Like everyone else at school this week, she's facing a mountain of work.

Her positive attitude is refreshing and welcome.

Adams had a knack for describing thorny space-time problems and then squeezing them until they sprayed out juicy absurdity. The novels could be silly -- Adams was a comedy writer -- but they also made dark sport of humans' self-importance. We look pretty small, he constantly reminded us, against the backdrop of a nearly infinite galaxy. --Jason Silverman --One Thumb Up for Hitchhiker  (Wired)

A while ago I blogged a review that trashed the movie, so it only seems fair to blog a more positive one. I still think I'll pass on this one.

In the minority are those teachers who have setup their blog/cms as the main home page for their site, integrated into their blog or CMS or at least provide obvious links to their CV, teaching experience, etc, off of the main page of their blog. The blog/CMS is thus positioned as the main public face for establishing professional ethos, an inseparable part of the teacher/researcher's identity. I was actually surprised at how few I have been able to find; it seems a large number of those in the field don't provide direct links to their professional CV or teaching philosophy from the front page of their blog or only a brief mention of their professional affiliation thus making it obvious to me that they would not share their blog as the singular main portal into their professional identity in a cover letter or resume submitted to a hiring committee.

Here's the list I have so far where teachers are building their professional identity into their blog/cms site, or at least featuring the blog as their home page with direct links back to CV, bio, etc.

• Matt Barton
• Johndan Johnson-Eilola
• Dennis Jerz
• Charles Lowe
• Clancy Ratliff
• Rich Rice
• Clay Spinuzzi

Anyone have suggestions for other sites in rhetoric and composition with these characteristics? I'm sure there must be some more out there and I'd like a few more examples. --Teachers Who Position Their Blog or CMS as their Professional Home Page (KairosNews)

Nowadays, news consumers have an almost unlimited choice. They don't sit down with a newspaper for an hour to read it cover to cover. Instead, they bounce from site to site, story to story, link to link, customizing their newsgathering experience, clicking on whatever stories from whatever publications appeal to them. They don't stick around long, but they do visit. It may be difficult for newspapers to figure out how to make money on them, but that doesn't mean that consumers don't find the product appealing.

People haven't been abandoning newspapers (and magazines). They have been abandoning the print medium. --Adam L. Penenberg --The New Old Journalism  (Wired)

Nothing terribly new here, but it's still notable to see support for The Basics in a publication like Wired.

Professors, in general, have the luxury of appearing moderate and open to competing ideas, but insecure students often research the opinions of faculty members to ensure that they will be on the correct side of any apparently open dialogue. The powerless seize on small expressions of political opinion from the powerful and embrace these views even more radically in order to prove their loyalty and worthiness.

Of course, most of us probably didn't recognize that we were latecomers to the grad-school pyramid scheme. Theory with a capital T grew up with the expansion of graduate programs and the adjunctification of higher education during the last 30 years. It was a ticket to success for a charmed circle of insiders: a few people at elite institutions with the connections and advance knowledge to get in and out of the game before the general rush. The language of theory -- carefully deployed in the world of academic hiring and publication -- still functions in ways that suggest the sub rosa communications of Ivy League clubmen in the world of investment banking.

By the turn of the millennium, however, the jargon-laden writing was on the wall. Shoeshine boys were talking about Jacques Derrida. You could buy books on Theory at Wal-Mart with a six-pack of Zima and an "Indigo Girls" T-shirt.

And now it seems like everyone is rushing to get out with what's left of their devalued stock. Famous scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, and Terry Eagleton have announced that "theory is dead." Of course, at this late date, it's as if our leaders have emerged from months of concentrated thought to announce that Jefferson Starship is no longer on the cutting edge of popular music. --"Thomas H. Benton" --Life After the Death of Theory (Chronicle)

I had the very same alienating experience with one particular theory class at the University of Virginia, though I also remember some very productive courses with E.D. "Cultural Literacy" Hirsch and Arthur "Shakespeare" Kirsch, among others.

In Hirsch's class, a history of critical theory, there were two philosophy students who frequently arrived about 10 minutes late, walked all the way across the lecture hall to their seat right next to the instructor's desk, and dominated the post-lecture Q & A sessions by arguing philosophical points with Hirsch. Once I actually went up to Hirsch after class and asked that he not let those students dominate the discussion, though in retrospect I'm sure that if I had simply raised my hand to ask a good question, he'd have gladly called on me. I was such a putz.

Kirsch's class was very much in demand. As a culling technique, he required students to write a 10-page paper every other week. What a way to ensure a dedicated student roster!

At Toronto, I got a good grip on a first-semester course, "History of the English Language," and also took a course on bibliography (which was more than research -- it was also an introduction to the history of books). I loved those classes, and I remember that they shook up some of my classmates. These were Ph.D. students who confessed they didn't know the difference between an article and a preposition. A bibliography course is even more necessary now. At the time, most of the grad students probably remember switching from writing papers long-hand to composing them on the computer, but that's probably not the case today.

My dissertation adviser, F. J. Marker, characterized me as a "theory refugee." Fortunately for me, he was a theater historian with a joint appointment to the English department, so that wasn't a problem to him.

Among my classmates, there were plenty instances of posturing and tunnel vision. As an American who had lived in Virginia all his life, I found myself in an interesting position in a class on Southern American lit, being offered at a Canadian institution.

One fellow, with steely blue eyes and long, flowing Jesus hair, got very excited about Foucault. He could "do theory" like there was no tomorrow. Years later, he told me that a library worker had cleared out his library carrel, throwing out a draft of his dissertation in the process. He said something about filing a lawsuit against that employee and the university. (Didn't he keep a backup? Hadn't he ever heard "Jesus Saves"?)

Another guy was planning to do a computer-assisted textual analysis of The Canterbury Tales (Or was it Paradise Lost?). I thought it was a cool idea, and at the time I was working on a computer project involving medieval drama. While my fiancée did end up joining me in Toronto, I had left behind a big network of friends in Virginia, and I was very lonely that first year in Toronto all by myself. So, one day after class, I asked this guy if he wanted to go out for coffee. He thought about it, then said he had some work to do instead. I later saw him in the library, reading. I never spoke to him again.

I feel like a hypocrite as I write this, but a student to whom I was polite and respectful seemed to get the idea that we were soulmates. She spouted theory left and right, interspersed with the occasional unthinking anti-American remark (which seemed almost obligatory in Canada at the time). For instance, when some text we were discussing featured rather violent and sexual language, this student noted that the author lived in such-and-such a town, and that near the town was an American military base, so it made sense to her that the author had picked up that language from the U.S. soldiers. Every couple weeks, she would call me up and share with me her latest outrages and department gossip. I was always polite, but never reciprocated. After several years, she stopped calling.

One student from Europe launched a whole interpretation of a story (written by a black author) on the premise that one family was white and another was black, and that the white family was oppressing the black one. When I pointed out that the mother of the "white" family used the "n" word to describe her own son, my fellow student paused, blinked, then suggested that the "white" mother was just demonstrating her racism by using a racial epithet against her son. When I pointed out several dialectical similarities between the way the two families talked, and when I showed how both families spoke in a completely different way from a group of characters who are described in the text as being white, he stuck to his guns. He was so interested in defending his interpretation that, when I asked him whether it was at all possible -- under any circumstances -- to use dialect to identify the race of a character in fiction, he said "no." So much for textual criticism.

The one time I made a sudden connection over a literary text was a complete accident. In one of my classes, we were about to discuss some W. H. Auden poetry. I think I was scheduled to be the "respondent" to a paper written by another student. A few days before the class period, I saw her in the halls and said, "Do you want to go to the lounge and talk about Auden?"

The woman did a double-take, then flashed a confused smile.

I realized she wasn't who I thought she was. "Whoops, My mistake," I sputtered.

She was still smiling.

"I think I just accidentally hit on you, didn't I?"

She laughed. "I was about to say, 'yes!'"

Looking back, I am a bit saddened that I spent so little time talking about literature, and so much time fretting over my own shaky grasp of theory. It was a love of books and writing that led me to grad school. Between classes in my first year or so, I read a list of books on my own, so that I could pass a series of written tests. I also studied -- alone -- for a German test. Maybe I just remember it that way, because talking about the literature wasn't hard, but reading, making sense of, and then talking about the theory was a challenge. I suppose we needed to spend that time practicing our ability to "do criticism."

I enjoy spending time with the grad students and other young professionals I've met via blogs or via CCCC meetings, since they are so literate in the theory of their fields. Reading Mike Vitia or Clancy Ratliff reminds me of the best things I took away from my graduate seminars. (Hmm... it looks like Clancy has been goofing off a bit lately, but that's okay -- she deserves it.)

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. And yet you almost never hear this story in popular accounts of today's media. --Steven Johnson --Watching TV Makes You Smarter (NY Times (will expire))

Just in time for TV Turn-off Week.

Johnson introduces daytime soap operas late in this article, after describing the narrative thread of Hill Street Blues. But that show, along with Dallas and others of a similar ilk, were billed as "nighttime soaps," so Johnson's decision to withhold that bit of information creates the appearance of a complexity that doesn't really need to be there. Of course, that's the choice of the author -- what are you going to withhold as part of the payoff, what will you give away in order to tease your audience.

The Love Boat featured two or three plots that dealt with visiting passengers, one of which typically involved one member of the recurring cast, and if memory serves, there was also a comic subplot dealing with the crew. But M*A*S*H (1971-1983) was a half-hour show that featured two or sometimes three plots happening at once, all designed to give the strong cast of supporting characters something to do (especially in later years, as the show got less farcical and more dramatically experimental).

Johnson's book, from which this article is an excerpt, will doubtless cover more ground. I'm not so sure that passively consuming television is the same thing as reading, but as Johnson notes, some of the best TV on today brings with it a plethora of fan websites and other forms of interacting with the primary narrative. I'll withhold my final judgement until I've read more, but I'm looking forward to it.

It's cute that those friends think the academic job search is anything at all like other job searches, in which you have a reasonable hope of living in a region you find desirable and getting work commensurate with your qualifications. They don't realize how someone intelligent, competent, and disciplined enough to earn a Ph.D. can be utterly desperate, forced to apply for every job advertised and to take anything offered. --Jonathan Malesic --No Longer a Desperado (Chronicle)

For some reason, a good chunk of the freshmen in my Intro to Literary Study class are talking about grad school this year. I want to be encouraging, but also realistic. What Malesic says about a religous studies Ph.D. applies equally well to an English Ph.D.

Incredibles DVD Freezes in My Player (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other day, my wife picked up a copy of the widescreen, 2-disc DVD of The Incredibles. The movie disc loaded, played the FBI warning, then froze on the screen that threatens our little family with legal action if we ever offend The Mouse.

I'm used to the annoying tendency of DVDs to refuse to let you jump right to the menu, but this was ridiculous. The screen froze at the warning, and didn't do anything. The only way we could get the DVD out was by shutting off the player.

The bonus features disc plays just fine, and the disk that hung in on our DVD player worked just fine in my laptop. The DVD has imprinted on it "www.TheIncredibles.com/support," but that URL leads to an error. Hacking the URL leads to a Disney site containing no obvious technical assistance.

We brought the box back to Wal-Mart to exchange it, and the same thing happened.

My son suggests that we return the DVD and get a videotape instead, but I doubt Wal-Mart will allow that. Maybe somebody else Googling for this problem will find this page and we can commiserate...

I discovered an abandoned deposit in my company owned by one of our Outer Rim customers who died along with his entire family as a result of an landspeeder crash. He actually deposited this funds amounting to IC12,000,000,000.00 (Twelve billion Imperial Credits), for safe keeping in my company here in Mos Eisley. Company file records shows that the funds was actually for a project our late costumer wanted to start in the near future (a multi million Dollar Spice plant in Kessel), before his sudden and untimely death. As such since his death none of his relations or next-of-kin has come forward to lay claims for this property as the heir, this is the basically the reason why I have contacted you. My company cannot release the roperty unless someone applies for claim as the next-of-kin to the deceased as indicated in our operating guidelines. --PRIVATE AND URGENT (The Darth Side)

Amusing comment posted to Darth Vader's blog. ("Tomorrow I may strangle General Veers.")

First, pigeons cannot fly through Windows. Second, since they don't fly in darkness either, this method's bandwidth drops to zero 50% of the time. Finally, there's the problem of droppings download. We are pleased to report that all these shortcomings were resolved in our new data transfer protocol, as we now turn to describe.

System architecture: the system is constructed of a back end - a carriage, Ben-Hur movie style, which is made of a yoke made of light Balsa, and outfitted with two huge wheels - 2 DVD wheels, 4.7 Giga each. --Snails are faster than ADSL (Ami Ben-Bassat's Blog)

Professor Ernesto wants to talk about plagiarism in student papers. Floor open.
Questions: Is there really a problem here? (Smythe)
Professor Ernesto: What'sthe percentage of student work that'ssuspect? Really, that high? Why don't we just castrate their damn laptops? That's obviously where it's coming from.
Professor Dale notes that the act of appropriation may sometimes be an homage.
Professor Ernesto grabs Professor Dale's briefcase and shakes out all the papers. Yells, "This is an act of appropriation, not an homage!"
Professor Dale threatens to deconstruct Professor Ernesto.
The chair brings the meeting to order again. Directs task force of Professors Dale and Ernesto to look jointly into student plagiarism. --David Galef --Last Week'sEnglish Department Meeting (Inside Higher Ed)

We've got an English faculty meeting tomorrow...

"Their parents posted 'Baby on Board' signs in their cars. They have been protected as children. Their free time was replaced by organized activities and structured programs. They have a high need for achievement and attention," said Xavier spokeswoman Kelly Leon.

She said this generation prefers learning from hands-on experience, craves technology-generated education, and feels comfortable working in teams.

"Millennial students do not learn in the traditional ways of 50, 30 or even 10 years ago," said Xavier President Michael Graham. "We need to adapt our campus to their needs and changing times." --'Smart' classrooms, ritzy dorms lure 'Millennials' (Cincinnati.com)

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Our time here may be fleeting ("Out, out brief candle!") but footnotes are not supposed to be. When online citations extinguish, every discipline is befouled, because replication, at the heart of the research process, becomes difficult without stable archiving, which libraries used to provide.

It was called a book shelf, as in Shakespeare's day. --Michael Bugeja --Such Stuff as Footnotes Are Made On (Inside Higher Ed)

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

30% Yankee

10% Upper Midwestern

5% Dixie

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

--What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them.

A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients.

[...]

We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market. --Paul Graham --The Submarine (PaulGraham.com)

--The Perfect Prescription (New York Metro)

New design for pill bottles, improving legibility and adding several other features.

In the early days of the telephone, the problem of speaking level was widely noted and discussed. The technological innovation was clever: a small amount of a person's voice was fed back to the earpiece, and people then naturally adjusted the loudness of their spoken voice to produce a comfortable level of feedback in the earpiece. Numerous studies in auditory psychophysics were performed to determine the correct amount of this feedback -- sidetone was the technical term. With the advent of the mobile telephone, sidetone has disappeared, and with it, the so-necessary feedback required to maintain voice level.

Why was sidetone eliminated from mobile phones? Two possible answers come to mind, and my suspicion is that both are correct. One is that modern telephonic engineers have no sense of history, and so they lack all the experience and knowledge that led to the early development of sidetone feedback. The second answer is that sidetone poses more difficult problems in the out-of-doors environment of the mobile phone, where wind noise on the microphone and relatively high-levels of ambient noise pose technical limitations on sidetone. --Don Norman --Minimizing the Annoyance of the Mobile Phone (JND.org)

I was recently lined up in the boarding tunnel at the airport. A woman behind me called up her local library to try to renew a book. She put her portable phone on speaker mode, and kept the librarian on the line while she rummaged through her carry-ons looking for the book.

It was the most annoying telephone experience I've had.

When the librarian finally said, "No, I can't renew your book," the feeling of satisfaction in the tunnel was palpable. I would have sworn I heard scattered applause.

In the interests of teaching kids not to be gluttons, CTW has transformed Cookie Monster into just another monster who happens to like cookies. His trademark song, "C is for Cookie" has been changed to "A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food." And this is a complete and total reversal of Cookie Monster's ontology, his telos, his raison d'etre, his essential Cookie-Monster-ness.

If the Cookie Monster is no longer a cookie monster, what is he? Why didn't they just name him "Phil: The Monster Who Sometimes Likes to Eat a Cookie"? --Jonah Goldberg --Let Cookie Monster be Cookie Monster (Townhall.com)

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip. --Martin Wainwright --Emails 'pose threat to IQ'  (Guardian)

Tradition has it that William Shakespeare was born on 23rd April, three days prior to his baptism recorded at Holy Trinity Church in 1564. The 23rd April is also the date of his death in Stratford aged 52. Shakespeare�s birthday was first celebrated in 1824 with a procession through the streets to Holy Trinity Church, a dinner and a few speeches. Over the years the tradition has grown to include many of the unique features that are still integral to the celebrations today. --Shakespeare's Birthday Celebrations (shakespeare.org.uk)

[A] de-emphasis in the academy in recent years on the formal elements of poetry, in favor of the social, legal, historic, and cultural background to literature, has meant that even doctoral candidates in English need not concern themselves overly with poetic form. Another quick but, I think, telling example: I was serving on a panel of poetry judges, and as the panel proceeded to deliberate, one judge, a university professor and poet, chimed in to say that I and another of our colleagues seemed to be paying a lot of attention to the language in the poems. It was never entirely clear to me what was meant by this statement, but I suspect that the implication was that, in carefully examining a poet’s deployment of words, I had failed to give proper weight to the poet’s biography as it was suggested by the poems. --David Yezzi --The Fortunes of Formalism (New Criterion)

I teach blank verse (iambic pentameter), and required my Intro to Literary Study students to write sonnets. The poets in the class overwhelmingly prefer free verse, but enough "got into" the exercises that I consider the experience a success.

I'm a much better poetry editor than a poet. When I do write verse, it's solely to play with form. That's almost the opposite of the student poets whose feeling gush forth into their keyboards.

Students in my upper-level Media Aesthetics class have started exchanging glances and smirking every time I bring up T.S. Eliot -- a formalist who knew the rules well enough to break them to pieces when he needed to. ("Wallala leialala" anyone?)

I am BOTH a teacher who gets papers from students AND a freelance writer who is receiving solicitations for writing them for students. (If I were truly entrepreneurial, I would design a paper so difficult that students would be likely to turn to professionals for "work for hire," then take their job offers under a pseudonym, and write the papers myself -- which would not only net me some easy $ but also make them oh so very easy to grade. Hah!) --Mike Arnzen --The Work-for-Hire Plagiarist (Pedablogue)

Nogroski presented his results before the entire fifth-grade science community Monday, in partial fulfillment of his seventh-period research project. According to the review panel, which convened in the lunchroom Tuesday, "Otters" was fundamentally flawed by Nogroski's failure to identify a significant research gap.

"When Mike said, 'Otters,' I almost puked," said 11-year-old peer examiner Lacey Swain, taking the lettuce out of her sandwich. "Why would you want to spend a whole page talking about otters?" --Fifth-Grade Science Paper Doesn't Stand Up To Peer Review (The Onion (satire; will expire))

Thanks for the suggestion, Will.

The Wall Street Journal on April 11 wrote that ?despite the occasional controversial article, many of the reader-written sites look more like church bulletin boards than, say, the New York Times.?

Let'snot dismiss church bulletin boards. When I wrote editorials in Omaha, Neb., I watched a Republican candidate win his way into Congress via a campaign conducted mostly on church bulletin boards. I suspect that in the most recent U.S. presidential election, church bulletin boards delivered far more votes than the New York Times did. We should hope that our work rises to the level of influence and inspires the loyalty of a church bulletin board. --Robert Niles -- Printer-friendly version Virtual roundtable: Grassroots journalism leaders discuss the nitty-gritty (Online Journalism Review)

From the intro to a "virtual roundtable" with Mike Noe, Lauren Ward, and Lex Alexander, " some people who actually are making grassroots journalism work for their publications."

Every grader of blue books was once a writer of blue books, so it might help to think about the process from that end.

I remember, with particular shame, a certain undergraduate essay exam of my own for a course in "Modern Moral Philosophy." The professor was Philippa Foot, who must have been in her early 60s at the time. I was wholly convinced by her attempt to renew Aristotelian virtue ethics (I still am), and that was part of the problem.

In answer to her essay question, I parroted her anti-Humean line without really making much of an argument -- as if I were an academic peer chit-chatting or a grad student sucking up. In the margin next to precisely the paragraph where I should have made some substantive argument, she wrote in her strong cursive hand, "But why was Hume wrong here?" and gave me a B or maybe even a B-, along with a note at the end of the exam expressing measured disappointment.

At the time, I was ashamed for having failed to really "do philosophy," as we were taught to say. Now I am ashamed for a different reason. How could I have wasted her time like that?

Professor Foot -- after a good 30 or so years of serious teaching, writing, and thinking, and at 25 years past my present age -- was still correcting the glib meanderings of 19-year-olds. As a student, I owed her more, and as a teacher I wonder whether I will practice the same patience and attention to detail (two of the pedagogical virtues) when I am at that stage of my career.

[...]

I know that the blue book and ballpoint pen are aging technologies, and that the hastily scrawled essay is probably on its way out. But I doubt there is a sound replacement for the requirement of a carefully composed essay on an assigned topic, written in two to three hours, whatever the technology. --Abe Socher --Grading Blues (Chronicle)

When was the last time you stretched your arms, locked your fingers together with palms facing out, and executed a satisfying snap before channeling your energies into a one-on-one encounter? I am not referring to the clicking of a mouse button, which is about as immersive as punching a warm soda from a vending machine. I am referring to your hands poised above the keyboard, your eyes glued to the monitor, and your torso leaning forward in the classic "game player position." Interacting with this game is similar to telling a gorgeous waitress your lips are parched, and her serving you a tall, wet glass filled with cold, fizzling soda and just the right amount of ice. It involves more than your basic senses; it involves your entire self. True, the game is built on convention: exploring pre-rendered environments, collecting items, solving puzzles, and opening new areas of the game, but it also turns convention on its ear while keeping its tongue firmly in cheek. The text parser forces you to interact with the game, pulling you into the solving of puzzles rather than allowing you to click your way to a resolution, the characters help or hinder the outcome of the game, depending on the nature of your interactions, and the carefully constructed game realm is the sum and substance of logic. Yet impregnating the entire concept, including the graphics, sounds, characters, architecture and puzzles, is a genuine sense of humor that is never forced. --Starship Titanic (review) (Adrenaline Vault)

Wonderfully sensual paragraph from a review of this 1998 graphic adventure game.

Theater owners are in three different businesses: showing movies; showing advertisements--previews, which must be shown as part of their contract, don't generate any revenue--and selling popcorn and soft drinks. The only business that makes a profit for them is the third, so it makes sense to cater to teenage males, who gobble the most popcorn and slurp the most soda. This demographic is reputed not to give a hoot if the picture is fuzzy and dim, as long as they can see the explosions.

[...]

It's hard to imagine even Wal-Mart imposing the kind of rules that made the Hays Office ridiculous, such as requiring married couples to be depicted sleeping in twin beds. But does freedom always improve art? Or to put it more provocatively, does censorship always hurt it? What is the proper place of public morality in popular art? Is it different from the place of morality in elite art? What is the appropriate standard by which to judge Hollywood movies?

[...]

But like the new censorship, the new technology raises the quality question. The advent of the DVD has paralleled that of the CD. Not only has it influenced the packaging of new material, it has stimulated the re-packaging of old. We may regard with mixed feelings the prospect of buying our favorite childhood TV shows in immaculate-looking boxed sets, but that is only the tip of the marketing iceberg. The DVD is making whole libraries of movies as available and accessible as the paperback made whole libraries of books. Will this help to educate the public about the history of film, thereby developing its taste and improving quality overall? Or will it degrade taste by reducing the experience of watching a movie to something you can do any time, anywhere, on your ever-miniaturizing laptop? (Lawrence of Arabia . . . Coming soon to a video phone near you!)

Granted, it is probably too soon to assess the aesthetic impact of the DVD--not to mention the whole "digital revolution" of which the DVD is but the leading edge. But Epstein's reluctance to address the quality issue also hobbles his attempts to come to grips with the enormous change that stands at the heart of his study: the one that occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the power in Hollywood shifted away from the moguls who founded the studios and toward the top stars, the top directors, and the agents who perfected that power in the new "art of the deal."

[...]

Speaking of the theater, it might be worth taking a moment to consider how Epstein's mode of analysis would illuminate that realm. The theater industry, if you'll pardon the expression, is a lot older than the movie industry. But think of all the regime changes it has gone through. In ancient Greece, it was part of a religious festival sponsored by aristocratic citizens who competed fiercely for performance spots and prizes. In Rome, it was the plaything of plutocrats, who cared more about the lavish special effects than about the drama (sound familiar?). In ninth-century Europe, plays were performed in church by priests. In Renaissance Italy, there was the elegant proscenium of Aleotti and the funky commedia dell'arte of the streets. In Elizabethan England, the Globe Theater was run as a profit-making venture by entrepreneurial actors and other investors. The French bourgeoisie plunked down good francs to see realistic drama. And in spite of themselves, the Communists gave the world Bertolt Brecht and the post-Revolution Moscow Art Theater. What is the point? To quote one of those entrepreneurial actors, "The play's the thing." Under all of these regimes, the theater has been dominated by a lot of junk. (Even the Globe Theater featured bear-baiting on off nights.) But in most eras, the junk has been punctuated by a few great works, which is why we bother to pay attention at all. --Martha Bayles reviews Edward Jay Epstein's The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood --Hollywood Means Business  (The Weekly Standard)

There's even a passage in this review that defends Patrick Stewart as an accomplished stage actor. Bayles knows her stuff.

M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
A: It can be.
M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
A: No it isn't.
M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
A: Yes it is!
M: No it isn't! --The Argument Sketch [Monty Python]

You can’t consider yourself a moral person and at the same time allow the field of education to replace well-designed instruction on tough and important material (what it takes to sustain a democracy, how to read accurately and with deep comprehension) with superficial coverage of dumbed-down subjects.

You can’t spend your life in silence, smiling in a collegial (brain-dead) way, while a thousand schools of education celebrate themselves for being “stewards of America’s children” as they turn out new teachers whose heads are filled with nonsense (“pedagogy”) and who have no idea how--exactly and effectively--to teach anything. --What Got Me Started Was This Kid in a Cub Scout Uniform (EducatioNation)

Strong words.

I don't teach in an ed program, so I'm looking at this from the outside.

At Seton Hill, ed students must major in a subject besides education, so when I do teach education majors, they are usually double-majoring in English. On the other hand, one of my classes has a large proportion of education majors who aren't terribly thrilled by the fact that they have to take several English courses (even if they don't plan to teach English). But I take this as a sign that our ed program holds students up to high standards.

Of course, computer games and the machines they run on have changed enormously since Zork first appeared in 1980. But I can't say that the games are any more entertaining.

Playing Zork and some of the other games of the day that were called "interactive fiction" was like reading a "Lord of the Rings" book for the first time. You could be transported to a strange and mystical world and caught up in a powerful and addictive story. --Ric Manning --The magic is back  (Courier Journal)

For the few seconds between the announcement that Ratzinger was named pope, and the announcement of his choice of name, the Wikipedia entry was titled Pope Joseph... I just happened to catch it on the fly (it was changed before I could update it)... --Stephen Downes, in a comment. --How the Community Can Work, Fast (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.)

That's some fast work on the part of the Wikipedians...

OTBs, or "Outside The Boxers," as they call themselves, are unconventional thinkers who believe "there are no stupid ideas," Lessjo says. "We really just wanted to know what would happen if Civil War soldiers fought the crew from 'Star Trek.' You never see that in the movies or TV reruns." --Tim Chitwood --A battle outside the box (Leger-Enquirer)

What happened? The unspoken hierarchy of obsessive-compulsive subcultures was laid bare for all to see.

First the Confederates said they wouldn't associate with "Trekkies," and the Star Trek fans said they preferred "Trekkers." The Confederates all laughed, and "that right there got things off on the wrong foot," Lessjo says.

(Make sure you read the fine print at the end of the article.)

"God forbid, if someone shot the President, which network would you turn to? It will be cable, the Internet--something other than General Hospital being interrupted." --Sam Donaldson, former ABC News anchor --Donaldson: Network News Dead (BroadcastingCable.com)

The school argued a need for it's services by citing lower test scores in Marlborough, Hudson, Maynard and Clinton than in surrounding areas.

Set to open it's doors in the fall to 276 sixth- and seventh- grade students, the charter school plans to expand it's enrollment to 826 students in grades six through 12. --Schools department may join charter school lawsuit (Shrewsbury Chronicle)

Nobody's perfect, but three misuses of "it's" for "its" in two paragraphs suggests somebody doesn't know the rule.
Via Joanne Jacobs.

Google il Papa! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Google hasn't yet started returning meaningful results for "Benedict XVI" in its main search results, though its news service was doing fine right from the start.

At 1:45 EST, I googled the new pope's name, and found plenty of speculation that the next pope after John Paul II would choose that name. Creative works, including a comic book, have used characters with the name Pope Benedict XVI.

At 5:45, the search results were unchanged...




But the difference in GoogleAd options is marked.



Regarding Wikipedia: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was well-known before he was named pope, so much of the Wikipedians' task was repackaging the material already assembled for Ratzinger, but it's still amazing to see how detailed the Wikipedia article is, just a few hours after the news was announced. (See Wikipedia: Pope Benedict XVI.)

--i am 8-bit

A Los Angeles art show.

Website requires Flash.

Sorry, we were unable to locate document(s) pertaining to your request.

Did you mean: zirconium instead of kirschenbaum? --This Morning's Lesson in Machine Learning (Or, So Said the Search Engine Unto Me) (MGK)

This is tremendous news... search technology has advanced to the point where a search engine has become aware of Matt Kirschenbaum's strong, metallic character, his tendency to spark and ignite when exposed to the open air, his usefulness as an anti-corrosive in alloys, his whitish-grey lustre, the fact that his atomic number is 40, and the fact that he was discovered by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789.

Sign Your Child Up Today!

Make extra money - or start your son's college fund!
We are currently looking for children in your area! Rent your son out on weekends. You have complete control over your child's schedule. All of our clients are fully screened, and you may screen prospective clients before any transaction takes place. --Rent My Son

The idea is, parents rent their kids out to single guys who want to attract women in the park, or to parents of a socially disadvantaged daughter who needs a date to the prom.

Not really worth one "har," let alone a "har har."

The logo doesn't have anything to do with the supposed business plan, and the pages don't feature a link to the home page in the upper left corner -- that's a very strong online convention, and it shows whoever put together this site was not a pro.

The address given on the "Company Info" page matches the address of several federal and local government groups in San Diego. All the suites or room numbers I've seen for that office building have four numbers, but this company is supposed to be in "Suite 100."

When you click on "Make Reservation/Get Quote," the page reloads, and nothing else happens. Tell me that an online business would let that happen. For fun, I signed up under the name "Amusing Hoax," and predictably got an error message.

One kid's profile reads, "This website lets me practice for acting." That pretty much lets the cat out of the bag -- the person doing the writing is thinking of the website, and the website only. And that's all there is to it.

Of course, the whole idea is ridiculous. It's not really good enough to last in the memepool for very long -- not when there are far more bizarre things happening in the world. The design for "Black People Love Us" is cheesier, but the content is far better. The same goes for "Rent a Negro."

Via Metafilter, where nobody's falling for it.

Okay, can you tell I'm bored? I think I have laundry or something to do now...

The real appeal of the game is seeing Star Wars characters rendered in itty-bitty plastic form. By the end of the game, there are more than 30 different little guys you can be in Free Play mode.

The good guys are cute, but the evil folks are just adorable. Mini-Maul! Sen. Palpateeny! Bite-sized battle droids! --Lore Sjöberg --Lego Star Wars: The Game  (WIred)

Good writing... the game would probably appeal to my son. Check out the captions in the photo gallery, too... "Your Jedi powers allow you to pull apart doors as if they were made out of some sort of plastic interlocking brick toy."

And there is no doubt that there are profits to be made in the reconstruction business. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10 billion to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); "democracy building" has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and times have never been better for public-sector consultants--the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets, often running government services themselves as subcontractors. (Bearing Point, the favored of these firms in the United States, reported that the revenues for its "public services" division "had quadrupled in just five years," and the profits are huge: $342 million in 2002--a profit margin of 35 percent.)

[...]

As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.--Naomi Klein --The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (The Nation)

Klein sees, in the global outpouring of support in the wake of December's tsunami, a crass, opportunistic colonialism. Instead of rebuilding the small fishing villages, the money will be used to build industrial fishing farms, and more tourist facilities.

Of course, rebuilding costs money. It's shocking to think of the displaced villagers still huddled in refugee camps after all this time, but Klein is using that emotional image not to draw attention to the villagers' plight, but as ammunition for a political statement.

And there's nothing wrong with that -- this is an opinion piece, not a news story. But I was bothered by Klein's selective use of Condoleezza Rice's January statement: "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the U.S. government, but the heart of the American people. And I think it has paid great dividends for us."

Klein trims the quote, writing "Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as 'a wonderful opportunity' that 'has paid great dividends for us.'" As Klein puts it, Rice seems to be saying that the tsunami paid great dividends, but grammatically speaking, "opportunity" is just as plausiblly what she was referring to when she said "it". Taking the whole statement in context, I find it obvious that Rice was speaking of the American response to the tsunami, not to the tsunami itself.

Rice's original quotation was easily googlable, and since my expertise is in language, I can easily see what Klein has done to Rice's original statement in order to make her (Klein's) position stronger. But because I'm hardly an expert in international finace or global politics, I don't know what other detials Klein has similarly dressed up to suit her argument.

I found Klein's ethical argument about the nature of the "reconstruction" to be gripping and convincing. I actually started blogging this editorial out of a sense of outrage at the treatment of the tsunami victims. But her conclusion is an attack on Rice, and not a very effective one. It reminds me of the attacks against Bush for insisting that the U.S. government will never stop thinking of new ways to harm our country and our people. Of course, Republicans are just as silly when they act as if Al Gore really claimed to have invented the internet.

Grammar flaming is fun, but it doesn't change minds or solve problems. If you just want to incite your own loyal supporters, then that's another story.

Goodbye, Blogdex (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I used to love Blogdex, but today's "most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community" are measured by a grand total of three links. So I've taken it off my blogroll. (I can't remember the last time I did that.)

The last announcement was posted in October of 2004, and that announcement hasn't been cleared of the spam that has collected there over the past few months.

I'm glad Technorati is still operating, but I do miss Blogdex.

--Gibby's Game Room (Nescapades)

That's my first computer on the bottom shelf, a Texas Instruments TI-99 4A (c. 1981). The key combination that produced "+" was "shift+equals." The key combination that produced "System Reset" was "namelessbutton-right-next-to-shift + equals." One day it started smoking, so we took it back to the store.

I didn't see an Atari 800 (c. 1979) on Gibby's page. An internal speaker was set to beep every time you pushed a key. The Atari 400 had a membrane keyboard, so I guess the beep was supposed to substitute for the click. But for the Atari 800, which had a real keyboard, the key beep was redundant. I opened up the case, snipped the speaker wire, and threaded both ends out through a gap between the keys. When I wanted sound, I twisted the wires together. What a geek.

Hm.... the TI really was our first computer, but "oldcomputers.net" says the Atari 800 came out earlier. Could we actually have gotten the TI 99 4 first? I remember we got a replacement at one point.... but I specifically remember the sound of the voice synthesizer saying "Texas Instruments TA 99 4A computer."

I'll appeal to my sister.... Rosemary, can you help me out on this?

There seemed to be better games for the Atari, and a summer computer course that I took as a middle schooler used HP terminals in one room and Atari 800s and 400s (check out that profile) in the other, so perhaps when we had enough of the Texas Instruments I convinced the rest of the family to go with the machine that I knew well.

On the top center, that's a Commodore 64 (c. 1982) -- the computer I took with me to college in 1986. (I used a tiny 4-inch TV screen as the monitor.)

If Gibby dies now, I think Gibby will win.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. --David Keys and Nicholas Pyke --Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world (The Independent)

You Get Transported To Another Dimension and Find This Weird Machine In A Maze And Then Some Other Stuff Happens, It's Really Cool --Jacqueline H. Lott --The Stupid Title Comp

What a stupid title for an adventure game.

Although the English word weblog is known in other languages, this has not prevented translations to appear. In Spanish, for example, weblog in general has apparently been translated using the journal-style kind of definition. In effect, in Spanish, weblogs are more commonly referred to as bitácoras, even though the word weblogs is well known. The word bitácora refers in the first place to the journals kept by captains of the old vessels that sailed across oceans, for example the ones used by Spaniards and Portuguese to arrive to the American continent in 1500. A bitácora is clearly different form a personal diary or diario íntimo in Spanish because it implies a trip. It is the account of events that happen during a long journey or physical movement from one place to another. This metaphor of movement in the Spanish language does not exist as clearly in English. Nevertheless, the word journal is used to call those weblogs that have a more personal or intimate tone. --Virginia Melián --Weblogs: nodes of participation in a global context? Non-expert publishing in many languagesDigital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy)

This seems to be a paper delivered at a conference called Digital Divide and the Media: Challenges for Communication and Democracy.

I really hate PDFs... using Firefox, I can't copy and paste more than one line at a time from the HTML document that Google generated from the PDF original, so the process of posting an excerpt from a PDF is a royal pain.

Are libraries and librarians willing to support initiative to provide weblog support for their community? The University of Minnesota Libraries think so: “It is our goal to develop a blog server through which everyone in the university community (faculty, staff, and student) can have access to their own individual blog” (University of Minnesota Libraries, accessed December 7, 2004). Other campuses are also providing students and staff with the means to creatE their own blogs. Though not library-initiated, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School hosts “Weblogs at Harvard Law,” which allows anyone with a harvard.edu e-mail address to create their own weblog. (John Harvard’s Journal 2004) Seton Hall University students can create their own weblogs with a service provided by the Humanities Division and the New Media Journalism program ([Jerz], accessed December 7, 2004). -- Reichardt, Randy and Geoffrey Harder, Science & Technology Libraries, 25(3), p105-116. --Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries (PDF) (Science & Technology Libraries)

That's Seton Hill University.

It's a good article, nevertheless.

Super-volcano, robotic rebellion or terrorism? Kate Ravilious asks 10 scientists to name the biggest danger to Earth and assesses the chances of it happening. --What a way to go  (Guardian)

Just in case you've gotten lax and started feeling optimistic or something, and you were planning to get a good 8 hours sleep tonight, this list will give you something worthwhile to fear.

Although not traditionally the domain of special collections, I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. Interactive fiction is a genre of computer game that is more literary than most computer and video games popular today. Also known as text adventure games, these works present story text to players, who then type in commands to the computer, which then prints text in response, back and forth, in the process unfolding and determining a story. Although not commercially popular today, the genre may be of great scholarly and historical importance as interactive electronic games grow both in general popularity and as subjects worthy of academic study. --Adam Mathes --Collecting and Preserving Infocom Interactive Fiction (AdamManthes.com)

Via Nick on GrandTextAuto., where Mathes notes that this is a hypothetical project, written for a class.

I wonder... quite honestly, are the best-known commercial IF games really the ones that are most in need of collection and preservation? Still, Infocom's works were undeniably influential.

How can I get rid of That Old Typewriter Smell?

Hey, some of us like it! But we're perverse ... Seriously, it's a common problem, especially with portables--and if you're allergic to mold, it can be a real health hazard. Yes, the smell is caused primarily by mold, combined with decades of dust and cigarette smoke. Mold won't grow on metal, but it will grow on typewriter ribbons and on fabric-covered cases. Take your typewriter out of its case and blow the lint and dust out of it (a compressed air canister for cleaning computer and stereo equipment is handy here). Throw away the ribbon. Look carefully for any surfaces that may have mold on them (the typebars usually rest on fabric or felt; some typewriters also have felt elsewhere, to deaden the noise). Clean and polish the machine using the materials I list on my restoration page. The cases can be cleaned with harsher materials, such as Lysol, window cleaner, or ammonia. Then let everything dry thoroughly, preferably in sunlight. Store typewriters and cases in dry environments with moderate temperatures. You may have to clean the cases again every 6 months or so. --Richard Polt --The Classic Typewriter Page Frequently Asked Questions (The Classic Typewriter Page)

I was in a retrotech mood today...

I typed the first draft of a Star Trek novel on my mother's pink manual typewriter, which she set up in the dining room. I remember the centerpiece on the table would shake every time I hit the carriage return, so sometimes I would put it on the floor of the living room -- where the lamps on the end tables would rattle softly as I typed.

He escaped Hitler's Germany and devoted the rest of his life to humanitarian and pacifist causes with an authority unmatched by any scientist today, or even most politicians and religious leaders.

He used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice and the McCarthy hearings. His FBI file ran 1,400 pages.

His letters reveal a tumultuous personal life - married twice and indifferent toward his children while obsessed with physics. Yet he charmed lovers and admirers with poetry and sailboat outings. Friends and neighbors fiercely protected his privacy.

And, yes, he was eccentric. With hair like that, how could he not be? --Joseph B. Verrengia --Einstein's Legacy Keeps on Expanding (AP|MyWay)

Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here's what you can't do with a textbook:

You can't annotate it. How strange is it that students can't add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?

You can't search it.

You can't link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.

You can't access it if it's not in your posession.

You can't copy out important information and paste it with other important information.

You can't share it in any meaningful way.

You can't have the most up to date information about the topic.

You can't edit it.

Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

--The Case Against Textbooks (Weblogg-ed)

If students own copies of the book, then of course they can annotate it.

They can search a book if someone else has prepared a concordance, and they can link to the contents of the book by referring to a page number.

And there are all sorts of things that you can't do with a digital text -- such as read it without access to a computer, or add its weight to the milk crate in which you plan to present your tenure review package. Of course, the former concern comes with the territory, and the latter is no flaw in digital text itself.

But I'm picking nits, because I'm mostly in agreement. I use printed collections of essays in my teaching, and of course I use printed literary works, but rarely do I use traditional textbooks.

Since I think of myself mostly as a writing teacher, I tend to think of content as a means to an end. So I'm more interested in getting students to be critical thinkers and researchers, rather than have them absorb the contents of a book and remember it long enough to take a quiz.

I'll use a textbook in my "Newswriting" course this fall, but in my upper-level courses, I'm more likely to use web pages, supplemented with journal articles. Textbooks that cover digital culture go out of date so quickly that Wikipedia is often a better resource.

Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a lawn, which was the stage, and the lawn went back towards the lake in the grounds of the college, and the play began in natural light. But as it developed, and as it became time for Ariel to say his farewell to the world of The Tempest, the evening had started to close in and there was some artificial lighting coming on. And as Ariel uttered his last speech, he turned and he ran across the grass, and he got to the edge of the lake and he just kept running across the top of the water -- the producer having thoughtfully provided a kind of walkway an inch beneath the water. And you could see and you could hear the plish, plash as he ran away from you across the top of the lake, until the gloom enveloped him and he disappeared from your view.

And as he did so, from the further shore, a firework rocket was ignited, and it went whoosh into the air, and high up there it burst into lots of sparks, and all the sparks went out, and he had gone.

When you look up the stage directions, it says, "Exit Ariel." --Tom Stoppard, as cited by Lary Opitz --The Play's the Thing: Drama versus Theatre (Skidmore)

I'm teaching "Drama as Literature" this fall. It will be a survey from the ancient Greeks to present day. I haven't decided exactly what texts to use, but I've never taught Stoppard's Arcadia. I think I will use Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in parallel with Hamlet, but I'm not sure I want to do two Stoppard plays...

How hard is this to hack? The first observation is that the system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky. The second observation is that the small group of voters -- all of whom know each other -- makes it impossible for an outsider to affect the voting in any way. The chapel is cleared and locked before voting. No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel. In effect, the voter verification process is about as perfect as you're ever going to find. --Bruce Schneir --Hacking the Papal Election (Schneier on Security)

"Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away." --Rupert Murdoch, "old media" mogul. --News must adapt to web, says Murdoch  (Guardian)

I don't believe that the internet is a leveller of genders. In fact, in many cases, it seems to be the opposite.

I spend a lot of time on IRC (internet relay chat), where my IRC nick is not gender-neutral. On many occasions I have joined IRC channels to ask technical questions, and have encountered people who say things like, ?Oh, I don't know the answer to your question, but you can talk to me anyway because you?re a girl.? or ?Are you really a girl?? and then after checking my ?real name? exclaiming ?Yesssss!? and suchlike.

If one outright pretends to be a man (for instance, by assuming a male IRC nick) then perhaps one could naively see internet-based communication as a leveller of genders, but only in as much as it'slevel because no one realises that you are a woman'that'sabout hiding gender, not levelling it! --questions (join-the-dots)

Hannah makes some excellent, thoughtful responses to a pre-interview survey. She seems a bit frustrated by commonly held notions about women in computing, noting, quite diplomatically, "a bit of an implied assumption" in a question that suggests that she, as a woman, might faces personal challenges that form personal challenges for her. "For example," she notes, "consider fathers who’d prefer to work part time or from home, but are discouraged from doing so due to societal pressures."

Heh. I'm usually discouraged from working at home by the sound of screaming kids, but I'm on my own for another week until the wife and kids get back from visiting my in-laws.

Simply counting the volume of conversations and comments and the number of trackbacks is one indication of the size and scope of the network surrounding your blog. Whether or not those comments are in agreement or disagreement requires content analysis, but presumably positive or neutral comments would be indicative of a healthy relationship between the blogger and his/her audience.

Examining the credibility and authority of the people who are commenting and/or linking to the site is another way to assess the impact and importance of the blog.

One needs to look beyond just quantity of postings or links to the quality of the dialog. I like the way Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University categorizes blogs in his classroom and have adapted his categories below:

"Coverage" -- The number of times your brand or issue is mentioned.
"Depth" -- How deeply does the posting discuss the brand? Is it just a passing mention or does the blogger go into the subject in depth with numerous links?
"Interaction" -- What was the nature of the interaction? Was the posting designed to solve a problem, compare different brands, or simply allow the author to rant?
"Discussion" -- What was the nature of the discussion? Was it a true dialog with extensive exchange of ideas, or was it just bantering back and forth.

Jerz further classifies comments as:

Comment Primo -- a comment that launches a discussion on someone else's blog
Comment Grande -- a long comment posted on a peer blog, which is then advertised via a cross-blog posting
Comment Informative -- in which a commenter uses his or her particular knowledge in order to flesh out a general or incomplete statement made in a peer's blog entry
Link Gracious -- a link that draws attention to the source of an idea or to a good conversation happening on someone else's blog

Consider also adding Tonality, an indicator of the health of the relationship between the blog community and the brand. If the tone of the posting leaves a reader less likely to do business with your organization it is negative. If the posting leaves a reader more likely to do business with your organization, or recommends the brand, it is positive. If it essentially just discusses facts it is neutral or balanced. --Katie Delahaye Paine and Andy Lark --How To Measure Blogs, Part One... and what to do with the data (The Measurement Standard (via Cymfony))

Apparently the folks at Cymfony were so excited that they appeared in this (subscription-only) article that they pasted the whole thing on their website. I've added extra line breaks for legibility. The link goes to Cymfony's copy, but it originally appeared on The Measurement Standard. I note that authors removed "xenoblogging" and "wildcard" from the categories I proposed, and their interpretation of "interaction" is very different from what I intended. Still, it's a good article, one to which I'll return fairly soon, since this summer I'll be helping two different university administrative units launch PR blogs.

Odd that the article is written in the first person, but is credited to two authors.

Six Apart plans to release version 3.16 of Movable Type this Monday, April 18. The new release includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements including significant security fixes making this a must-have for all Movable Type installations. --Movable Type 3.16 on the way (neil's world)

Aah, phooey... just this afternoon I finally upgraded from MT 2.65 to MT 3.15. One weekend and it'll be obsolete.

I really like MT 3.15's comment moderation feature. If someone posts a comment that looks like spam, MT can hold it for moderation -- that is, the blog owner has to click a button to publish the comment.

Once students users approve a comment from a poster, other comments from that poster get approved automatically.

The only complaint I have is that comments awaiting moderation show up on a page that I created to show all comments across all blogs, a page which doesn't seem to be rebuilding anyway. Hmm... that's a bother, but I've been at it long enough today. Time to go home.

First of all there are two categories of blogs. One is the traditional web-log where a web surfer shares his online discoveries. And the second is the web diary where person shares his or her thoughts of the day. --John C. Dvorak --Understanding and Reading a Blog (for Newcomers) (Dvorak.org)

Interesting... Dvorak uses the masculine pronoun to describe "the traditional web-log," but uses both masculine and feminine pronouns to describe "the web diary." (See my handout on gender-neutral language.)

Young women and mothers with the distinctive headscarves share the pedestrian areas with blond girls in leather jackets and jeans. Sometimes you see girlfriends walking arm in arm, one demurely wearing the headscarf and the other letting her hair go free to drive men wild with passion. Rebecca West wrote in the 1930s of the ?tranquil sensuality? of Sarajevans. Headscarves in Sarajevo tend to be very stylish or colorful. I noticed, also, that young men took less care to conceal their appraisal of passing young women than they do in Montenegro.

Yet in spite of the city'sexoticism, I never felt easy there. I was tired from the drive and felt uncomfortably claustrophobic in the city. Clouds and fog had backed into the gorge where the city sits by the time we arrived, so we had to walk around in mist or drizzle or dreary rain. The city makes no effort to tuck away its cemeteries with white stone spikes marking graves, all the same age, all more or less new. In the gray, misty weather these seemed to stand out all the more. --John Spurlock --Bosnia and Herzegovina (The Blue Monkey Review)

A beautiful passage from a travellog posted by my truant division chair.

Okay, so he has a Fulbright, so he's not AWOL or anything.

Wireless internet is an idea that first formulated back during the Cold War. It was a young Al Gore who first was struck in the head by an apple (much like Sir Newton, except this apple was thrown at Gore by Ollie North). Mr. Gore said to himself, in a very slow and monotonous tone, "I should create a world wide communication network... with my bare hands! All by myself!" And then, about an hour later, over a bowl of scrambled eggs with ketchup, he thought out loud, "You know what... once I have this internet thing completed, I should make it go through the air without wires... I will make this with my bare hands! The question is how..." --Mike Rubino --Wi-Fi Madness (Tranquility Lost)

Lately I've been love-bombing Mike Rubino, a graphic arts and creative writing double major, who's a major presence on blogs.setonhill.edu, but who for some silly reason won't declare a new media journalism major. He hasn't even taken a class with me yet. (Was it something I said?)

Anyway, he's a great satirist. I'm surprised I missed this back in August when he first posted it.

An ''Aha!'' Moment: Emotion, Opinion, and Fact (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Since my graduate school background is in literature rather than composition studies, I may be stumbling along a well-trod path, but a conversation I had with a colleague in the hall lit off a lightbulb in my head.

Today in my Seminar in Thinking and Writing class (our version of freshman comp), students shared sample thesis statements for a paper on the role of America in global culture.

Last week, students voted on four essays they wanted to read for this unit. I had predicted (correctly) that they would choose the excerpt from Joel Andreas's Addicted to War, a political comic book ("illustrated exposé") skewering the Bush administration. While several students did note on their blogs or in class that the text was one-sided, student after student said, "This is exactly how I feel about the issue." Someone cited a detail from Michael Moore's 9/11 to support one of Andreas's points, and more heads nodded.

Today, when the issue was security vs. freedom, most students said they would gladly give up freedoms to secure their daily lives. One student who desribed in detail the experience of being singled out for additional screening at the airport concluded by saying that she felt patriotic and good about doing her part. Again, heads nodded.

Why was the same class that lapped up Andreas’s angry invective happily curling up with the fuzzy sentimental promises of Homeland Security? Was it easier to go along with what the comic book said, and to go along with the airport security lines, rather than challenge either? Where was the critical thinking? (During class I wondered... what has Andreas written drawn about airport security? Has Dinesh D’Sousa made a comic book that I could assign for an opposing view?)

Since I've known these students for two semesters now, we've built up a rapport where I can, in a smiling, non-threatening, but (I hope) productively irksome way, ask question after question to drive wedges into the tiniest flaws in their arguments. For instance, a student began a sample thesis statement by noting out a conflict between American's perception of itself as the land of the free, and the presence in America of racism. Since he didn’t introduce an historical perspective, I asked him whether, in a country as diverse as ours, people should be permitted to hold politically incorrect views. For example, who would be responsible for determining whether a particular person ever thought racist thoughts? Should all white people be taxed 10% more, and the money used to enforce a "no racist views" policy? If he says that I married a white woman because I am too racist to consider marrying a black women, should everyone just take his word for it? Am I racist because he says I am, or as an American citizen, do I have a right to a trial?

Of course, he had no interest in proposing a new government program to process thought crimes, but he had to think hard to figure out where exactly in my stream of responses I first said something that went beyond his intenion. He would have to come up with a definition of freedom that permits the routine censorship of certain thoughts. A different student started moving in the direction of differentiating between racism and discrimination, which opened the way to separate the moral issue from the legal one. No law can change a person's racist beliefs, but a law can offer protection to the actual or potential victims of racist actions.

Another student said he supports surveillance of citizens if it stops terrorism. After I got him to generalize from “terrorism” to “crime,” I asked what he thought about the U.S. government installing a sensor in his car that would call the cops on him every time he exceeded the speed limit. No, he said, he wouldn’t like that.

I have been trying to get students to move from simplistic normative statements ("Women should not be oppressed" or "Racism is bad") to more analytical or at least descriptive claims.

Sometimes my efforts to exaggerate student opinions backfire, as the other day when an animal-loving student, backed into a corner by some probing questions, admitted that if her dog were dying, and she could save the life of her dog by pushing a button that would kill a stranger in another part of the world, then she would push the button. She wouldn’t do it for just any dog, but she would do it for her dog. Of course, I manipulated her into making that decision; she was probably more interested in not giving me the satisfaction of seeing her cave in than she was in making a serious statement about the value of human vs. animal life, but I was too surprised to go further.

It’s only now that I see her comment as part of the pattern that became more obvious to me today.

The revelation came when I, still pumped up from an exciting class period, chatted in the hallway with Frank Klapak (communications; two doors down). Klapak related something that he picked up in a discussion with Mike Cary (political science; on a different floor).

I am struggling to get my students to see the difference between facts and opinion. According to Klapak, Cary attempts a similar goal by asking his students to reconsider what the term "opinion" means. To someone who has been through graduate school, an opinion is a conclusion -- something that you arrive at after you have considered all the evidence. But what students label as their own "opinion" is probably more often than not their pre-conditioned, unresearched emotional response.

I see this all the time in the behavior of students who first write out "what they think" about an issue, and then go to the library to "find quotes" (facts) that support the claims they have already written. I’ve chalked this up to the active user paradox – the feeling that lateral work, such as reading instructions and doing research and asking for directions, is unproductive when compared to the prospect of sticking to one’s guns and blindly charging along towards one’s destiny.

Recasting “unexamined opinion” as “emotional response” and emphasizing the value of “researched opinion” as something only arrived at after careful research may help. This seems so clear and obvious now that I look at it…

I do try to differentiate between "personal opinion" and "expert opinion," but that sounds like a gradation within ethos, rather than a distinction between pathos and logos (which is what I am trying to teach).

Rather than have students try to move from emotions directly to facts that support their emotions, I hope I can get them to think of a journey from emotions -> research question -> concluding opinion -> thesis.

I spent quite a bit of time sorting through (and adding to) my collection of blogging-related bookmarks. Several of these have been linked here previously, but I thought it would be useful to compile them for easy reference. Here, for example is a (perhaps somewhat arbitrary) collection of blog criticisim links... --William Cole --Blogging Workshop (Donut Age)

A useful collection of links... I'm flattered to be on it.

In the spirit of endism, here's a list of all the forms of major media and how they're trending. Make of it what you will.

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising) --Mainstream Media Meltdown (The Long Tail)

To include books along with all the other media dinosaurs is misleading.

The growth rate of books seems flat, but compared to the other traditional media, books look healthy.

I'm also not sure that measuing the advertising dollars spent on the web is a good way to measure the importance of that media. So, while the author coyly withholds commentary in an attempt to appear unbiased, the selection and organization of this particular list carries an ideological slant. I'm not criticizing the author for having an ideology, I'm just noting the rhetorical impact of the author's compositional decisions.

When people don't fill out forms, they often use the excuse that it's too much work. Consider how to encourage them with negative or positive incentives. The IRS appears to have entirely solved this problem, too. Once again, the key comes from the close relationship with the criminal justice system that the IRS enjoys. Willful failure to file your taxes can result in criminal charges. However, the IRS also has an elaborate and complicated set of financial penalties available for people who fail to file their taxes or pay them in a timely manner.

On the other hand, the IRS offers rewards too. As many people overpay taxes during the year, customers who are unsure about their taxes often fill them out early in the hopes of "winning" a refund of their overpayment. This helps keep users interested. --Peter Seebach --The cranky user: Bad design can be so taxing (IBM)

Although a failed business enterprise, Laurel'sPurple Moon seemed to do exactly what it had planned -- hit it off with girls. Her idea that games should consist of relationships, values such as loyalty, love, and courage, and conflicts such as jealousy, cheating, exclusion, racism, materialism, and broken homes seems worthwhile, but as a young girl I also would have wanted some action as well. Perhaps there is a happy medium that would please both boys and girls -- a video game that incorporates action and physical complications into an in depth storyline filled with rich characters, relationships, emotional conflicts, and growth. --Johanna Dreyfuss --Utopian Entrepreneur (The Long and Winding Road)

My student Johanna Dreyfus reflects on Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur. I'm looking for this game, too, Johanna! Let me know if you find it!

The moon base landing dome opens in pie slices like eye muscles, or the jagged mouth of a cyclops. Pods are not designed strictly for function but thematic meaning: who would fly one without side ports? Tunnel vision. The dark port in the white pod body is very eye-ballish. Similar also is the deep socket of Discovery's bridge. It's lit red early on when Bowman inhabits this superskull, later it's dark/blind when HAL takes charge, signalling his dismissal of the astronauts, prefiguring his death. The space station shuttle bay was read as a vaginal slit by Freudian reviewers; the clipper ship entering can also read as a symbolic prestatement of the blinding of the Cyclops, an archer's arrow aimed at the widescreen audience. Similar blind slits are in the Orion moon shuttle and lunar surface flyer. --Mark Martel --Another Odyssey: Design and Meaning in 2001 (Visual Memory)

An interesting Homeric reading of Kubrik's version of Clarke's novel. It's only a stab at a full-fledged essay -- there's plenty listing of interesting parallels, but none of the "so what?" that turns a list of observations into a thesis.

The implications of scalable theory have been far-reaching and pervasive. In fact, few end-users would disagree with the deployment of expert systems, which embodies the private principles of artificial intelligence. We explore new introspective configurations, which we call KindlerDop.--Shatner, Elmo, Jerz and Nye --An Improvement of XML (SciGen)

Read the backstory behind this random CS paper generator. From Metafilter.

Note the citations to articles by "Elmo, T. M." in the bibliography. Brilliant!

"Just think about it," I would tell them with as straight a face as I could muster, "next Tuesday the Royal Shakespeare Company will be on campus to give their rendition of King Lear." I left time for that news to sink in, and then added: "I'm told that their production is absolutely world class." Then I would thicken the plot by adding that this is not the only cultural event scheduled for next Tuesday. "It turns out, on the same evening, there also will be a performance by a man who, I am told, can fart the 'Star Spangled Banner.'"

This announcement would invariably get the attention from a students sitting in the back row and wearing his baseball cap backwards: "He can really fart 'The Star Spangled Banner'?"

"That's what I'm told," I would earnestly reply.

"Wow, I sure don't want to miss that! And I'm going to bring my fraternity brothers too!"

"I'm quite sure you are," I would say, taking careful note of those students who were in on the joke (they would invariably get A's ten weeks later; and, those yahoos who nodded their agreement would invariably get C's and D's). --Sanford Pinsker --I Know How Much it Costs to Hear the Caged Bird Sing (The Irascible Professor)

A sad anecdote from the celebrity author scene:

Not surprisingly, Ms. Angelou packed the hall, but she made it clear that she was not about to meet with English classes before her reading nor would she attend a reception held in her honor by the Black Students Union after it. As a member of her entourage put it, neither event was stipulated in the contract.

--Star Trek Personality Test

Apparently I'm the middle-aged, toupee-sporting movie-era Kirk, though I'm 36 now, which is about the age of the TV-era Kirk.

Ah, well... I'm still Shatner, and to be Shatner is good! My wife picked up two more Star Trek paperbacks for me at the library booksale... one tells of Spock's first voyage on the Enterprise (under Capt. Pike), and the other tells of the end of the original five-year mission. I'm also reading the book that tells of Kirk's first mission on the Enterprise. I'm not expecting great things from these books, but since the wife and kids are off visiting grandparents in Texas, I've got a lot more time on my hands, even after doing the laundry, weeding the lawn, marking papers, reviewing a book for a publisher, and playing The Longest Journey for about four hours yesterday.

The senior wireless operator was John "Jack" Phillips, age 25, and the junior operator was 21 year old Harold Bride. The radio transmitter was of the "spark" type, and the radio operator used a telegraph key to transmit a "Continental" version of code, which is slightly different from the American "Morse" code. The ship's radio actually required two separate rooms, one for the receiver, and one for the transmitter, to keep the loud buzzing of the transmitter from interfering with the receiver. --Dwight A. Johnson --The Radio Legacy of the R.M.S. Titanic (Avisa)

"Shut up! We are busy...." Phillips telegraphed, after yet another warning about ice in the vicinity.

The Titanic struck an iceberg less than an hour later.

Phillips had been up at 5:30am the previous day, fixing a problem with the radio equipment. During the outage, a pile of outbound messages from passengers had built up... he and an assistant were apparently still catching up on the backlog by the following night. Once the enormity of the accident was clear, Philips stayed at his post, sending distress signals until the last possible minute.

The official inquiry found that the chain of unlikely events that led to the loss of so many lives was not the fault of any one person.

Among the many factors contributing to the loss of life:

• reducing the number of lifeboats in order to gain more deck space
• releasing some nearly-empty lifeboats early
• the desire to make the ship's maiden voyage a race against time
• the captain's decision to steer away from the iceberg, permitting it to scrape all along the vessel's flank, rather than just ram it head-on
• the height of the watertight compartment walls

In the past few years, I have seen Titanic museum displays hosted by pro-salvage and anti-salvage groups. The Titanic wreck was discovered by Robert Ballard, who advocates leaving the wreck as it is. But a company called RMS Titanic Inc was awarded salvage wrights; they have pulled up artifacts such as china and fixtures, and they sell chunks of Titanic coal. (See National Geographic's "Retrieval of Titanic artifacts stirs controversy."

If something needs to be prettier, they just add a few lines of description (or remove some - "beautiful" could challenge your mind to create an entirely different image than "beautiful blonde") instead of spending hours rendering.

In fact, there's so much content, Mihaly says it would just be too difficult to convert his game into a conventional MMOG. "Most good text MUDs would be way too expensive to translate to graphics because the range of features would require ungodly huge heaps of graphics... We'd have to strip out the soul of the game (as well as most of the features) to make it work," he said. While a picture can speak 1,000 words, it seems a few lines of text can conjure thousands of mental pictures. --Joseph Blancato --In Search of Deeper Content (War Cry Network)

Increasing graphics and cooler monsters doesn't always satisfy. Sometimes, less is more...

That's your lot. That's the movie we've been waiting 26 years for. And let me tell you, it was not worth the wait, not for this. The whole film is true to neither the letter nor the spirit of Douglas Adams' books and scripts. And it really seems that many of the changes have been introduced for no reason at all. For example, the novel leads us into the story by saying that the tale 'begins very simply. It begins with a house' whereas in the film Stephen Fry's narration tells us that it 'begins very simply. It begins with a man.' Even though, when Fry says this, we are looking at a house! --Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Review, Long Version (Planet Magrathea)

The quotation is from the conclusion to a depressing review of what might have been a good movie. From the review: "This is a terrible, terrible film and it makes me want to weep."

Sad. It was a great series of books, at any rate.

In all honesty, how many informed analysts in the early 1980s believed that Soviet Communism would evaporate within a decade, or that Reagan's confrontational nuclear policies would really lead to a massive reduction of global tensions? Yet Reagan believed these ridiculous things, and on both points, he was ridiculously right.

Troy's readable book is impressive in its integration of political and social history, while he rightly recognizes that popular culture can provide an effective gauge of the public mood. Thus, he effectively uses the television series Hill Street Blues to illustrate attitudes towards crime and race, and throughout, he uses television, film, and popular music.

Troy is anything but a Reagan cheerleader, and he stresses the still contentious nature of the Reagan record. Apart from the obvious liberal critics, fiercely defensive "Reagan zealots" will challenge Troy's balanced approach. As he dryly remarks, "Studying Ronald Reagan is not for the faint-hearted?or the untenured." To the extent that he is being shot at from both sides, Troy thus emerges as impeccably fair-minded. --Philip Jenkins reviews Morning in America, by Gil Troy. --Who Invented the 1980s? (Christianity Today)

In the service, a penitent Charles will acknowledge and solemnly bewail his "manifold sins and wickedness" and promise to be faithful to Camilla. --Paul Majendie --Charles, Camilla Finally Tie Knot After 35 Years (Yahoo!)

Awkward grammar. While the author obviously meant "promise" as a verb, if you take "promise" as a noun, it seems to be the object of "bewail," suggesting that at a solemn religious service, the Prince of Wales will bewail his promise to be faithful to his new wife.

It's easy to propose edits to Encarta. To start editing, just click the Edit this article link on any article page. After you enter your changes to the article, summarize them in a brief sentence in the Summary of Changes field. Then cite your sources of information in the Sources and Comments field.

After you submit an edited article, it goes through several steps. First, a researcher verifies the accuracy of the suggested changes. Then an editor reviews the article for issues such as readability and organization. Finally, the proofreading staff makes sure the article adheres to Encarta style.

Due to the high volume of feedback we receive, it may take several weeks for your suggested changes to go through this process. Lengthy submissions may take even longer. Unfortunately, at this time we are unable to notify you when your suggestions are accepted.