May 2005 Archive Page

Often, when studying history, the details are lost in an attempt to fully understand the bigger picture. We do not look at what the individuals faced, the decisions they had to make. This project will not only examine the Holocaust as a whole event, but delve deeper into the history to see what choices people had to make as the Nazis stormed their homes, took them to ghettos, and forced them to dig their own graves.

It will be important to approach this subject with caution and seriousness. It was a horrible experience that we can never recreate or even relate to. As you create your story, pay close attention to the details. Read the stories of those who lived and were able to share with world what they experienced. This project will hopefully draw you into the time period and help you understand it more thoroughly. --[Holocaust Choose-Your-Own Adventure Assignment] (Stories of the Holocaust Wiki Project )

Part of a project that asked students to create a branching narrative (of the Choose Your Own Adventure model) describing the fate of a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

On the one hand, this is an excellent way to get students to imagine all the possibilities, rather than simply following the story of one particular family. I particularly like the concept of an Intersection Point, where it seems events take on a more communal focus.

On the other hand, it would take a strong teacher (and supportive administration) to manage something like this.

Seton Hill has a National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, and I'm currently involved in doing some editing and design work for them. I don't have any particular knowledge of the subject matter, but I can tell that emotions run high on topics such as simulations (in which students act out the roles of prisoners or guards) and the over-emphasis on rescues (when in fact few people were willing to risk themselves for their Jewish fellow citizens).

Via Weblogg-ed.

MANY train journeys on Britain’s busiest routes are much slower than they were under British Rail and some even take longer than in the age of steam. The high-speed inter-city routes are slower now than in the 1980s, according to an analysis of train timetables. --Ben Webster --In the age of steam, express trains averaged over 80mph... today they're lucky if they beat 60 (TimesOnline)

The traditional, dominant method for getting academic work, research and ideas reviewed and accepted by peers is for work to be published via a recognised source. Publication in a acknowledged journal demonstrates the work meets a required standard for acceptance into the academic community.

When an academic is working on an idea at a very low level they may call upon colleagues within their department to revise and pass comments. However, this process is less well suited for work that is at the ?working or draft stage?; i.e., not quite ready for submission for publication, but well past the beginning stages of development. It would be ideal if a wider body of reviewers could assess the work. --David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller --Weblogs: a contributory element to the research dissemination process (ePortfolio Research and Development Community)

If you like, you can see Google's HTML translation. [Update, 31 May: Karissa tells me that the URL is broken. Oh, well.]

It's kind of nice to see, in the opening paragraph, references to blogging at Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, the University of British Columbia... and our own Seton Hill University. We weren't worth mentioning by name in the body of the article, apparently, but there we are, in footnote 5.

Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students taking A.P. or International Baccalaureate classes in math more than doubled, from 4.4 per cent of graduating seniors to 9.5 per cent. My own high school, North Hollywood High, in Los Angeles, had three or four A.P. classes when I graduated, in 1979 (a time when we were told that our most illustrious alumnus was Bert Convy, the game-show host; Susan Sontag had gone there, too, but nobody mentioned her). Now it has twenty-two.

Some schools, responding to the critique that competition has got too bruising, have decided that naming a single valedictorian is part of the reason that today'sstudents have become so anxious. (Many small private schools came to this conclusion long ago, and never adopted the valedictorian tradition.) --Margaret Talbog --Best in Class (New Yorker)

The educator's anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university "in the South," spun tales of spoiled-rich "Ashleys" with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

"At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications," the professor wrote, describing her charges as "barely literate," prone to emotional problems and "terrified of displeasing Mommy and Daddy." --Thomas Korosec --SMU lecturer takes heat for telling blog (Houston Chronicle)

Liner, the author of "Phantom Professor" weblog, is actively shopping her story around.

"I heard the two words every writer waits a lifetime to hear," she said. "Movie deal."

Ah! Leave it to Hollywood to rescue us from all that pesky soul-searching about boundaries and ethics.

There was one kid who always sat in the front row--let's call him Fester--who recognized me right from the start of class because he'd read one of my short stories in a horror anthology. He was a horror fan. His story was also written from a passion, but I could tell that he truly set out to frighten me, and therefore impress me. And he did this by writing a story about me. --Mike Arnzen --Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom  (Broad Universe)

I love the name... "Fester". His last name is probably Boyle. Arnzen is inviting comments on Pedablogue.

As part of a web design unit, I once gave the class an assignment to create a web page that was so terrible it would make me weep. One student posted a photo of one of my children, with a link that connected to a porn site. I should have probably specified that I was looking for horrid design, rather than horrid content.

In another class, a female student submitted a two-page dramatic analysis making a fairly predictable and juvenile pun on the word "climax." She supplied ample erotic language to illustrate her point, but she mistook the ending of the play for the climax. Some students in the class were stunned when I suggested that her metaphor would be stronger if she recognized that most playwrights give the audience and the characters the chance to fall asleep holding each other after the climax, and that a relationship that ends with the climax is probably an economic transaction. I skewered her -- not for pushing the boundaries, but for the omissions that weakened her claims. (While literature is full of material that is both clever and shocking, in a college English class, you can only get so far simply by making a clever, shocking observation.)

While I don't teach creative writing classes, I do occasionally slip a short fiction assignment here or there. I might give this fall's American Lit classes the option to write a literary parody instead of a traditional close reading, for example. A few years ago, a student who was supposed to give an oral presentation on Huckleberry Finn instead read a made-up chapter that had Huck being seduced by Tom's Aunt Polly. I let him read for a little while, then politely asked him if he was going to do any critical analysis. He said no. I told him that he could sit down, and he did without a fuss. I didn't bother to ask him whether he had written that passage or just found it on the internet, and recorded an F for his presentation. I'd have let him redo the presentation if he'd have asked, but he dropped the course soon after.

A student recently submitted a whodunit in which the prime suspect was an English professor, who is the shell of a great man at the beginning of the story. As part of a workshop in which I demonstrated the value of conflict in fiction, I rewrote a few lines of dialogue and suggested a backstory that would have permitted us to watch the professor breaking down, rather than only showing us the end result. I think students who are just discovering their identities as adults and scholars, and who are used to the clear boundaries that were in place between them and their high school teachers, may feel that seeing their teachers as less than perfect can be liberating and humanizing. This pushing of the boundaries is a part of adolescence, and when students have room to do it thoughtfully and reflectively, it can be a great developmental technique.

From time to time I do appear as a character in a different kind of student writing -- academic blogs. Or, almost as often, the personal blogs in which my students pour out the emotions they don't want to put into their academic blogs. Typically the references are neutral, sometimes they are affectionately mocking. While students do from time to time complain about the workload I assign, only one student has posted an all-out rant.

While I do post links to student blog entries, it's a different matter completely for me to post anecdotes about things that happened offline. I would never post a student's grade, or post a bulleted list of all the things a student did wrong. It's part of my profession to know where those boundaries are, and I've had plenty of mentoring and practice to learn about them.

Check out the rather startling difference between the Atari 2600 title Jet Goblins Attack from 1980 and The Legend of Zelda just seven years later:

The yellow block in the first screen is Batman.

Now compare Goldeneye (1997) to Red Faction 2 (2004). Same seven-year span:

We're on a technological plateau. The next real leap, the next real difference in how we play games via sensory suits or neural inputs or whatever, is still too far away and too expensive. We once thought it would be VR headsets, but that technology turned out to be a headache-inducing fad, people's desire for tech novelty outweighed by their fear of being caught in an enormous electrical dorkhat.

Compare Madden NFL 2001 to Madden 2004. You have to squint to tell the difference. Do you think innovations for Madden 2007 will be startling by comparison? I'll never forget the IGN Madden 2002 screenshot with a caption pointing out that it would be the first Madden to depict players' arm hair.

Gaming simply can't survive that way. There's a reason why you can still see a motion picture a century after they hit the scene, but Vaudeville shows are extinct. There's a reason why people still go to operas while live gladiator contests and public witch burnings are both rare and poorly-attended. In the entertainment world there are wives and then there are mistresses, long-term relationships and drunken one-night stands.

Our culture is married to the cinema. Gaming is a series of flings with continually younger, prettier partners. --David Wong
--Life after the Video Game Crash (PointlessWasteOfTime.com)

I combined the four screenshots into a single image, to make it easier to reproduce here.

While it's true that there's little difference between the two later screenshots, advances in graphics also involves advances in 3D space rendering, so that what was just a static bitmap in 1997 might be a fully rendered object in 2004, which opens up more gameplay possibilities.

But better graphics don't necessarily make better games, as the author notes: " I'll never forget the IGN Madden 2002 screenshot with a caption pointing out that it would be the first Madden to depict players' arm hair."

If the new consoles are built with a graphics-first mentality, how easy is it going to be to make games that stretch the boundaries of game logic and player freedom? And if so, can we at least have our damned adventure games back?

But there's another, less-obvious side of that muffin: if a machine is so "advanced" it can draw a photo-realistic city in the background of every level, that only means that developers now must to hire somebody to render that photorealistic city instead of pasting on a bit of flat, blurred wallpaper. That means game development costs are skyrocketing and that leads to the big-budget Hollywood blockbuster syndrome. Bigger investments means developers must "play it safe" for fear of losing their ass. And that means fewer and fewer oddball "niche" games like those mentioned above and more quickie knock-offs based on movies. --David Wong and Haimoimoi --A Gamer's Manifesto (PointlessWasteOfTime.com)

Some spicy language, but it's refreshing to read this kid of stuff from someone who isn't a stuffy narratologist academic like me. Via Slashdot.

As these groups lose their remaining original members, others are on stages around the country are using their names, Porter said. Some groups claim an association with the originals, while others say they own the rights to use their titles.

"Imposters bask in reflected glory. None contributed to the respected legacies that they claim to represent and the billing should reflect accordingly," she said, adding that it is a matter of what is advertised versus "what am I getting? The public doesn't know that and they capitalize on it."

Groups that perform without saying "tribute," according to Sonny Turner, an original member of The Platters, are "unequivocally misleading ... (It's) like buying a knock-off Rolex watch." --Amanda Cochran --'Truth in Music' stalls in committee (Tribune-Review)

A high school friend of mine is the drummer for an 80s and 90s cover band called Gonzo's Nose. I've never heard them play, but I do read their website from time to time. It pokes fun at the fact they have been "playing other people's music since 1996".

As I understand it, the music industry lets other performers pay a standard fee if they want to "cover" somebody else's work. I seem to remember a Gonzo's Nose anecodote about band members encountering groupies who don't know what a "cover band" is.
While those fellows are based in the Washington, D.C. area, I wonder how the proposed Pennsylvania legislation would have affected them, if at all.

--Y! MIndset

An interesting Yahoo! search engine that places "Shopping" and "Research" on opposite ends of a sliding scale, which you can adjust in order to change the weightings of of search results.

Researchers and educators blame the gap between books and boys on everything from a built-in fidgetiness to low expectations to a lifelong association of reading with their mothers, teachers, librarians -- all female role models.

But now more are suggesting that the problem may not lie entirely within the boys themselves. Some educators believe that the way schools teach reading tends to favor girls, both in terms of teaching style and reading materials chosen. It's a concern that has pushed teachers to work harder to both find materials that boys like to read, and to find more "boy-friendly" ways to present that material.

"Boys have a more tactile, 'hands-on' learning style," and they favor subject matter which reflects that, says Linda Milliken, reading specialist at Chester County Intermediate Unit near Philadelphia. "They like lots of nature topics -- bugs, dinosaurs, how things work," she explains. "They like to identify with a character who has his life in control."

What they may not like is the problem-focused reading popular with many teachers today -- stories about divorce, abuse, single-parenthood, addiction, and such.

Girl readers are generally drawn to narratives that focus on relationships between people, while boys tend to prefer adventure, science fiction, war stories, history, and, of course, sports. --Mary Beth McCauley --How to Get Boys to Sit Down with a Book (ABC News)

My son (age seven) recently selected a series of books on the elements (Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen... we even tracked down Magnesium) for me to read to him at bedtime. We're working our way through another series of books on Energy of the Future (we finished Biofuel of the Future the other day, and we're on Solar Power of the Future now.

The men in my American Lit course generally liked The Great Gatsby and James McBride's Miracle at St. Anna, though one student who has called herself a literary snob spoke out against both works. But some of the female students who didn't get into the heavier literary works also liked McBride, so clearly gender is only one factor in a complex equation.

As for gender differences in literary styles, see this great spoof of a tandem writing assignment, an e-mail that has been passed around for years.

"People buy games for gameplay, not to hear voices," counters Finlayson. "And technology creates gameplay, not actors. People who play these games understand that, and in fact, some gamers turn the volume down because (they) find those voices distracting. In film or television, the actor's performance makes the experience. In video games, it does not." --Xeni Jardin --Strike Looms Against Game Makers (Wired)

Finlayson's job is to talk tough in order to scare the unions during the negotiations, but the truth of his statements really depends on the kind of game.

Someone tell me that a game version of Elmo's World doesn't need Kevin Clash's voice. Okay, transmediated games are one thing, but that's not really what Finlayson is talking about here.

I just finished playing The Longest Journey the other day. It probably took me about 60 hours, stretched out over many weeks. When my wife took the kids to visit her parents last month, I got to put in some long hours on the game, but when they came back, it was time for the end-of-term crunch, and until I submitted grades last week, I had little time for gaming.

I'm not when I'll ever have the time to write up a full review of The Longest Journey, but I was consistently impressed by the talent of Sarah Hamilton, who voiced the herione, April Ryan.

Obviously, in an adventure game driven by plot and character, the voice talent is extremely important. Broadway shows were once mainstream entertainment for the masses, but are now mostly the realm of the elite, due to high ticket prices (which reflect not only actor salaries but also the special effects and lavish production values that movie-bred audiences expect)

[Update: I just remembered that a writers' strike in the early 90s helped ushered in the era of reality TV -- COPS and America's Funniest Home Videos were both products of the networks' need to fill air time without using scripts.]

How will an actor's strike against the gaming industry affect the development of the plot-heavy, character-driven games that have the potential to raise digital narrative out of the pop-cult ghetto?

At any rate, I'm looking forward to Dreamfall -- The Longest Journey, though I still have Deus Ex 2 and Half-life 2 on my playlist. (Sadly, Deus Ex 2 will only play on my office computer, and I never have time to play it when I'm at work... and while the demos of Half-Life 2 do run on my home computer, I'm going to wait until the price comes down a bit before I splurge for that one.)

Microsoft shouldn't be hard to understand
taking a cold, risky plunge for a taste of abalone
many of the thousands of demonstrators in the city square cried - it was their first public forum in years
behind failed Abu Ghraib plea
internet attack is called broad and long-lasting
a high-ranking Uzbek official said on condition he not be named
men and women took the podium and shared their anger about
a party last weekend in Virginia Beach
a hyper-realistic visual impact rarely encountered in the medium of watercolor
neutralizes
don't confuse a respirator with a working brain
a late HIV diagnosis
lies in its ability to concretize the most fundamental human emotions
an Italian man who didn't tell his bride he was impotent
is back on the radar screens of intelligence agencies --Microsoft shouldn't be hard to understand (Newspoetry)

A poem, auto-generated from news sources.

If you find one you like, post it on your own blog, or here in the comments.

Via Scott Rettberg.

Something important is happening in the world of journalism:. It's an evolution from the lecture model, to which we in mass media have become accustomed in the past century, to something closer to a conversation. The shift stems from the collision of technology with media.

This evolution is having an effect on all three major constituencies of journalism. The most important of those is what I call the former audience -- the people who until recently were our readers, listeners and viewers, who until recently were either buying our lectures or not. --Dan Gillmor --What Professional and Citizen Journalists Can Learn From Each Other (Bayosphere)

Rogers' Predator is one of more than 1,200 UAVs in the US military arsenal; three years ago, there were fewer than 100 in the field. Today drones as small as a crow and as big as a Cessna are searching for roadside bombs, seeking out insurgents, and watching the backs of US troops. They're cheap, they can stay in the air longer than any manned aircraft, and they can see a battlefield better - all without risking a pilot.

Those capabilities tell only part of the story. UAVs give rank-and-file soldiers powers once reserved for generals. They push generals into the thick of battle. And they're blurring the lines between the fighter jocks and the grunts on the ground. Firmly entrenched hierachies don't change easily, but drones are reshaping military culture. --Noah Shachtman --Attack of the Drones (Wired)

Just as e-mail and blogging puts into the hands of the people power that was once reserved for executives and publishers, the military technology that gives field operatives access to current information and real-time interaction possibilities means that those field operatives will be held back if they wait for authorization from top-level officials. The increased number of micro-judgements multiplies the opportunities for making a mistake. (Of course, it also multiplies the opportunities for making correct judgements -- choosing not to attack a potential target because a drone helps determine the target isn't a threat.)

The whole thing, from legal decision to command to execution, took five minutes. Tacticians call that time line - target acquisition, deployment of force, order to attack, destruction of target - the "sensor-to-shooter cycle" or "kill chain." It's a measure of any military's reflexes; in Gulf War I, the kill chain was often three days.

It can still take days for satellite pictures to be captured, scoured by imagery analysts, forwarded through the military hierarchy, and passed on to someone with a gun. But that's changing. With an armed UAV, the sensor is the shooter. The kill chain is only one link long.

Random things that I will not miss about high school:

- listening to my classmates whine
- my business law teacher parroting back everything I say in the form of a question
- never getting any input on anything I turn in
- disgusting bathrooms
- listening to my male teachers flaunt their "big, tough guy" persona
- not having enough writing or literature classes
- hearing my teachers talk more about their social life than the subject they teach
- wasting six hours and accomplishing nothing
- tedium
- watching my peers create loud, violent disturbances in class after class, and having teacher after teacher stand back and say helplessly "I don't know what to do with them."
- getting up at 6:21a.m.
- never getting any advice on my assignments and therefore, never becoming a better writer
- watching the teachers try even harder than students to invent excuses for us to not do any work
- counting the seconds and the minutes and the hours until I could go home and have my time truly be mine again

I am ready for college. I am ready to learn how to think and feel for myself again. --Kayla Sawyer --I am dead inside, and I have the educational system to thank (Shameless Digressions)

Kayla wrote this the evening that she finished her last day of classes as a high school student. She's on her way to Seton Hill University in the fall.

She contacted me the other day, saying that she heard SHU journalism majors used blogs, and she wanted to get sarted.

If you have a moment, I hope you'll visit her blog and let her know what you think about her writing. I know I'm looking forward to having her in class.

Are you so alienated from nature that you can't tell when a piece of fruit is ripe? Don't worry, there'sa new line of packaging that changes color when the fruit has reached palatability.

Are you too tired to measure out coffee and then too impatient to wait eight minutes while your automatic drip machine brews a fresh pot? Don't worry, there'sa new coffee container that allows you to heat a cup of premade joe at the touch of a button.

We?re supposed to be so impressed by the ingenuity of these gadgets that we?ll ignore our utter lack of need for such technology. But shouldn't new inventions help mankind achieve great things, not enable our worst neuroses? --Gersh Kuntzman --Stop Them Before They Invent Again! (MSNBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Andy.

Whether there is a subscription requirement or a Site Pass, there is still a wall around Salon's content -- and that means the blogosphere ignores it. Without this persistent cross-linking, relatively few read its words, and as history is being made -- or Googled -- every day, Salon's footsteps in cyberspace become fainter and fainter. --Adam L. Pennenberg --Salon's Balancing Act (Wired)

--Top 100 Speeches (American Rhetoric)

Full-text of all, and audio versions of most. Part of a good collection of rhetoric links on Metafilter.

Murdered blogger's last entry helps find killer (Suspect admits to the deed) Here's his last entry. --Murdered Blogger's Last Entry Helps Find Killer (Metafilter)

The comments left on Metafilter add much more to the story than those left on the victim's site.

An English teacher's heart will go pitter-pat whenever he or she sees close engagement with the language of the text.

That means reading every word: it's not enough to have a vague sense of the plot. Maybe that sounds obvious, but few people pay serious attention to the words that make up every work of literature. Remember, English papers aren't about the real world; they're about representations of the world in language. Words are all we have to work with, and you have to pay attention to them.

The problem's most acute in poetry. Here, for instance, is the opening of Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard":

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

The surface-level meaning is something like this: "At evening, when the curfew bell rings, the cows and the plowman go home and leave me in the dark." Many students read passages like this, "decode" them into something they can understand, and then ask, "Why didn't he just say that?"

That's usually a dismissive rhetorical question, with the implication, "Why is that nasty old author making my life difficult when he could have said it simply?" But in fact "Why didn't he just say that?" can be a great question, and you should learn to take it seriously. Why did he say it in the denser way? Answer that, and you're on your way to a good thesis. (Hint: with good writers, the answer is almost never "Because he had to rhyme" or "Because he couldn't do it any better.")--Jack Lynch --Close Reading (Getting an A on an English Paper)

It's really little wonder that college students want to talk about "the real world," since their high school English teachers often rewarded them for being able to apply a literary work to their own life. Thus, when reading a poem that invokes fear, students were encouraged to talk about times that they felt afraid. This is fine if it's presented as a way to get into the text, or if it is part of an informal response journal. But students who can't get beyond their vague impressions (perhaps because they didn't actually do the readings) can distract and stifle a classroom discussion.

Few things give me "that sinking feeling" more sharply than when, during a rickety class discussion, where a few students who haven't done the readings are still trying to fake me out by asking clarifying questions, and the students who have done the reading aren't ready to take a stand, someone makes a reference to a movie or TV show they just watched, and then hands suddenly shoot up all over the room, and I ask, "Can we relate Desperate Houswives to Arthur Miller?" and the hands go back down.

Between 4 and 4:45 p.m., the father gives you a great interview. His descriptions of his son are colorful, specific, and heartfelt. His overarching theme is the pride he feels for his son, and his stories all express this theme.

In particular the father relates: A) How his son was searching for a purpose in life and found it in the Army; B) How Army service instilled in his son the idea of importance of duty to nation; C) How when he had enlisted he, the father, had expressed some doubt but the son had cut him off: "Dad, it's what I want to do;" D) How his son was proud to be helping the Iraqi people establish democracy; E) How only a week ago his son had called him from Baghdad to say he had been assigned to a new mission to train Iraqi citizens to be soldiers, and how motivated he was by the mission; and F) that he and his son had had a heart-to-heart talk on the telephone and how the son had assured him that "he had no regrets" about signing up for Army service.

At 4:45 p.m., you, the reporter, are thinking to yourself: "Wow, I've got a great story here. Great color. Great quotes. A solid through-line. It's time to wrap it up and get back to write it on a tight deadline."

However, at that very moment, the son's mother makes her first appearance in the living room. She looks terrible, as though she hasn't slept for weeks. Her face is tear-stained, she's nervous and distracted. For the last few minutes of the interview, she keeps her eyes fixed on the floor as her husband speaks, but you notice she grimaces and shakes her head slightly when he speaks.

At this point I ask the students: "As a reporter, what do you do?" --Doug McGill --Covering the Iraq War: A Homefront Hypothetical (Local Man)

As adviser to The Setonian, I'm helping to develop a core of student-reporters who have the basics down, but who aren't always aware when they have the choice to take an angle that moves a story beyond the routine. There are only so many stories on parking, cafeteria food, and crowded dorms that we can cover, yet the mission of the student paper requires those student issues to be given attention. While our deadlines are never as rigid as the one described in the story, our student-reporters do sometimes feel the pressure to get the article done in order to get it over with. We don't yet have a culture in which a student will drop a less-important story in order to pursue breaking news that suddenly becomes more important.

I notice that elsewhere on his site, McGill questions Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View," and the teaching scenario described above is clearly intended to discourage covering local soldier deaths as patriotic events, and to encourage the examination of anti-war sentiment.

I can understand the value of reminding journalists to seek out alternative points of view, but in addition to this soldier scenario, I can imagine a similar story about an eco-activist who chained herself to a tree and was killed in the line of duty; key family members gushing their support of her actions, while one marginalized member suggests the family isn't united.

I tried to get this idea across in a final exam question featuring a conflict between cat owners and dog owners. Some students spent their time correcting the punctuation and grammar of a mock story, while others correctly pointed out that the bias in the story was a far bigger issue. That mock story was, based on a story that actually appeared in the Cavalier Daily, one of two competing student papers at the University of Virginia when I was an undergrad there. The Cavalier Daily reported that there were two protests, one pro-choice and one pro-life, at opposite sides of the downtown mall on the same day. If I recall correctly, the student's article contained three direct quotations and one paraphrase from pro-choice demonstrators, and represented the "anti-abortion" protestors by describing the signs they waved and the slogans they chanted. Yet the lead said that there were equal numbers of protestors at both events. Can you guess where the reporter's sympathies lie?

I'm planning to add a unit on editorial writing, so that students will have one outlet for expressing their political opinions, if they wish.

I usually tell my freshman comp students to stay away from emotional topics such as abortion or gay marriage, because students who choose such topics invariably end up quoting slogans rather than making academic arguments. In the context of an editorial, however, I can be more flexible.

I'm toying with the idea of putting students with wildly divergent political opinions on teams in which they have to co-author an editorial. People on opposite sides of the abortion issue might both agree to praise a particular government program or local charity, or they might both agree to criticize violence against clinics or the restriction of free speech in areas near clinics.

In looking back at those final "Practice of Journalism" exams, I'm surprised at the number of students who, when asked to define "objectivity," thought of something like "goal orientedness," obviously thinking of "objective" as "a goal to achieve," because they encounter "objectives" in the materials they use in starting their University Portfolio.

Working on ''Drama as Literature'' Syllabus (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm working on my goals statement for a 200-level “Major Writers and Genres” course. I'm still working it out -- the final version will be less chatty and more infused with academicspeak.

The primary research method I teach in a survey course is close reading – the extended examination of the particular words, style, and form of a particular literary work, gained by the sustained reading of a script. A secondary methodology is historical context – the identification and explication of contemporary cultural influences (including theatrical conventions of the period).

Students are asked to move quickly beyond plot summary and personal responses (which served them well in high school), and are asked to demonstrate critical thinking skills by participating in lively classroom discussions, by writing short expository and analytical exercises, and by writing two longer papers that support a non-obvious claim about the texts under scrutiny.

Literary research in English involves both primary sources (that is, literary works) and secondary sources (theoretical, biographical, and comparative explication, analysis, and evaluation). This method is introduced in a spring-semester EL150, “Intro to Literary Study,” and reiterated in a junior-level “Critical Theory” course. In a first-semester EL 250 course, which is typically packed with incoming freshmen, there will not be enough time for me to introduce the concept of academic scholarship, and the specific way it is practiced in English, to students who are at the same time taking the first semester of freshman composition.

Part of the historical research is a formal examination of theatrical conventions (sets and costumes, acting styles, audience expectations, critical response, etc.) that contributed to the reception of the work’s initial performance, and which continue to affect the reception of later performances. For instance, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was historically played as a comic villain, but modern productions use the same dialogue, but present him as a tragic figure. The historical method includes occasional reference to live or videotaped performances of the works, as well as published reviews, and such sources as memoirs of actors, directors, or other theatre professionals. But this course does not aim to examine a definitive, optimized, particular performance (something they are used to in the form of “Director’s Cut DVDs).

Students are often drawn to parallels between the author's biography and events in the story, a kind of mythic parallelism that drives the movie Shakespeare in Love, which shows the Bard incapable of any creativity that does not involve writing down (without any apparent revision) a thinly veiled version of what just happened to him last night. (I get lots of that when I ask students to write narrative essays.)

Where a dramatic work makes an ambiguous statement (such as in the matter of Hamlet’s madness), I aim to get students to identify ambiguity inherent in the text, and to rely upon textual evidence from elsewhere in the literary work to argue for a particular point. For example, when reading Ibsen’s A Doll House, students typically respond so negatively to Torvald’s patronizing and infantilizing of his wife Nora, that they prefer to see Torvald as a moustache-twirling oppressor, completely ignoring the textual evidence that argues he is a good provider and a good man, that she manipulates him into treating her like a child, and that both are equally victims of their prescribed gender roles.

Thus, a little-known 1913 play about anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernardhi, must be understood in the original context in pre-war Europe, but may also be re-read in 2005 in the context of American anti-Islamic tensions and anti-Christian and anti-American tensions in the Islamic world. The fourteenth-century “Everyman,” which uses the central merchant-class metaphor of an accounting book to teach a lesson about the inevitability of sin and death, must be understood in a certain historical context as a piece of didactic entertainment for a largely illiterate, wholly Catholic society. Yet the presence in the play of a brief aside, containing a stern warning directed at corrupt priests, resonates even more strongly today in light of the recent sexual scandals faced by the Church.

Hmm... thunder is booming outside my window, so I'm gonna cut this short and head home.

There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television's adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all. I'm a novelist, so I'm hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is also about narrative and morality; if it takes a television show to get some of that over to an audience - and possibly to send them to the original source - then there are small grounds for moaning. --Andrew O'Hagan --The Plot Flickers (Arts.Telegraph)

Maybe when Joe and Mary Sixpack compare the real world they live in with the consistently troubled, violent, sensationalized world the news media present to them day after day, they notice the obvious discrepancies.

A perfect example is crime coverage. If you relied only on newspaper front pages and TV news -- as so many older suburbanites unfortunately do -- you'd be afraid to go out of the house. --Bill Steigerwald --Real vs. media world (Tribune-Review)

HUNDREDS of BBC journalists and production staff in Manchester are to go out on strike today in protest at planned job cuts. --Nicola Dowling --BBC staff go on strike (Manchester Online)

To assure its continued success, Gemini has further increased it's [sic] exposure to retailers and consumers alike with innovative marketing and a successful brand[-]building strategy. The For Dummies brand was recently added to Gemini's stable of product lines. With it's [sic] recognizable brand name, For Dummies compliments [sic] the current Gemini brand profile that includes such strong brand names as Philips, Magnavox, Philips Magnavox, Zenith, and Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone. The company's multi-tiered brand strategy is an affirmation of Gemini's commitment to maintain it's [sic] leadership position. --Gemini: Marketers of Brand Name Accessories -- About Us (www.gemini-usa.com)

Here's the e-mail I just sent to technical support:

I am unable to install the Gemini Recoil PC gamepad (GGE908) on my Dell Inspiron 700m.

When I first plug it in, I get "USB Device Not Recognized". When I follow the Windows dialog boxes, Windows can't find any drivers on the CD included with your product.

When I run the "setup.exe" program on the CD, it runs through a wizard and adds a folder to my Start menu, but the only thing in that folder is "uninstall".

I checked http://www.gemini-usa.com/gemini/support.asp and found a driver to download, but the zipped file on that site is password protected.

I've gone through the Windows troubleshooting guides several times, with no help.

I have restarted my computer and rerun "setup.exe" several times.

A few seconds after I pushed "send," the following appeared in my inbox:

: 216.182.17.254 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 5.7.1 Unable to relay for techsupport@gemini-usa.com
Giving up on 216.182.17.254.

Time to get the receipt and send that sad puppy back to Wal*Mart.

Dear Card Reader (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Dear Card Reader,

Where are you?

I've been looking everywhere for you. You pick the most inopportune time to disappear, because I have a 1GB SD card to futz around with for the summer.

You weren't under the cushion of the comfy chair, though I did find 13 pens, one marker, one pencil, one lollipop, one bottlecap, and a small ear of corn.
(I inherited that chair from a former colleague who was retiring after some 30 years of teaching, so the chair actually accumulated less than one writing implement a year, which is reasonable. I can't explain the ear of corn.)

But still no card reader.

The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek.... What they [Muslims] need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom." --Jeff Jacoby --Why Islam is disrespected (Boston.com)

Another take on the alleged Koran abuse story -- this one sympathetic to Newsweek without fingering the U.S. military.

The challenge is to create students who are lifelong learners rather than successful test takers. One of the phrases that Alan consistently uses in his presentations is "fearless learners," that we have to give our students the tools and the skills to find relevant information and use it well on their own. That we need to teach them to literally revel in the learning process and the collaborative, social construction of knowledge that it creates. That the teacher to student vertical model doesn't cut it any longer. I sincerely believe that is what the Read/Write Web can do, that it can provide the means for our students to create their own learning opportunities, that it can teach them how to negotiate meaning, how to find truth, and how to become a lifelong learner. I believe this because it's my own experience, and because I see more and more of it every day in this community of learners.

But here is the struggle, of course. Schools are not fearless. --Will Richardson --Fearless Learners, Fearful Schools (Weblogg-ed)

If blogging is both the construction of a personal knowledge artefact and an ecological practice, which reveals emergent knowledges as a series of dynamically linked spaces, this immediately focuses any pedagogy of blogging on questions of connectivity and the evolution of ideas over time.

I am therefore becoming increasingly convinced that blogs used across classes over the duration of a degree course, rather than blogs focused on specific assignment tasks or blogs developed for single semester units are a more congruent use of this technology.

If students were encouraged to establish a blog at the beginning of their course and continued to use it to post research notes, stories and reflections throughout their degree studies, this would become a unique and powerful teaching and learning tool. The blog would evolve together with (and record) the student's learning and practice experience. --Marcus O'Donnell --Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology (Blogtalk Downunder)

I agree. The panel I proposed for next year's 4Cs was sparked by the realization that more and more students are coming into our classes with experience as social bloggers (or with a knowledge of other social networking programs, like friendster, P2P file sharing, and IM culture in general), and on the role of their academic blogging as it is situated in the larger context of the blogosphere. Only the very young or the very cutting-edge people in the composition field have the proper experience to assess this dynamic.

O'Donnell's article also references Patricia Remmell's KairosNews posting, "Falling out of love with blogging," which sparked an excellent discussion of a topic rarely discussed in the blogosphere (for perhaps obvious reasons).

Via Kairosnews.

The retraction set off a firestorm in the blogosphere and on talk radio. The Bush Administration piled on too. White House press secretary Scott McClellan urged the magazine to help undo the damage to the U.S.'s image by pointing out ways in which "our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care." Newsweek wasn't the only media outlet feeling the heat. By inevitable extension, journalism in general was back under a shadow, its reputation already scuffed by a series of incidents, including the Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times, the fall of Jack Kelley at USA Today, the dubious National Guard memos at CBS, Newsweek's use of a doctored photo of Martha Stewart on its cover, and CNN and TIME's 1998 retraction of the "Tailwind" story that claimed the U.S. had used nerve gas during a 1970 commando mission in Laos. --Richard Lacayo --When a Story Goes Terribly Wrong (Time)

This article follows up on Newsweek's retraction of a story alleging that a U.S. military official confirmed reports that guards flushed a prisoner's copy of the Koran down a toilet.

My Scrabble© Score is: 46. What is your score? Get it here.

--Pholph's Scrabble Generator (Solfire.com)

Cool fun, via MGK.

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005. --60 Second Story (Contagious Media)

Chess provided one of the safety valves that kept the lid on the cold war. But how did chess come to play this role: both symbol of the war and its antithesis? And how does chess illuminate the process by which the west triumphed over communism? --Daniel Johnson --Cold War Chess (Prospect)

Check it out, mate.

In popular conception, mathematics is the ultimate resolvable discipline, immune to the epistemological murkiness that so bedevils other fields of knowledge in this relativistic age. Yet Philip Davis, emeritus professor of mathematics at Brown University, has pointed out recently that mathematics also is "a multi-semiotic enterprise" prone to ambiguity and definitional drift.

Earlier this year, Davis gave a lecture to the mathematics department at USC titled "How Do We Know When a Problem Is Solved?" Often, he told the audience, we cannot tell, for "the formulation and solution of problems change throughout history, throughout our own lifetimes, and even through our rereadings of texts."

Part of the difficulty resides in the notion of what we mean by a solution, or as Davis put it: "What kind of answer will you accept?" -- Margaret Wertheim --Definitional Drift: Math Goes Postmodern (LA Times)

Interesting... the author saved "Dare we say it: Math is becoming postmodern" for the very end of her essay, but the headline writer gave it all away up front. Because I went into this article expecting to read about mathematics as a postmodern phenomenon, I was disappointed to find that claim only hinted at, not fully supported.

This isn't a criticism of the essay, but rather an observation of the different rhetorics of newspaper headlines (which are designed to grab the reader) and the classical essay (which is designed to build slowly to a conclusion that rewards the committed reader).

It has been more than 40 years since Marshall McLuhan wrote that the “medium is the message,” a lesson that Duke University has had to relearn the hard way concerning its iPod giveaway this academic year to some 1,650 first-year students. Almost immediately, the “iPod First-Year Experience” was dubbed a trendy gimmick, and the university went on the defensive, emphasizing that the Apple music player was the device of choice for a variety of educational tasks meant to keep pace with a mobile generation of learners. --Michael Bugeja --The Medium is the Moral (Inside Higher Ed)

Extracurricular Blogging Roundup (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Grades are in, and the semester is winding down. Things are fairly quiet on blogs.setonhill.edu, but that doesn't mean the site is dead.

Our admissions director, Mary Kay Cooper, continues to maintain her Training for the Ride of a Lifetime fitness blog, and she has also recently started the Seton Hill University Admissions blog.

The Setonian's news editor and online editor, Amanda Cochran, has posted her personal thoughts about her first day in a newswriting internship at the local paper.

Mike Rubino is one of SHU's most prolific bloggers, even though he has never taken a class with me. He frequently posts about the comedy improv troupe of which he's a member, The Cellar Dwellars. He just posted a tremendous account of what happened when the Cellar Dwellars were recognized by people in the crowd as they waited for the midnight showing of Star Wars.

Karissa Kilgore has recently posted about the astronomy, math, and philosophy courses she's taking this summer, as well as her struggles to get caffeine.

Mike Sichok waxes nostalgic over Nine Inch Nails, the 24th in a long-standing series of music reviews he has posted to his blog.

Oh, and if you'd like to see a photo of the top-level administrators of Seton Hill University waving flyswatters to the tune of "The Blue Danube Waltz," take a look at the photos I posted from the Seton Hill Unviersity faculty and staff end-of-year party.

--Ergebnisse 1 - 10 von ungefähr 36.900 für dennis i would like to talk to you for a minute - offline (Google Deutschland)

My server logs report that somebody came to my website after searching Google Deutschland for the terms "dennis i would like to talk to you for a minute - offline".

Why anyone would search the internet for that phrase is a mystery to me.

"We need a cultural shift so that young girls and women feel that playing games is not a testosterone monopolised hobby reserved for their boyfriends and husbands," urged Mr Lowenstein.

For this to happen, game producers need to think radically about the sorts of games they make, said the ESA president.

As part of this, games had to become easier to play, as often people are intimidated by the technology or the complexity of a title. --Alfred Hermida --Call for radical rethink of games (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

[..]

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth?

[...]

Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you [Yoda] still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a f*cking give.--Anthony Lane --Space Case (New Yorker)

The asterisk is my addition.

There's plenty more ranting in this article.

I therefore formulate and offer to the world the following Principles for Quotations, two for quoters and two for readers, which, if universally followed, would make an immense improvement to the reliability of the information available on the world wide web.

Principle 1 (for readers)

Whenever you see a quotation given with an author but no source assume that it is probably bogus.

Principle 2 (for readers)

Whenever you see a quotation given with a full source assume that it is probably being misused, unless you find good evidence that the quoter has read it in the source.

Principle 3 (for quoters)

Whenever you make a quotation, give the exact source.

Principle 4 (for quoters)

Only quote from works that you have read. --Martin Porter --Four Principles of Quotation (Martin Porter's Home Page)

Porter launched a detailed study of a quotation often attributed to Edmund Burke, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

One of my students chose, as the title for her portfolio, a quotation that she identified as being from Shakespeare: "We know what we are, but know not what we may be." This is from Hamlet, and the speaker is Ophelia, who is at this point mad, and who will soon be found drowned in the pond. (I told the student I hoped she ended up better off in life.)

Thank goodness for Clueless, which has a brief exchange in which Cher corrects a snobby would-be intellectual who misattributes "To thine own self be true."

I also like Porter's close reading of four lines from Hamlet, "Doubt thou, the stars..."

At the grave yard Hamlet does not manifest any feelings towards his late father who according to the traditional interpretation, must have been buried there only a couple of months before that. Hamlet's behavior remains the same even when the grave-digger mentions king Hamlet. There appears an impression as if Hamlet had two different fathers: the one whose death he mourns, and the other one whom he does not remember. This is not strange because in the text, there are two Hamlets : the one who is about twenty, and the other one of thirty years of age.

According to the applied version of the Literary Theory, the only possible explanation is that Shakespeare created Hamlet as a menippeah containing several full-scale plots based on the same text. In every such work, there always exists an 'inner story' -- in this case, in a form of a drama reflecting the events in Elsinore, while its characters should correspond to 'real' persons with altered biographies.

An attentive reading reveals that the 'now living King' married Gertrude not a couple of months before the described events began but rather more than twenty years earlier, when prince Hamlet was a baby. This conclusion is supported with multiple facts scattered over the text of Hamlet. By employing them, several strictly logical conclusions are made:

King Hamlet and king Fortinbras were brothers; King Hamlet won Denmark by having killed his brother. (That is only too obvious. 'King Claudius' mentions the Norway as his brother. The Norway and the late king Fortinbras were brothers as well. Therefore, 'King Claudius' and Fortinbras were brothers. Further, 'King Claudius' assassinated king Hamlet who was his brother. Therefore, king Hamlet and king Fortinbras were brothers.) -- Well, is not that obvious, indeed? Did we really need four centuries to reveal that?

Prince Hamlet is king Hamlet's son only within the 'inner drama'; in 'reality' he is the last son to king Fortinbras. (Queen Gertrude delivered prince Hamlet in Elsinore on the very day of the battle. The castle was still in the possession of Fortinbras, therefore only his spouse could deliver Hamlet there.) (2)

Prince Hamlet and young Fortinbras were brothers as they were both the children to the same king Fortinbras?queen Gertrude couple. That explains why before his death prince Hamlet gives his vote for the throne in favor of prince Fortinbras.

In 'reality', King Hamlet was never poisoned by his brother. On the contrary, having killed his brother Fortinbras, he has been living with Gertrude for thirty years. We see him 'alive' for all five Acts, until his nephew Hamlet kills him. The act of poisoning took place only within the plot of the inner drama.

In 'reality', king Claudius does not exist at all; that is merely a character of the inner drama.

As Hamlet appears to be a menippeah with an 'inner story', there follows the necessity to perform certain steps:

Within the menippeah, there should exist a special character narrating the text. He must be the main object at whom Shakespeare's satire is aimed. The hidden intention of that character is the most important composition element of Hamlet.

Within the main plot of Shakespeare's work, it is necessary to define the identity of the 'proxy author' who has created the inner story. That might be the Narrator himself or some other person, but in any case that must be one of the characters of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

It is imperative that the borders delimiting the 'main' body of Hamlet and the inner story should be defined. --Alfred Barkov --Hamlet: A Tragedy of Errors or the Fate of Shakespeare? (Wiliam Shakespeare Authorship -- Geocities)

Extremely interesting close reading. I'm going to spend some more time reading this more closely. The argument is remarkably consistent and thorough -- for instance, the author argues that a "real" plot takes place in prose, while a nested "performance" takes place in verse -- that The Mousetrap (the play that Hamlet asks the players to perform) actually encompasses many sequences that we have taken to be the text of Hamlet. Barkov suggests that the interruption of the play-within-the play is scripted, so that much of the action that follows the interruption is still part of the play. I'd love to have the chance to stage something like this, but the founding principles (such as the claim that Hamlet from the outermost drama is really the son of Fortinbras senior, who was killed by Hamlet senior in battle) don't stand up too well to even a casual application of Occam's razor.

I'm scheduled to teach "Drama as Literature" this fall, and Hamlet (and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern) are probably going to be on the syllabus. Thus, yet another attempt to find meaning within meaning will make good reading. (See also Laura Bohannon's wonderful "Shakespeare in the Bush," in which an American anthropologist, convinced that Hamlet has a single, universal meaning, tests her theory by telling the story to the elders of an African tribe.)

America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters -- the BBC -- is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it.

Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience. --Cory Doctorow --The Beeb Shall Inherit the Earth (Wired)

It's that abrupt elbow in a graph of growth or decline when the new technology or paradigm truly kicks in, and suddenly there is no going back. From that moment, the new stuff takes off and the old stuff goes into rapid decline, whether it is a new standard of modem, a new video game, a new microprocessor family, or just a new idea. I think we've just hit such an inflection point and -- though most of us still don't realize it -- the personal computer, video game, and electronic entertainment businesses will never be the same. --Robert X. Cringely --Inflection Point: This Week Changed the World of High Tech Forever, Though Most of Us Still Don't Know It (PBS | I, Cringely)

1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time -- protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself -- name and, when relevant, role at IBM -- when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: "The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM'spositions, strategies or opinions."
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don't provide IBM'sor another'sconfidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.
8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory -- such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
--Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary (IBM)

A good set of guidelines for the blogosphere in general.

But while the goal of rewarding good teachers is laudable, the awards can sap the morale and productivity of faculty members who try too hard to receive them. For young professors in particular, paying too much attention to teaching awards is dangerous. [...] A professor whose goal is to win a teaching award can be tempted to focus on using varied and creative teaching styles, rather than on student learning and its assessment. The abundance of recent literature on teaching styles, with its endless debate about the effectiveness of different strategies, exacerbates the problem. Adopting different teaching strategies is terribly time-consuming. Junior faculty members must decide if it is worth it. --David G. Evans --How Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers (Chronicle)

It is very tempting to teach everything the same way I taught it last time, shooting for polish and refinement rather than radical re-vision.

This year in my American Lit class, in response to the unusually high stress signals the students were giving off, I turned what had been on the syllabus as the final date for the term paper into the due date for a rough draft. I pulled an all-nighter marking those drafts and turned them back to students within a few days. In a class of about 25, only four students took advantage of the opportunity to revise.

It takes about a half hour for me to read and comment on a term paper, if I assume the paper is a draft and that the student will use my comments to revise. If, on the other hand, I am simply assigning a grade, I can easily sort the papers holistically -- Susie's paper is better than Billy's, which is not quite as good as Frankie's -- and then go back and assign grades based on whether each paper meets the assignment criteria.

A handful of others did benefit from the extension, in that they didn't bother to turn in the rough draft, and only turned in the final draft -- but that means I had to mark their papers closer to the end-of-term crunch. And some students didn't need to revise because they were happy with the As or Bs their draft earned them. But a significant chunk -- including most of the ones whose papers took the most time for me to evaluate -- decided they would rather live with their C or D.

Was the benefit to those four students worth the extra effort I put into the assignment? One one level, yes. On another level, I'm not so sure. I knew I couldn't force the students to take advantage of the opportunity, but I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply writing a letter grade on the draft, and then simply let those students who were unhappy with their grade make an appointment with me to discuss it.

Instinct told me to start with the market of the 1970s - the time when electronics were getting small enough and cheap enough to allow for the definition to become true. Therefore the 1970s were also a time when the very concept of a PDA was something ordinary people could grasp. In some ways this was because of real-life inventions, such as Bowmar's handheld calculator, the handheld tape player (Sony Walkman), and handheld games like Mattel Auto Race. It's also thanks to literature and popular culture concepts, like Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and gadgets such as the communicator and tricorder from Star Trek; see more examples below. The fact is, by the mid-to-late 1970s, the PDA was inevitable and just waiting to be invented. --Evan Koblentz --The Evolution of the PDA 1975-1995

Link via Slashdot.

Star Trek featured the "microtape," which looked pretty much like a 3.5 inch floppy disk and served basically the same function, except the writers treated each "tape" as if it held only one file (which could be an audio recording, a video recording or a single slide).

There was a "tape viewer" which was a device into which the tape could be inserted, but it was rarely seen on the show, and only geeks like me know about it.

But certainly worth a mention are the nameless clipboards that yeomen carried about (for Kirk to glance at and sign with that pale blue triangle-shaped pen).

2001: A Space Odyssey features a flat-screen video player, but it's not clear that the device was supposed to have any other functions (though it's been years since I've read the novel).

Dripping wet and deeply disturbed, the smartly-dressed man was discovered walking along a windswept road beside the sea. Over the next few days he steadfastly refused, or was unable, to answer the most simple questions about who he was or where he had come from.

It was only when someone in hospital had the bright idea of leaving him with a piece of paper and pencils that the first intriguing clue about the stranger's past emerged. He drew a detailed sketch of a grand piano. Excited, hospital staff showed him into a room with a piano and he began to skilfully perform meandering, melancholy airs. Several weeks later he has still not spoken a word, expressing himself only through his music. --Steven Morris --Do you know this man? Mystery of the silent, talented piano player who lives for his music  (Guardian)

A good example of a well-written news feature, which balances deft storytelling with the journalist's obligation to convey information without creating suspense by withholding crucial details. The first two paragraphs give the main facts of the entire story, including the conclusion. The rest of the article re-tells the same events in more detail.

Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press. More than 7 in 10 journalists believe the media does a good or excellent job on accuracy--but only 4 in 10 among the public feel that way. And a solid 53% of the public think stories with unnamed sources should not be published at all.

Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists.

Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1--but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation ?moderate,? versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative. --Joe Strupp --New Survey Finds Huge Gap Between Press and Public on Many Issues (Editor & Publisher)

This article notes that the survey may have over-sampled upper management, with 43% of respondents being editors or news directors, many of them well-paid, and only 47% rank-and-file reporters.

Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to the victims of deadly Muslim protests sparked by the article.

"We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst," Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine's latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday. --David Morgan --Newsweek says erred in Koran desecration report (Reuters | MyWay)

A tiny item in Newsweek sparked huge international protests in Islamic countries, launching a huge wave of fresh anti-American sentiment, and leading to clashes in which protestors lost their lives.

The Reuters article cites former Guantanamo prisoners who reported abuse of the Koran, but Newsweek felt the accusations suddenly became newsworthy when a U.S. military official corroborated the claims. Later, that official backed down. Since the impetus to go with the story was based on the U.S. official's confirmation of the story, when that confirmation is withdrawn, Newsweek is left on shaky ground.

Rarely does a journalistic oversight have consequences that are this immediate, this dire, and this uncorrectable:

The report sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza. In the past week it was condemned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, Malaysia and by the Arab League. On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States.

"Parents so far have not gotten the message that trampolines should not be used in the home environment," said James Linakis, a pediatric emergency physician at Rhode Island Hospital's Hasbro Children's Hospital. --Study: trampoline injuries have spiked (Washington Times |UPI)

Sigh. My next weekend project is to put together the backyard trampoline that my wife got on sale at K-Mart.

My wife is usually the one who is more conservative when it comes to the kids' health. I figure as long as that loud crash from the next room doesn't result in the spillage of blood, it's not worth worrying about.

But she had to talk me into getting the trampoline.

Are classic essays like Swift's still being written, or has the elegant thoughtfulness that is the essay's legacy been winnowed away by its rapacious bastard offspring, the blog? And will the Internet generation, suffused by the blogosphere, lose the ability to write essays altogether? (The plethora of essays for sale online to students portends they may.)

Blogging has replaced the real essay for most people under 30, just as the Internet has replaced the daily newspaper. Polls show more than 60 percent of online readers trust independent news sources like blogs over mainstream news sources. But while blogs provide immediacy, they also breed inaccuracy - from spelling and grammatical errors to errors of fact. An essay, despite the immediacy and passion with which it might have been written, has still been perused by an editor, a copy editor and a fact-checker before it saw print. (Even Swift had an editor.) A blog has been reviewed by no one, edited by no one - not even, in many cases, been proofread by the author.

Some bloggers, such as Andrew Sullivan and Richard Scheer, are former newsmen with real journalistic credentials. Others, like Matt Drudge, are more like Stowe's Topsy - they just grew. Blogland isn't like the world of mainstream journalism, and bloggers are not usually serious essayists like Sullivan or Scheer. Any dot-commer can blog - a serious journalist with years of experience like, say, myself, or the teenager down the block spewing political rants during breaks from Grand Theft Auto. The problem in the blogosphere is that the kid and I will be received with equal credibility. --Victoria A. Brownworth --The Long Arm of the Blog (BaltimoreSun.com)

While Matt Drudge has often been lumped with bloggers, his site is a collection of links, with an occasional news/gossip exclusive. Drudge has shown what the democratization of journalism means for politics, but to compare him to an essayist is like comparing a ballet dancer to a polka dancer. Yes, both are dancers, but the set of skills involved are completely different. I can't tell you how many times that an outsider's attempt to analyze the blogosphere reminds me of the old story of the blind men and the elephant.

Citing the prevalence of online essay banks and the prevalence of bloggers in the same paragraph, and then implying that the two are somehow causally related is silly. Online essay banks were there long before the bloggers showed up.

For someone who strikes such a literate tone, I'm surprised Brownworth starts off with this example: "But blogs are pretenders to the throne of true essay writing. They mimic the essay much as Eliza Doolittle mimicked the Queen's English before Professor Higgins got his hands on her." Excuse me? While Eliza does show up at Higgins's house asking for lessons, she doesn't make any attempt to mimic the Queen's English beforehand. It's only Higgins who, intellectually smug and self-assured, gets it into his head that if only Eliza spoke more properly, he could pass her off as a duchess. "I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English."

If you consider what happens to Eliza after Higgins makes her too good for Covent Garden, and she gets tired of the ruse that lets her play the lady, I'm not so sure that Shaw's Pygmalion is the literary example I would choose if I were trying to make a point about the superiority of essays to blogs.

Brownworth dismisses all the things that blogs do better than essays, so naturally when she evaluates blogs on the same set of criteria that have been historically developed for essays, she's going to find bloggers come up short.

"Bloggers are more Web-cam style diarists than essayists," she says. Okay. And the average essayist, if placed in front of a web cam, would produce a pretty boring video diary -- if judged according to the criteria that are active in the webcam community.

As a writing teacher, I struggle to get students to plan ahead, to condense, to revise. So I can identify with Brownworth's woes. But an experienced diaryblogger has a certain set of skills that a non-writer has never developed.

Brownworth, whose essay invokes Orwell to attack the achievements of bloggers, uses a bit of Orwellian rhetoric herself. Brownworth's final warning, " Blogland is a sprawl, fast encroaching on the fragile landscape of the finely wrought essay," invokes the "urban sprawl" that encroaches on the "landscape" of pristine nature.

This presumes that the "finely wrought essay" is natural, while it is in fact the result of hundreds of years of conventions, aesthetic rules and personal judgments.

The essay is just as artificially constructed as the weblog. Yes, the essay has been around for hundreds of years, but its existence depends upon the existence of an intellectual aristocracy of educated men and women with the necessary leisure time to write back and forth to each other about subjects that they deem important, using rhetorical techniques and organizational patterns that they themselves deem effective.

The great Greek orators voiced similar complaints about a vulgar form of communication that they said killed spontaneity, and would permit anyone with a smattering of technical skill to masquerade as a great communicator.

The bastard art the Greek orators derided was called "writing".

Link via metafilter.

For those of you who don't know what Mono is... let me explain. It is known to most ignorant people as "The Kissing Disease." This, of course, makes anyone who has it appear to be a whore or a gameshow host. But, this isn't a proper representation of how the disease is actually spread. I certainly didn't get it through kissing (I more than likely caught it from my roommate Jon, or from just general overwork). But the disease is actually spread through saliva and mucus. So you could really call it the "Blowing Your Nose Into Someone's Mouth/Licking Someone's Eye/Sticking Your Tongue In Someone's Ear/Sneezing on Someone Else' Tongue/Pouring a Cup of Your Spit into Someone's Coffee" Disease. That's a little more fitting. --Mike Rubino --Thank You Epstein-Barr (Tranquility Lost)

An SHU student, who I've never actually had in a class, offers this as his end-of-term excuse. (Tongue in cheek, of course.)

The departure of Griego Erwin, who wrote three columns a week, continues the run of recent embarrassments for newspapers, many of which have cost writers their jobs.

Last week, USA Today Pentagon correspondent Tom Squitieri resigned under pressure after lifting quotes from another newspaper and using other quotes without attribution.

That followed on the heels of the resignation of veteran Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Al Levine, who pilfered information from two Florida newspapers without crediting them.

Los Angeles Times reporter Eric Slater was dismissed last month when editors at the newspaper could not verify information in an article he wrote about fraternity hazing at Cal State Chico.

The recent headliner in the string of news scandals was bestselling author, sports columnist and TV personality Mitch Albom, who was suspended from the Detroit Free Press for describing a scene in the stands at an NCAA basketball tournament game before the game had been played.

With polls showing journalists already held in low esteem, the run of bad news has alarmed many in the business. --James Rainey --Newspaper Columnist Resigns After Inquiry (Yahoo! News (will expire))

--Ladies of Star Trek (SixtiesCity.com)

Knee boots and beehive hairdos... I'm in heaven. (Thanks for the link, Scribblingwoman.)

After finding food, scout bees returning to the hive dance on the vertical walls of the honeycomb. A round dance indicates the food is very close, within 35 yards or less. A figure-eight pattern indicates that the food is farther away. The bee indicates the distance to the food by how long it dances; it indicates the food's richness by how vigorously it dances; and it indicates the food's direction by the angle the dance deviates from an imaginary line drawn from the current position of the sun to the dance floor. The code is complex and detailed. --Wendy M. Grossman --Decoding Bees' Wild Waggle Dances  (Wired)

Apparently the "waggle dance" has only been a theory until this research tested it with tiny, tiny radar units. I didn't know that.

"The cause for the beatification of John Paul II is open," the new Roman Catholic leader told priests meeting at Rome's Basilica of St John in Lateran. --Pope John Paul II to be beatified (BBC)

I have recently decided that not being in a class that requires blogging is a bad thing. Because i am not required to do blogging, i don't do it. This isn't because i don't want to, it is because i don't have time to. If it were required, i would make time to do it, seeing as how blogging would be a part of my homework. I fear that in mentioning this, i am going to be bombed with blog-required classes, but, i almost look forward to it *shudder* So, next semester blogs, come on, bring it on. I will be attempting to blog over the summer, although i don't know how often this will be... --Lori Rupert --I bid thee farewell (Kaleidoscope)

One of my students posted this pretty much on her way out the door for the summer.

The World's Energy Problems Solved by My 7-year-old (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

For months now, my son has been requesting, for his bedtime stories, books about chemistry and energy. We just finished one on windmills.

These aren't kiddie picture books -- they are thin, but they are chapter books, packed with statistics and chemical equations. For a while, Peter was making up stories about Atom City, a place he invented where anthropomorphic molecules of oxygen, carbon and hydrogen run around sharing electrons and exchanging energy.

Here's what's on his mind lately.

Save Earth-made Energy Sources

Dictated by Peter Jerz (age seven)

Anybody know about those coal power plants or other fossil fuel burning stations, and all the people who know there is only so much the Earth can make? Well, if we run out, how can we get energy? So save some fossil fuels.

But here are two power stations that may be able to use energy that lasts until the end of time. Wind power plants, and water power plants (hydro-electric power or power stations that use water to turn their turbines). So on this weblog, you can find out how you can save some fossil fuels. And now, here are ways of doing it.

Close some coal power plants that may make pollution or get rid of some fossil fuels the Earth created.

Some furnaces could burn other things besides natural gas, perhaps use wood instead. (Maybe you could just use a few fans so you don't waste too much wood.) Since oil may last for only thirty-five years, close a lot of oil burning places. Also, natural gas may last for sixty years, so you can keep a few more natural gas burning plants open. Since coal can last for the next six hundred years, you can have a few power plants open, but make sure you can save it so it can last even longer.

And so now you've learned about what I am thinking of the Earth.

Perhaps you should think seriously like I do.

Goodbye, and see you on the next weblog or email.

Okay Daddy, that's about what I wanted for my weblog.

Have you saved it yet? Because I think I want to put one more thing.

By the way, my name is Peter Jerz. Bye bye.

You know Daddy, if you let [Humanities Division chair] John Spurlock see that, I bet you could earn another fifty dollars.

Stopping Pollution

The cons of using fossil fuels:

For one thing, fossil fuels could make pollution, and they could be rare. Another thing is, that you could run out of fossil fuels. Another thing is that mining some fossil fuels could be dangerous. And for another thing, pollution could destroy the environment. (In some movies, pollution can make monsters). Fossil fuels could be expensive to start a business with. Even though some states and countries may have lots of it, then it could run out if they keep burning it up for energy. Coal could last for the next six hundred years. Natural gas for the next sixty years. But there may be only oil for the next thirty-five. Natural gas and oil may not last for very much longer. Coal dust can be dangerous to lungs in mining. Another thing. Try to make safe energies, and non-pollutive ones, too.

Well I guess that's what I wanted to put down. Those are probably good reasons for someone so young, I guess, Daddy.

You can send it.

The main cost of starting a Web-based startup is food and rent. Which means it doesn't cost much more to start a company than to be a total slacker.

[...]

Most startups fail. It's the nature of the business. But it's not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program. --Paul Graham --Hiring is Obsolete (PaulGraham.com)

Provided it is fed with cubes, the robot can create a copy of itself within a few minutes.

To build a replica, a 'parent' robot bends down and places its own uppermost cube on the table next to it. This becomes the base of the 'child' robot. The parent then picks up a new cube, using electromagnets powered from contacts on the surface of the table, and stacks it on top of the child base. During this process, the child bends down to help the parent add cubes whenever it becomes too tall for the parent to reach. In the end, two four-cube columns stand next to each other. --Andreas von Bubnoff --Robots master reproduction (Nature)

There's a video that teaches about what the birds and the 'bots do. I think it only counts as "reproduction" in a very loose sense... it's more like "final assembly," aided by humans who (between takes) carefully stack the components in precisely the location the robot needs to pick them up. That reminds me of the robot that fuels itself by digesting the bodies of insects, but who depend on humans to feed the insects to them.

"Robots master reproduction"? Hardly. We're still a long way from the rebellion depicted in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).

The video is still interesting to watch. If nothing else, these bots could play a mean game of Tetris.

No one at Southern Methodist University knew -- for sure -- who The Phantom Professor was. The professor's blog, like those of many untenured academics, was anonymous and the university was never named. --Scott Jaschik --'The Phantom Professor' (Inside Higher Ed)

A professor blogs anonymously, venting about the campus crime and the wealthy socialites in her classes. SMU officials admit that they know about the blog, they admit that they worry about the blog, and they admit that they think Elaine Liner might be the blogger. I'm not sure about the timeline of events, but an editorial in the school paper is involved.

Elaine Liner doesn't get rehired.

Fired for blogging? Is this a first amendment issue?

The First Amendment reads, in its entirety, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

What, exactly, does Congress have to do with Southern Methodist University's decision not to rehire a popular and talented writing professor?

"SMUAshley" is right: "You had free speech -- your blog was published. What you don't want is consequences of that speech."

Liner might have been better off saving all those stories for a tell-all book, after she has carefully scrubbed it clean from any details that might identify individuals.

Come to think of it, might sell even better now, given the publicity it has received.

How many other American journalists, perhaps not as secure in their position as I, have thought to do a story and decided that it's too close to the bone, too questioning of the American government or its actions? How many times was the risk that our own government might come in and rifle through our apartment, our homes or take us away for questioning in front of our children a factor in our decision not to do a story? How many times did we as journalists decide not to do a story because we thought it might get us into trouble? --Molly Bingham --Home from Iraq  (Courier Journal)

This is an extension to the point raised by Time's exposure of the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign. It's possible to be a good journalist without revealing everything that you know. A reporter's obligation to tell the truth without bias conflicts with the right to privacy of sexual assault victims. Journalists also regularly protect the names of minors.

It's troubling enough when an American news reporter wants to refers to US forces as "us". What happens when the American forces become "them"?

We are prudent, practical, common-sense people. And what could be more common-sense -- more downright American -- than chopping down vast acres of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and carted across the country to printing plants where they are turned into newspapers as we know them (with sections folded into one another according to a secret formula designed for maximum mess and frustration and known only to a few artisans) and then piled into a third set of trucks that fan out before dawn across every metropolitan area dropping piles here and there so that a network of newspaper deliverers can go house-to-house hiding newspapers in the bushes or throwing them at the cat, and patriotic citizens can ultimately glance at the front page, take Sports to the john, tear out the crossword puzzle and throw the rest away? --Michael Kinsley --Remember: You Can't Swat a Fly With a Computer (LA Times (registration))

Given the dominance of Hierarchical folders over the last 40 years, this is a major development in the history of information management. Implicit in Google's product offerings is an declaration of war: Hierarchy is doomed, and Search is going to kill it. --John Hiler --Google's War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders (Microcontent News)

The article doesn't deliver as much philosophical speculation as the blurb suggests... it's actually a historical retrospective, rather than a set of musings about the future. But it's still a good retrospective.

We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long lasting contribution of ideas instead of short-lived answers to narrow questions, it requires us to rethink our roles as teachers and to redefine our curricula. Remember, we don't own the content any longer. Our students teach us the tools. They are already connecting and collaborating. To hold on to the vertical classroom is to risk irrelevance...soon. --Will Richardson --Horizontal Classrooms (Weblogg-ed)

Okay, okay, I'm rethinking, I'm rethinking!

''You cannot overestimate the passion that engineers and scientists of that generation have for the slide rule," said Douglas, carefully sorting these precursors to the calculator with her white curator's gloves. --Jonathan Abel --For curator, slide rules are cutting edge (Boston.com)

3) The most common excuse for guests not being asked to come on show was ?I am taping my own show at that time.? Realized I no longer know anyone who doesn't have own talk show.

8) The better writers are on the page the worse they sometimes are on the air. What TV requires is not someone who is authoritative but someone who looks authoritative. Genuine articles are often hopelessly out of the demo, with coke bottle glasses or unfortunate predilections for a thoughtful pause. --Tina Brown --Ten Things I Learned at Topic A (The Huffington Post)

I'm not a TV news kind of guy, so I can't say for sure whether I've ever seen her broadcast work, but I know she wasn't exactly a smashing success as editor of The New Yorker.

Yes, she's exaggerating, but talk about an echo chamber. Does the world really need yet another way for Tina Brown to share her ideas with the world?

And compare her point #8 with a recent spoof article from The Onion:

"[Canton] went on like that for six... long... minutes," Salters said. "Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these statistics about megawatts and the nation's current energy consumption and I don't know what, because my mind just shut off. I tried to lead him in the right direction. I told him to address the fears that the average citizen might have about nuclear power, but he still utterly failed to mention meltdowns, radiation, or mushroom clouds." ("Actual Expert too Boring for TV", posted 04 May 2005; will expire soon)

When she writes "not being asked to come on show," does she really mean "not being able to come on show"? Why would "I am taping my own show at that time" be an excuse for not asking someone to be on her show? Or does she mean a person who was not asked to be on her show would use that story to explain the oversight to a third party?

There's no way to ask that question on the blog and get a clarification, since there's no way to post a comment. So the world will have to shrug and hit the "go back" button.

MIT Technology Review Online on March 21 retracted two stories written in whole or in part by Michelle Delio, citing the publication's inability to confirm a source. On April 4, InfoWorld edited four articles by Delio to remove anonymous quotes.... Penenberg provided Wired News with a list of 24 stories that contained sources he could not confirm... Delio, in communications with Penenberg and Wired News, stands by her reporting and the existence and accuracy of her sources.

[...]

Wired News is not retracting any of these stories. Rather, we are appending notes to the stories, indicating what we have been unable to confirm about them and editing them, as noted, where appropriate. By keeping these stories posted and clearly marked, we hope that our readers can help identify any sources whom we cannot track down. --Wired News Releases Source Review (Wired)

Interesting development. I've probably linked to dozens of Delio's stories. I think I once sent her an e-mail that was critical of a phrase that I thought was biased, but that's insignificant.

Keeping the articles up, noting which details are unconfirmed, usefully takes advantage of the flexibility of electronic text.

The columnist who once ran for governor of California launched a Web site called The Huffington Post on Monday. It features dozens of name-brand bloggers, as well as news coverage. Is this a welcome addition or an unwanted intrusion? --Blogs of the Rich and Famous (AOL -- Daily Pulse)

Now this is funny... when AOL is tweaking you for not getting it, you know you're in trouble.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out. --Nikki Finke --Deadline Hollywood: Arianna's Blog Blows (LA Weekly)

--Google Movie Reviews (Google)

Amazing... one page gives you the showtimes and rating of movies playing in your area, along with a link to the IMDB.

I learned about this on Dan Gillmor's site.

The Huffington Post: First Response (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name?

I briefly checked out The Huffington Post today. I was never too impressed by the collective achievements of the celebrity intellectuals that Salon pulled together in its heyday. The experiment will expose a wider range of people to the potential of the internet.

John Cusack's entry on Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most literate and engaging thing on the site. Playwright David Mamet has some existential fun with the nature of truth and authority in the blogosphere; I hope his future entries are less "cutesy." Scientist and media expert Jay Winsten's comment on the Center for Disease Control's overstatement of the effects of obesity on health also caught my eye.

A significant number of the other contributors are of the "My homework assignment was to post a blog entry... how does this work?" variety. See Al Eisele, a columnist whose blog entry reads like a column, and the co-blog of writer Brad Hall and actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who attempt a comedy routine. Including charter school activist Roger Lowenstein was a good idea, since his criticism of teacher unions and the left in general will deflect criticisms that Huffington is simply trying to create a liberal echo chamber, but somebody ought to tell him to break up his prose into browser-friendly chunks. On the other hand, comedian Ellen DeGeneres, who has written several humor books in a narrative, conversational writing style, seems right at home in the medium. She should really choose link text that is more cognitively or emotionally significant than the word "here," but that's a common characteristic in the writing of hypertext newbies.

Does that little graphic of the speaker really need to be Flash animation? Why wouldn't a GIF suffice?

I do like the openness the site shows on its wire feed... while there's no way for visitors to post comments to the blogs written by the contributors I've mentioned above, it is possible to comment on wire stories (which are excerpted on site) and on Huffington Post exclusives. The site invites leads and scoops, so it's in direct competition with The Drudge Report, the retro design of which is getting less and less cool every day.

Well, the grades for graduating seniors are due today, so it's back to the salt mines for me.

Update: Online reviews from AOL ("Blogs of the Rich and Famous") and the LA Weekly ("Arianna's Blog Blows").

A Metafilter poster echoes Yeats: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards blogging to be born."

My goodness, that Metafliter post is full of good bits. The next comment says The Huffington Post is "like a Drudge Report, only happier and more famous."

And check out the hilarious Guardian spoof.

I take the view that computer languages, robot ethics, method acting, and biomechanics are the main ingredients that fused, in the 1950s, to become the cultural meme we call Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. None of those ingredients was wholly new at that time: biomechanics and the Method - first known as the Stanislavski system - had been around since the early 1920s; Isaac Asimov, in conjunction with science fiction author and editor John W. Campbell, formulated the Laws of Robotics in 1940 (t'was about time, too - Jaques de Vaucanson had had the first mecha working in 1737); Ada Lovelace had anticipated the development of computer software, artificial intelligence and computer music back in 1843. But in the 1950s, thinking machines went pop. --Dirk Scherung --Thinking machines go pop (Robot Soul)

I've had only the most basic training in acting, and no formal training in artificial intelligence. It's been productive in the classroom to apply what I do know about those topics to certain works of literature (such as Galatea 2.2, PICK UP AXE, or R.U.R.). But I'm very interested in what Scherung might find as he continues to explore this meme. Hurrah for yet another bridge across the cultural divide.

I'm particularly puzzled by the suggestion that the man pretending to be a woman in a Turing test is drawing on the same store of creativity that a method actor would use. A method actor draws on his or her own specific personal memories in order to find emotional depth that fills out the spaces in between the words the playwright wrote about the character. I can see how the attention to the construction of a character contributes to the spread of the AI meme, but I don't know that method acting contains any truths that would be useful to the AI community.

As a homosexual, perhaps Turing was able to draw on his personal experience of gender roles to concoct the gender-bending experiment. But how does this relate to method acting? The specialized acting skills of the drag queen are campy and farcical, not offering the sort of psychological depth and individuality associated with the plays written for method acting.

You need a certain kind of physical space for method acting, and only certain kinds of plays lend themselves to method acting. The tastes of the playgoing public, the talents and accomplishments of playwrights, and the performing styles of actors are all interconnected.

Drama expresses universal themes, but it does so through unique, individual characters. I've raised this topic on this blog before (and when I did, I don't think I convinced Will). But here goes... Computer programming in general is about abstraction. A program that accurately simulates the actions of a man pretending to be a woman would probably have more hard-coded, specialized features than a program that could accurately simulate general human behavior. But isn't it specific human actions, in specific contexts, that make dramatic interest? Is human behavior, taken in general, ever that dramatic?

If I weren't sick, and I had the time, I'd check to see how much of this has been covered by Brenda Laurel, or by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern.

Oh, and of course I'd suggest that Rossum's Robots be added to the list of artificial intelligence precursors. RUR was tremendously popular in its time. It also popularized the word "robot" in languages around the world.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play. --William ShakespearePrologue, Henry V (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This fall, I'll be teaching a survey of drama course, covering from the ancient Greeks to the present. I've taught it before, but not at SHU. It will be packed with first-semester freshmen.

I think I'll begin the course with this passage, to drive home the point that reading a playscript is an extension of the co-creative, interpretive act for which Shakespeare here calls.

It's also not a bad metaphor for close reading, or, by extension, education in general. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it. I don't have the budget of George Lucas, the background dancers and laser shows of Britney Spears, or the time to wordsmith 50-minute lectures (like the ones delivered by my own professors, who taught only two classes each term, with graduate students to run the discussion sections and mark the papers).

I don't even have the pretty colored pie charts, like their $85 science textbooks do.

But somehow, I've got to compete for their attention, against all the pleasures of their newfound freedom. And the contents of their iPods.

Of course, I've got some pretty good course material to work with. I can show video clips. I can invite drama majors to do scene work. If the classroom dynamic is good, we can even do impromptu staged readings.

I also have the benefit of the knowledge that I will probably see most of these freshmen again, in another class, perhaps even the following semester.

Shakespeare's audiences probably included many who sought escapist entertainment, just as some of the incoming freshmen will think of college as their own escapist playground. I think the key here lies in the Chorus's efforts to align the audience and the players on one side -- united in imagination and possibility, against the limitations of form and dreary reality on the other side.

--Hawaiian Good Luck Sign (USS Pueblo.org)

Communist North Koreans captured the U.S.S. Pueblo, imprisoned its crew, and began using them for propaganda purposes, coercing them to write apologies and trotting them out at press conferences that North Korea used to its advantage.

The October 18, 1968 issue of Time revealed that the men of the Pueblo, while appearing to cooperate with the North Koreans (out of fear for their lives) were actually giving their captors the finger. Korean culture did not recognize a raised middle finger as a gesture of contempt.

The North Koreans, learning the truth through the magazine, punished their prisoners severely.

The Time photo caption makes a witty allusion to Marshall McLuhan. The men had reasoned that their captors would probably learn the meaning of the gesture sooner or later, but the ethics of exposing a prisoner's only means of communication is troubling.

For future reference... here's another troubling photo.

Update: My brother-in-law, Robert, notes that I got a historical detail wrong in this entry... I've deleted the offending passage. Thanks for the correction.

--Bad Timing In the Worst Way (BreakTheChain.org)

How strange... when I catch a glimpse of the Twin Towers in the background in Sesame Street videos that we taped years ago, or on the cover of a Curious George book, I still cringe. But for this ad, I felt a pang of sympathy for the advertising designer, who had no idea what kind of emotional impact his or her image would create.

From a website about chain e-mail letters.

Tom Bosley Haunts Me (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm laid up in bed, having gotten my usual end-of-semester cold a week and a half early. (Last time at least it had the courtesy to wait until a few hours after I submitted final grades to start hammering me into submission.)

It suddenly occurred to me, from out of nowhere, that despite what Tom Bosley told me at the beginning of each episode, I really don't care that Happy Days was filmed before a live studio audience. I don't care now, and I didn't care back then.

I did take a trip down memory lane, courtesy of The Greatest American Hero fan site.

Sigh. Sometimes I wish the dark secrets I hide from my students were less... lame.

Like many developments in the history of computing, some of the ideas for a GUI computer were thought of long before the technology was even available to build such a machine. One of the first people to express these ideas was Vannevar Bush. In the early 1930s he first wrote of a device he called the "Memex," which he envisioned as looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time. --Jeremy Reimer --A History of the GUI (Ars Technica)

Bush's vision was tied to his vision of the potential of analog computing, so it's a stretch to use the fact that digital computing hadn't been invented to dismiss Bush's ideas as unworkable. Wartime research discoveries had led to a boom in scientific publications, which gave his ideas from the previous decade more currency.

Put bluntly, failure attracts more money than success. Politically, failure becomes a reason to demand more money, smaller classes, and more trendy courses and programs, ranging from "black English" to bilingualism and "self-esteem." Politicians who want to look compassionate and concerned know that voting money for such projects accomplishes that purpose for them and voting against such programs risks charges of mean-spiritedness, if not implications of racism. --Thomas Sowell --The Education of Minority Children (TSowell.com)

That's from very near the end of this essay, which contains some other very challenging statements.

Two and a half decades later, as the little yellow notes celebrate their silver anniversary, it'seasy to forget what a recent innovation they are. Thanks to their material simplicity, they seem more closely related to workplace antiquities like the stapler and the hole-punch than integrated chips. Instead, they?re an exemplary product of their time. Foreshadowing the web, they offered an easy way to link one piece of information to another in a precisely contextual way. Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life. --Greg Beato -- Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes (The Rake)

Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: "It's pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It's the news value that is most important."

He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review - despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.

As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. --Robert Matthews --Leading scientific journals 'are censoring debate on global warming' (Telegraph)

This is my favorite conspiracy theory.

I spend so much time trying to drill into the heads of my students that information published in peer-reviewed academic journals is more valuable in a term paper than random stuff you find on the internet. But here's another reminder that the peer-review process is only as good as the peers doing the reviewing.

College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters Eve Ensler'splay The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate ?V-Day? (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. --Christina Hoff Sommers --Why Can't They ?Just Get Along?? (National Review Online)

At first, I thought this was an Onion article. This is both sad and hilarious.

The appeal of the blogs? Humor seems to be the biggest attraction. Ironic detachment from the news, an ability to deflate egos and refreshing, undisguised opinion are also valued. All are antithetical to most news organizations.

American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each. Radio and television try to ensure that opinion remains secondary to reporting. Conclusions should be drawn warily. Bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact. It's part of the appeal of the blogosphere.

As news organizations fight to regain their battered credibility and vanishing audiences, the blogs and the number of people who read them continue to grow. The blogs entertain, they provoke, and they are not constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.

This is a challenge and a danger for journalism. --Jeffrey A. Dvorkin --When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News (NPR)

The issues extend beyond the world of journalism.

Dvorkin notes that "younger people find the Internet a more useful place, and a more nimble way to get their news," but when he says " blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules," he misses the point. The internet is full of moral people, too. But because the mass broadcast media offers its audience only one meaningful way of personalizing its content (the on/off button), Dvorkin is thinking in monolithic terms.

He is right to note that there are instances where the public's right to know does not supersede issues of national security, but the specific case he mentioned -- the U.S. government issuing a redacted report that could be easily, trivially manipulated to reveal the redacted text -- is itself a newsworthy story. Journalists are trained to understand that just because they discovered a name (or a fact) does not give them the moral justification to publish that name (or fact) in every circumstance. That's because journalists are trained to think of the impact their work has on the general public. Bloggers, who may be writing for an imagined audience that consists only of peers, may simply not understand what it means to post a personal comment on their weblog.

A former student of mine from the University of Wisconsin, who started blogging for a class project and kept it up after she graduated the class and entered law school, kept detailing her escapades with alcohol and misadventures with boyfriends. I was often horrified to read of her exploits, but 1) they were funny and 2) they helped remind me that the "good students don't drink too much, only bad students do" binary opposition I carried in my head was false. At any rate, when I last checked this student's blog, she had removed all the entries and replaced them with a statement suggesting it was time for her to move on. I guess she doesn't want future potential clients to Google her and read of her exploits.

This student wasn't a journalist, but she named the names of her friends, not just herself. Presumably her friends have blogs that might mention her name.

Since more and more students are arriving at college already having blogged socially, it seems to me that part of freshman orientation should include a "be careful what you write" warning, along with "don't walk home alone" and "don't procrastinate."

"May the cutest kitten win..." --Kittenwar

Parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are.

It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. --Dubner and Levitt --Do Parents Matter? (USA Today (will expire))

An analysis of the language used in real estate ads shows that certain words are powerfully correlated with the final sale price of a house. This doesn't necessarily mean that labeling a house "well maintained" causes it to sell for less than an equivalent house. It does, however, indicate that when an agent labels a house "well maintained," she is subtly encouraging a buyer to bid low.

So consider the terms in the box on the previous page: A "fantastic" house is surely fantastic enough to warrant a high price, right? What about a "charming" and "spacious" home in a "great neighborhood!"? No, no, no, no, and no.

In fact, the terms that correlate with a higher sales price are physical descriptions of the home itself: granite, Corian, and maple. As information goes, such terms are specific and straightforward - and therefore pretty useful. If you like granite, you might like the house; but even if you don't, "granite" certainly doesn't connote a fixer-upper. Nor does "gourmet" or "state-of-the-art," both of which seem to tell a buyer that a house is, on some level, fantastic.

"Fantastic," meanwhile, is a dangerously ambiguous adjective, as is "charming." These words, it turns out, are real estate agent code for a house that doesn't have many specific attributes worth describing. "Spacious" homes, meanwhile, are often decrepit or impractical. "Great neighborhood" signals to a buyer that, well, this house isn't very nice but others nearby may be. And an exclamation point in a real estate ad is bad news for sure, a bid to paper over real shortcomings with false enthusiasm.

If you study an ad for a real estate agent's own home, meanwhile, you see that she emphasizes descriptive terms (especially "new," "granite," "maple," and "move-in condition") and avoids empty adjectives (including "wonderful," "immaculate," and the telltale "!"). She patiently waits for the best buyer to come along. She might tell this buyer about a house nearby that just sold for $25,000 above the asking price, or another house that is the subject of a bidding war. She is careful to exercise every advantage of the information asymmetry she enjoys. -- Levitt and Dubner --Cracking the Real Estate Code (Wired)

In interviews, Margaret Edson has expressed mild surprise that critics have not paid more attention to the religious aspect of her play. "The play is about redemption, and I'm surprised no one mentions it. Grace is the opportunity to experience God in spite of yourself, which is what Dr. Bearing ultimately achieves" (Martini 24). Despite notable exceptions in essays by Betty Carter and especially Martha Greene Eads, most commentators have fastened upon the medical aspects of the play. Victims of ovarian cancer have used it as a rallying point. Medical professionals have employed it to discuss patient rights and research ethics. In several American cities, sold out performances have been followed by lengthy talk-back sessions that have focused on these issues. The play thus seems valuable to much of its audience for its realistic portrayal of courageous suffering and its attack on the indifference of doctors. At its moral center, the play is not about kindness, but redemption. --John D. Sykes, Jr. --Wit, Pride and Resurrection: Margaret Edson's Play and John Donne's PoetryRenascence 55.2 (2003))

I've taught Wit in several different classes. I used to show clips from the Emma Thompson video, but a few students cried, and since I typically teach this play at the end of the semester, I didn't really want to send them away with that experience. Still, at a Catholic school, I think it's completely appropriate to bring religion into the classroom, and as a class everyone knows each other well enough that I hope they'll feel comfortable disagreeing (politely, with specific reference to the text).

Students have turned in their term paper already, but there's a short final paper due on Wit on the last day of classes, because I want to see how the students' ability to respond personally to a text has developed after a semester in which I introduced them to literary research.

I've also carefully prepared students to make the most of this play, by introducing them to Donne's "Death, Be Not Proud," the punctuation of which plays an important role in the play; they've also read Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which asked students to look at punctuation more closely than they ever have.

Armstrong.edu has a bibliography (though the links only work if you have an Armstrong account) and links to some useful news articles.

I'm bummed that the blogs were down for half the day yesterday, which means that some students who might otherwise have blogged in advance of the class didn't. But Valerie Masciarelli, who wrote a paper on the humor in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, touches on how wit can't solve all our human problems; Vanessa Kolberg wishes she could see a production, and Chris Ulicne, in a reflective mood, compares his own love of literature to the motives Vivian Bearing offers.

Research papers, correct grammar, and deadlines are important. But it's days like this that I remember why I did such a stupid thing as go to grad school in English. I love talking about literary works that mean something to me. Even more so, I love sharing those works with students who use them (or reject them) as part of their process of defining who they are and how they are going to live the rest of their lives.

As Sykes puts it,

This is why both Christian intellectuals such as Carol Iannone and secular interpreters such as the makers of the HBO film get the play wrong. It is neither about simple kindness, as Iannone believes, nor can a wishful (and fully clothed!) return to youth convey Bearing's redemption,l as it is made to do in the film version of the play [where, instead of the actress emerging from her deathbed and reaching, naked, for light, the screen shows a black and white headshot of the scholarly Bearing, as she might have appeared on the back cover of a book --DGJ]

BreakAway has collaborated with the nonprofit group Believe in Tomorrow to create Splash, which helps pediatric cancer patients cope with painful treatments by donning headsets for a virtual scuba dive. CyberLearning Technology sells a $548 game system to treat kids with attention deficit disorder in more than 80 therapy clinics. It uses neurofeedback sensors to monitor patients' brainwaves: As their cars zip along tracks in Gran Turismo 4, sensors detect when their minds wander -- and adjust the action to help them refocus. Jennifer Alsever and Danielle Sacks --Journey to ''Serious Games'' (Fast Company)

The later spinoffs were much better performed, but the content continued to be stuck in Roddenberry's rut. So why did the Trekkies throw themselves into this poorly imagined, weakly written, badly acted television series with such commitment and dedication? Why did it last so long?

Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by. --Orson Scott Card --Strange New World: No ''Star Trek'' (LA Times (will expire))

I watched Star Trek religously until I took my first full-time teaching job, during the last season of Deep Space Nine and the third or fourth season of Voyager. A new job, a new baby, and a TV with poor reception. Oh, yeah, and Babylon 5 was still on at the time. My sister would tape the show for us and sends us batches of 5 or 6 at a time, and we would watch them straight through. Very powerful to see it all in that manner.

In total, I've watched about 10 minutes of Star Trek: Enterprise, and though I'm still a Star Trek fan, I'm satisfied with the Trek I have and remember.

I am actually very slowly working my way through a 1986 Star Trek novel depicting Kirk's first mission on the Enterprise. I enjoy the way the novel depicts "down time" on the classic Enterprise, which is something we only rarely saw on the original show.

Impact of the Writing Tests on Curriculum and Classroom Instruction

The kind of writing valued by the SAT reflects a set of assumptions about writing?and about ?good? writing?that we find problematic and which diverge from what the best current scholarship tells us about the nature of writing.

• Although it is possible that the new SAT will promote more writing instruction, preparation for the test is likely to take precious time away from high quality writing instruction.
  
• The kind of writing required for success on the timed essay component of the SAT is likely to encourage writing instruction that emphasizes formulaic writing with specific but limited textual features.
• Research suggests that writing instruction focused on following patterns, writing one draft, and adhering to specific criteria for the text?just the kind of instruction likely to be used to prepare students for the new SAT?prepares students poorly for college-level writing tasks and for workplace writing tasks. --Conclusions and Key Points: ?The Impact of the SAT and ACT Timed Writing Tests? (National Council of Teachers of English)

Inside Higher Ed has a good piece on this.

Since SHU uses a timed essay (written during freshman orientation) to place students in developmental courses, the faculty voted to drop our own testing procedure (which was conducted hurriedly, by faculty volunteers) for the more formal, controlled test.

I do sympathize with the plight of high school graduates who don't go on to college, but whose English teachers might now spend a lot of time teaching the formula for a college-entry essay.

While composition is not my specialty, I have taught a comp course every year since leaving grad school (in 1998). If more students come into my class knowing the basics of how to plan and execute this kind of timed essay, then my task as a comp instructor will probably be easier than it is right now.

But I'm already struggling with gen-ed students who are producing formulaic writing in my lit classes (either too much plot summary, character analysis, or a stand-alone research paper on an issue such as racism or women's rights, with occasional references to how a particular character has an experience that validates -- but does not prove -- the student's non-literary thesis).