Current_Events: May 2005 Archive Page

"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.)

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)

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 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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))

"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)

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)

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.

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."

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).