Humanities: June 2005 Archive Page

Over the last few years, I've noticed that a surprisingly large number of native English speakers, who are otherwise very technically competent, seem to lack strong English skills. Mostly, this seems to manifest itself as varying degrees of poor spelling and grammar: 'definately' instead of 'definitely'; 'should of' instead of 'should have'; and I even see the names of products and companies misspelled from time to time. It baffles me that a culture so obsessed with technical knowledge and accuracy can demonstrate such little attention to detail when it comes to communicating that knowledge with others, and it baffles me even more that many people become enraged when you attempt to help them correct and learn from their mistakes. Do hackers and geeks just not care about communicating effectively? Do they not realize that a mediocre command of written English makes them appear less intelligent? Am I missing something here? -- Strom Carlson --Hackers, Spelling, and Grammar? (Slashdot)

One commenter's reply: "Can... open... worms... everywhere."

For one thing, we overestimated academe's interest in the humanistic study of video games. True, colleges and universities across the country are rushing pell-mell to grab a piece of the game pie, but that rush seems to be more about pipelining students into industry jobs than helping them develop critical-thinking skills.

Ensuring that young people secure employment is a noble goal -- and in many ways the primary objective of contemporary higher education -- yet game-industry workers are among the most exploited high-tech laborers in the world. Call us crazy, but there's something disingenuous about channeling students into an industry without first teaching them to be critical of that industry's labor practices -- especially when those practices all too commonly include outsourcing game development and asset creation to cheap foreign markets, and exercising early-20th-century techniques of union-busting. --Ruggill and McAllister --Game Over (Chronicle)

Thanks for the nudge, Mike. I'd been meaning to blog this for a while.

The authors seem a bit too clever -- just slightly too amused with themselves. But I still welcome the attention they are putting on the humanistic study of computer games.

Modern English has given us two terms we need to explain this phenomenon: "geeking out" and "vegging out." To geek out on something means to immerse yourself in its details to an extent that is distinctly abnormal - and to have a good time doing it. To veg out, by contrast, means to enter a passive state and allow sounds and images to wash over you without troubling yourself too much about what it all means..... The first "Star Wars" movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs - the purest kind of vegging-out material - to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle. --Neal Stephenson --Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out (NY Times)

Hmm... I think the scenes in the command bunkers were simply there to give Carrie Fisher something to do during the battle. Well, having C-3PO there to worry about Artoo was also a nice touch.

It just can't be good, it has to be original and good.

When I think hard about it part of me kind of wishes
we hurled our bodies into the air, at times, cracking on impact,
but I miss the rest of you
and I am now working on keeping myself at SHU.
You can vote for who you feel wins the argument.
I strongly recommend that you become involved in one that doesn't kill anyone.
I don't know how many of the younger readers will remember him,
following me from trash can to trash can as I went about my business
in like.. some scholastic endeavor. Or something.
All I can say is, I’m not surprised France came up with crap like that. --Feeling Inspired? (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A "found poetry" exercise, inspired by Kait.

As theorists became endowed chairs, department heads, series editors, and MLA presidents, as they were profiled in the New York Times Magazine and invited to lecture around the world, the institutional effects of Theory displaced its intellectual nature. It didn?t have to happen, but that?s the way the new crop of graduate students experienced it. Not only were too many Theory articles and books published and too many Theory papers delivered, but too many high-profile incursions of the humanities into public discourse had a Theory provenance. The academic gossip in Lingua Franca highlighted Theory much more than traditional scholarship, David Lodge?s popular novels portrayed the spread of theory as a human comedy, and People Magazine hired a prominent academic feminist as its TV critic. One theorist became known for finding her ?inner life,? another for a skirt made of men?s neckties, another for unionizing TAs. It was fun and heady, especially when conservatives struck back with profiles of Theorists in action such as Roger Kimball?s Tenured Radicals, sallies which enraged many academics and soundly defeated them in public settings, but pleased the more canny ones who understood that being denounced was better than not being talked about at all (especially if you had tenure).

The cumulative result was that the social scene of Theory overwhelmed the intellectual thrust. --Mark Baurerlein --Theory's Empire (Butterflies and Wheels)

Now that the theory movement has firmly established itself in academia, faculty members who want to introduce theory have a lot of history to cover. Is it legitimate to say that theory is somehow "over" when people outside the circle of theorist-activists learn it and teach it?

As did many others, I received the sad news this morning that John Lovas, recent chair of CCCC, passed away June 21, 2005. He was 65. --Doug Hesse --John Lovas (Community College English)

I'm still catching up on all that happened during my offline week. This is a shock, and it certainly puts my own little problems in their proper perspective.

I knew John through his blog for some time, and finally got the chance to meet him and spend some time with him at the 4Cs just a few months ago.

On Father's Day, while we were headed east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, on our way to a family vacation in Amish country, the steering on our 1992 Taurus gave out. The car spun out in the grassy median, flipped over, and came to rest partially in a westbound lane.--Dennis G. Jerz

--What I Did on My Summer Vacation: Walked Away from This... (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This wasn't a lot of fun to experience, but if you've got to be involved in a rollover accident, I strongly recommend that you become involved in one that doesn't kill anyone.

On this blog, I don't want to talk about what might have caused the accident, and I'm not seeking advice on what to do next. Anyone who's had a close brush with death sees life as more precious.

My son dictated his description of the accident in a letter he wants me to give to his piano teacher. He ended it with, "Well, I hope you're glad we survived."

Vacation June 18-25 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Sometime this weekend, I'll be taking the wife and kids to a cabin for a week in Amish country.

Actually, that phrasing is misleading. It's more accurate to say I'll accompany my family to a cabin that my in-laws booked.

At any rate, I'll be offline the whole time... and that will be the first time I've been offline since... well, since I went online.

If I can't quickly figure out a way to hold comments for later approval, I'll have to disable the script for adding new comments until I return. I might blog a bit more today or tomorrow, but the weekend spam attacks are about to start, so I thought I might as well take care of blocking comments now.

THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has criticised the new web-based media for ?paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry?. He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was ?close to that of unpoliced conversation".

[...]

?There is a tension at the heart of the journalistic enterprise. Its justification is that it promises to deliver what other sources can?t ? information that is needed to equip the reader or viewer or listener for a more free and significant role as a human agent. But at the same time it is bound to a method and a rhetoric that treats its public as consumers and the information it purveys as a commodity.? --Archbishop hits out at web-based media 'nonsense' (

The headline creates the impression that the long quote I included above applies to web-based media, but the article notes that Rowan also criticized traditional media. The article also ends by noting that Rowan "said that it was important not to scapegoat the media," and that Rowan praised BBC journalist Frank Gardner.

On May 7, the 26-year-old vaccine researcher from Arlington, Virginia, 15 weeks pregnant with her second child, collapsed from a stroke brought on by undiagnosed melanoma.

She suffered serious brain damage and will never regain consciousness, but the cancer is spreading quickly.

Now Ms. Torres' family is hoping she will live long enough on life support to deliver the baby -- her last act of love, says her husband, Jason Torres. --Joanne Laucius --Woman kept alive to save baby (National Post)

Susan Torres graduated from the University of Dallas, my wife's alma mater. She and her family are now living in the general area where I grew up. So I feel a connection.

Unlike the Terry Schaivo case, it appears that family members support Jason Torres' decision to keep his wife on life support. (At least, if they don't, that's not part of the current news coverage.)

The techniques Rumsfeld balked at included “use of a wet towel or dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.” “Our Armed Forces are trained,” a Pentagon memo on the changes read, “to a standard of interrogation that reflects a tradition of restraint.” Nevertheless, the log shows that interrogators poured bottles of water on al-Qahtani’s head when he refused to drink. Interrogators called this game “Drink Water or Wear It.”

This is how articles are written, conventional wisdom chopped pressed and formed: the techniques Rumsfeld “balked at” – meaning, I assume, did not permit – did not include actual suffocation, but the use of a wet towel that would induce the misperception of an emanation of a penumbra of suffocation. NEVERTHELESS. Key word, that. Lines crossed not in fact but in spirit. He balked at fake suffocation, aye; NEVERTHELESS the climate of pain and retribution did not forbid men from freely dumping bottles of Dasani on the heads of the detainees. Why, it was a game to the interrogators. “Drink Water or Wear it.” Spiritually, it’s a first cousin to Saddam’s game, “Use Tongue Then Lose It.”

After the new measures are approved, the mood in al-Qahtani’s interrogation booth changes dramatically. The interrogation sessions lengthen. The quizzing now starts at midnight, and when Detainee 063 dozes off, interrogators rouse him by dripping water on his head or playing Christina Aguilera music.

Djinni in a bottle, no doubt. --James Likeks fisking Time Magazine. --The true horror of American Torture has been revealed. Let me make light of it. (Screed Blog)

Thas passage features a careful analysis of how the conjunction "nevertheless" creates a connection between rejected interrogation techniques "use of a wet towel or dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation" and pouring water on the prisoner's head when he refuses to drink it. It seems that the rejected and approved methods are very different, related only by their use of water.

Fleet Street began its association with publishing in 1500 when Wynkyn de Worde built London's first printing press next to St Bride's.

It became home to Britain's newspaper industry.

But one by one the newspapers moved out - the former offices of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Express are now home to the US investment bank Goldman Sachs. --Agency shuts Fleet Street office (BBC)

All in all, I enjoy my job very much, and I'm thankful that in return for my work, I make enough for my family to live on (with the help of some summer work). I may not see my family as much as I'd like, but I know that what I'm doing is right for them.

But when I'm asked to do more for my job -- without additional compensation -- of course I hesitate. I need a trade-off for leaving my family. I'll teach a night class and not be there to put my children to bed because I know that the money I make from that class will pay for three months' tuition for my 8-year-old.

But ask me to give up attending that child's dance recital to stand at a table during a Saturday morning admissions fair and expect me to do it for free? Sorry. There's nothing in it for me -- nor for my family. --Chris Barnett --So, What's in It for Me? (Chronicle)

There are times when I feel this way, and other times when I truly enjoy stopping by the publications office on my way home from work, and lingering to chat and just watch the students being productive as they churn out the latest issue. Fortunately, I get a course release in order to advise the student paper, but the students do most of the hands-on work right around the time I'm supposed to be driving kids to lessons, giving baths, and reading bedtime stories. I do a lot of informal mentoring via e-mail and weblogs, and that's something I can often do from home, but it's only visible to those students who are heavy internet users.

I'm able to manage the work that I'm doing over this summer (an independent study and a more informal web project), so if you're one of my students and you're reading this, don't worry, I'm not complaining about you. But colleagues have suggested that I make sure to consider my own writing as important as my students'. Time-management, that skill that I'm supposed to be able to teach freshmen, is something that I still struggle with. I made a big mistake in putting a lot of time into marking rough drafts of final papers in one of my classes this term... a miniscule number of students actually bothered to revise it. One student put in 98 minutes of time revising an F paper and seemed to expect that it would be worth an A or B. (How do I know the revision took 98 minutes? Check out MS-Word, File -> Properties -> Statistics.) Over the course of several drafts, consultations, and e-mails, I spent almost that much time evaluating the paper. Yes, I'd like to give students a chance, but obviously I didn't manage my own resources well that time.

Right now, my daughter is running around at my feet, scribbling on post-it notes with whiteboard markers. Any minute now she's going to get bored and she's going to need my attention. I can blog knowing that any moment I'm going to have to pause in mid-word to grab something out of her hand (she just tried to throw a set of keys at my 20-inch LCD monitor), but I can't do much else. (Now Carolyn has just noticed a mole on the back of my neck, and she has asked about twelve times, "Why do you have a boo-boo?")

On top of that, some long-term research that I've been working on over the past few years has suddenly started to pay off big-time. I'm uncovering new information more quickly than I could possibly process it even if I had a full-time research assistant, and I've somehow got to do it while The Wiggles are on TV.

I chose this life, of course, so I'm not complaining -- I'm just reflecting. I won't get fired if I don't get my latest findings in a journal article this fall. Nobody will die of a disease that my findings might cure. Ecosystems won't be affected by my absence from a big national conference.

Still, at times like this I think of my alternate life. Torill Mortenson's recent "mommy moment" post makes me think. She reflects on how happy she is to have grown children. "Who needs soft marsipan-sweet cheeks and sticky paws when I can have a firm jaw and a strong hand to carry the heavy suitcase or drive the car?"

I'm not ready to give up the sweet cheeks and sticky paws -- not yet. I'm being pawed and kissed by a lollipop-slurping preschooler at the moment, so I'm signing off for now. Everything else is going to have to wait.

Mine Ears Have Heard the Tinkling of the Righteous Ice Cream Bells (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

An ice cream truck just drove by our street, playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". It's an emotionally rousing march, but it sounded very strange in this jingly kid-attracting arrangement. Okay, it was part of a patriotic medley, but it was still uncanny.

I haven't been this creeped out by music since the time I was in an elevator and heard a mellow instrumental rendition of Michael Jackson's "Thriller".

My daughter asked whether the music was supposed to put children to sleep, and before I knew it, I was telling her that this is "the sandvan," that drives around neighborhood during naptime.

Whether you're a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you've been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post.

Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don't want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory, republish an AP news story that's under copyright, or write a lengthy piece detailing the alleged crimes of a candidate for public office.

The difference between you and the reporter at your local newspaper is that in many cases, you may not have the benefit of training or resources to help you determine whether what you're doing is legal. And on top of that, sometimes knowing the law doesn't help - in many cases it was written for traditional journalists, and the courts haven't yet decided how it applies to bloggers.

But here's the important part: None of this should stop you from blogging. --Legal Guide for Bloggers (Electronic Freedom Foundation)

Also worth noting: Bloggers' FAQ on Defamation and Bloggers' FAQ on Intellectual Property

Why have monograph sales declined so sharply? Is it because readers are turning to other sources of information like the Internet, as many observers have speculated? The main explanation almost certainly lies elsewhere. Research libraries constitute a principal market for scholarly monographs, and in the course of the 1980s and 1990s they were subjected to intense pressures of their own: the steep rise in the prices of scientific journals and the increasing costs of information technology. Library budgets were limited, and something had to give. In the period from 1986 to 1998-99, the number of monographs purchased annually by research libraries in the United States declined by more than 25 percent. Since academic publishers were also producing more monographs each year, that meant that an ever-increasing range of available titles was competing for a dwindling pool of resources. --John B. Thompson --Survival Strategies for Academic Publishing (Chronicle of Higher Education)

This article is designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media. We'll look at how news organizations can employ the citizen-journalism concept, and we'll approach it by looking at the different levels or layers available. Citizen journalism isn't one simple concept that can be applied universally by all news organizations. It's much more complex, with many potential variations. --Steve Outing --The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism (PoynterOnline)

If citizen journalist websites would organize some kind of virtual internships, in order to encourage promising student journalists and make them think seriously about how they can develop their talents, moving them from personal rants to quality research and reporting, how would that affect my role as a journalism teacher? A question to ponder.

[T]he process by which a fringe subculture, through its idiosyncratic reception of Tolkien's fiction, ultimately came to define the "medieval" imagery, pacing, and plotting of one of the most popular film series in history is a relatively recent development. What was once a conception of Tolkien's medieval fantasy realm held by an eccentric few has since become the predominant visualization of the medieval world-- Tolkien's and otherwise-- held by the generations, like Menand's nephew, raised in a world of personal computers. --Courtney M. Booker --Byte-Sized Middle Ages: Tolkein, Film, and the Digital Imagination (PDF) (University of British Columbia)

The article includes an unsurprising but detailed treatment of the relationship between Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons, and Colossal Cave Adventure, drawing from canonical sources.

I don't think I learned anything knew about Adventure from reading this article, but Booker has connected enough of the dots that I'm relieved I can just quote her him in an article I'm working on, rather than have to write it all out myself.

If you're on a slow connection, try Google's HTML cache.

One of the many reasons why a PDF isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. The PDF doesn't contain any of the publication information. I had to get it from the author's homepage.

"Byte-sized Middle Ages: Tolkien, Film, and the Digital Imagination," Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 35 (2004): 145-74.

Update, 12 Jan 2006: The URL moved. I've updated it.

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually intruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant bills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings. --H.P. Lovecraft --The Beast in the Cave (The Works of H.P. Lovecraft)

I had been searching for a quotation from Thoreau, "unfathomed mammoth cave."

This story features getting lost in "the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave," "wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues," a light source that goes out, and the lobbing of missiles at an unseen foe. Reminds me more of Hunt the Wumpus than Colossal Cave Adventure.

The story also refers to the practice of using caves as a sort of hospital for patients with consumption.

No, the beast isn't a grue, but the story -- while far from Lovecraft's best -- was a pleasant find. Still, ending with a final capitalized word, with three exclamation marks, is a bit TRITE!!!

Entering Daddy Mode (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Each day this week, my nocturnal wife (a full-time home-schooling mother who never schedules anything before 11am) will get up early in the morning and head off to work.

The director of the local Suzuki music school asked her to direct a play as part of a week-long, 9-5 music camp for about 25 kids. We're counting the music camp as a full week of schooling, something Leigh would have had to put the time in to do anyway. They're paying us by letting our son attend the camp for free, and also giving him free tuition for his next set of lessons. Since the music lessons aren't cheap, we're pretty pleased with the deal.

So I'll be home with our three-year-old daughter for the whole week. One of the reasons I wanted to be a professor was because I wanted to be able to spend time with my family, and I've already been home for a couple weeks now that classes are over. It's not going to feel unusual for me to be the primary care-giver. What will be unusual is that I'll get so much time with Carolyn, without her brother and mother around.

While I'm not expecting next week to be like the Brady Bunch episode where Mike and Carol switch roles, it's been somewhat reassuring hearing my wife putting off decisions and telling people over the phone that she's stressed and can't think straight since she's been spending so much time preparing for the music camp. I always feel that way right before classes start. But here's my chance to be a supportive spouse. I'll get up in the morning to see her off, and I won't hand her a poopy baby the moment she comes in the door.

She'll have plenty of "down time" during the day, since she actually only gets a few hours of rehearsal time, and someone else will teach the kids the songs, so she's already talking about letting me take Peter there in the morning, and showing up herself around noon. And my wife says I can work in the evenings on an article that has a June 15 deadline, but I'm sure I'll still be drafted for bathtime and bedtime. But for the time being, it's pleasant to think about role-reversal.

I blogged about my son's first exposure to Suzuki music last year. Since then, I've been incredibly impressed with his progress. Last week, his teacher played a new tune for him twice on the piano, and wrote down a simplified notation that tells what finger should hit which note (A, B, C, etc.) and for how long. The next day, I asked him to play the new song for his mother, and he played it almost perfectly. (He uses a toy piano at home, so the key widths are not what he's used to in his lessons.) With practice, he can play two-handed pieces with three-finger chords.

For the show, I had suggested a kids version of 101 Dalmatians, but she opted instead for a musical on the life of George M. Cohan.

General Electric is the latest big corporate convert; politicians at the state and national level are looking for solutions; and religious groups are taking philosophical and financial stands to slow the progression of climate change.

They agree that the problem is real. A recent study led by James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies confirms that, because of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases, Earth is trapping more energy from the sun than it is releasing back into space. --Dan Vergano --The debate's over: Globe is warming (USA Today)

I've blogged before on the global warming issue.

Vergano notes that companies are responding not to recent, more convincing scientific evidence, but to public pressure from shareholders.

Listen to the voices of many of the best writers of the English language. These uncut, behind-the-scenes interviews were the foundation of Don Swaim's long-running CBS Radio show, Book Beat. --Author Interviews by Don Swain (Wired for Books)

Great collection of literary interviews. Blogging this for future reference.

"You mean to tell me that we have just purchased a mega-expensive computer that will build robots, drive cars, walk, talk, and probably wash windows and you want a text computer game that requires less than 640K RAM and a black and white monitor to run?" Indeed that was what he wanted, and off we went to the computer store. We returned with Zork. --Lorelle VanFossen --Computer Game -- She's Got a Thing for Spring (Taking Your Camera on the Road)

My wife is not a geek. Today she mentioned, out of the blue, that one of the things she admires about me is that I'm clever enough to find things on the internet. She says she's not the slightest bit interested in doing anything like that herself, she says, but it was still a nice ego boost to hear the mother of your children say she's impressed by something you can do.

Lorelle VanFossen is here writing about the nature-themed IF game, "She's Got a Thing for Spring." While her history of the text adventure genre conflates Zork with Adventure, her description of a personal connection to text adventure games is precious. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter, I started writing a text-adventure game in which the PC is in the delivery room about to give birth, but for some reason my wife wasn't very thrilled with the demo I showed her. (She tactfully encouraged the other games I had in the works, rather than coming right out and saying she didn't like the game I'd written, but I still got the message.)

Her workout on the Stairmaster pumped the clot right through a too-porous wall in the heart on a direct path to the right side of her brain.

Hurrying down to the gym, I suspected that whatever the "small" problem was, we might still have time to make the play. Instead, our lives were about to change fundamentally, and we were both about to experience firsthand the inner workings of British health care.

We spent almost a full month in a British public hospital. We also arranged for a complex medical procedure to be done in one of the few remaining private hospitals in Britain. My wife then spent about three weeks recuperating in a New York City hospital as an inpatient and has since used another city hospital for physical therapy as an outpatient. We thus have had a chance to sample the health diet available under two very different systems of health care. Neither system is without its faults and advantages. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions to modern health care problems, only trade-offs. --David Asman --There's No Place Like Home (Opinion Journal)

This semester we are going to experiment with blog technology to practice working on your critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. Frankly, I?m not sure where this is going to go this semester, but I hope we will find this useful and productive. Students last term convinced me that blogs rather than course discussion lists were more useful to them for deep discussion (as opposed to short messages), so let?s see if they were right. Jo Koster --CRTW201 Blogging Home Page (Winthrop University)

I found that students who only blogged sporadically sometimes found it difficult to remember which peer blogs they had commented on. I like the idea of a blog sheet, though I wonder if it might be more useful to have students keep that log online, as one of their blog entries.

I have thought about the "designated blogger" role. The whole class benefits when one or two super-dedicated bloggers do a lot of filtering and cross-linking. But I'd like to spread that responsibility around a bit more...

Lau never expected to become a fortune-cookie writer. After graduating from Columbia with degrees in engineering and business, he joined Bank of America, then ran a company that exported logs from the Pacific Northwest to China. In the early eighties, he was hired by a Chinatown noodle manufacturer, which eventually expanded into fortune cookies. The firm bought the Long Island City plant, and it soon became apparent that its antiquated catalogue of fortunes would have to be updated. (?Find someone as gay as you are,? one leftover from the nineteen-forties read.) ?We knew we needed to add new sayings,? Lau said. ?I was chosen because my English was the best of the group, not because I?m a poet.? --Jeremy Olshan --Odd Jobs Dept: Cookie Master (New Yorker)

John Watson, who teaches journalism ethics and communications law at American, has noticed another phenomenon: Many students, he says, believe that simply working hard -- though not necessarily doing excellent work -- entitles them to an A. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student dispute a grade, not on the basis of in-class performance," says Watson, "but on the basis of how hard they tried. I appreciate the effort, and it always produces positive results, but not always the exact results the student wants. We all have different levels of talent."

It's a concept that many students (and their parents) have a hard time grasping. Working hard, especially the night before a test or a paper due date, does not necessarily produce good grades.

"At the age of 50, if I work extremely hard, I can run a mile in eight minutes," says Watson. "I have students who can jog through a mile in seven minutes and barely sweat. They will always finish before me and that's not fair. Or is it?" --Alicia C. Shepard --A's for Everyone! (Washington Post (will expire))

Its doughnuts, available for many years only in the Southeast, had attracted a devoted, even fanatical, customer base. When the company decided to go national, it opened franchises in locations guaranteed to generate buzz ? Manhattan, Los Angeles, Las Vegas ? and customers lined up around the block. By August 2003, KKD was trading at nearly $50 on the New York Stock Exchange, up 235 percent from its initial public offering price of $21 on Nasdaq, and Fortune magazine was calling Krispy Kreme the "hottest brand in the land." For the fiscal year ended in February 2004, the company reported $665.6 million in sales and $94.7 million in operating profit from its nearly 400 locations, including stores in Australia, Canada, and South Korea. --Kremed! (CFO.com)

Wait a minute... $21 x 2.35 = 49.35, so "nearly $50" is accurate. But "up 235%"?

$21 x 1.00 = $21, but I wouldn't say "trading at $21, up 100% from its initial public offering price of $21."

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that should read "up 135%." Am I wrong?

The new so-called "size law" will force clothes sellers to display and exhibit larger clothes sizes in their stores, in an attempt to address the problem of bulimia and anorexia in teenagers. --Argentina to Implement Size Law (China Broadcst)

Just filing this for the next time I get a freshman comp research paper with an "Advertisers should show more diverse body images" thesis.

If you saw her in Santa Monica, even in her Mex red apron, you would assume she was an actress. She could easily fill in for a bad blonde in a Mexican telenovela. Yet she shows little animation in her work, and falls short even in the conventional friendliness that I?ve received from checkers at other stores here. Even her colleague at the Mex meat and cheese counter gets a kick out of my fractured attempts at communication (and I?m just going to mention the counter-girls at the bakery who treat my visits like a game). But the check-out movie star offers little more than ?izvolite? when she hands over my change.

I had a chance to explore this with several of my students. After my the last lecture of my course, a few of them joined me for drinks at the Atrium. Three of the young women considered my question about the difference in optimism between young men and women.

?I am not a pessimist,? said Tatiana Metiko?.

Ana Pono? agrees in rejecting pessimism. ?I am a realist,? she said. --John Spurlock --Some notes on gender (The Blue Monkey Review)

Very interesting observations about deeply-embedded masculine privilege in Montenegro.

Spurlock writes: "Ironing probably remains a novel, one-time experience for most of American manhood, or else it is like bungee-jumping, something that they have nothing against but will probably never try."

I've ironed, usually in hotel rooms.

But here's a man's way of ironing. Pointlessly complex, amazingly geeky. Put your shirt over an inflatable parachute-silk form, that heats up and irons your shirt from the inside. (Via BoingBoing.)


Awesome! Now if we could just somehow get an open flame involved, or more moving parts that make a lot of noise...

Of course, if you take your shirts out of the dryer when they are still a bit damp, and hang them up while they are still hot, you don't have to iron them at all. You can also just throw a shirt into the dryer along with a wet handkerchief, go brush your teeth, and when you're done, both the shirt and hanky are wrinkle-free.

While the debate on the moral virtues of any particular form of grade distribution fascinates as cultural artifact, the variability of grading standards has a more practical consequence. As grades increasingly reflect an idiosyncratic and locally defined performance levels, their value for outside consumers of university products declines. Who knows what an ?A? in American History means? Is the A student one of the top 10 percent in the class or one of the top 50 percent?

Fuzziness in grading reflects a general fuzziness in defining clearly what we teach our students and what we expect of them. When asked to defend our grading practices by external observers ? parents, employers, graduate schools, or professional schools ? our answers tend toward a vague if earnest exposition on the complexity of learning, the motivational differences in evaluation techniques, and the pedagogical value of learning over grading. All of this may well be true in some abstract sense, but our consumers find our explanations unpersuasive and on occasion misleading. --John V. Lombardi --Grade Inflation and Abdication (Inside Higher Ed)

"Since the war has ended, all is good."
"Are the people happy?" I asked.
Mr. Shukry paused for a moment, as if it were the simplest question he'd been asked in months, "Of course they are happy," he said.
"Are you Muslim?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. --Michael Yon --A Fork in the Road (Michael Yon: Online Magazine)

Grocery stores full of fresh fruit. Gleaming kitchen appliances and widescreen TVs. A picnic in northern Iraq.

A fascinating report from Dohuk.

If you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it?s not the right time to discuss with your passengers where y?all would like to stop for dinner. But as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn?t serve the greater good of whatever they?re trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where as the post enlightenment west, and perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes of intelligence). --Scott Berkun --Why smart people defend bad ideas (ScottBerkun.com)

Ross, a professional actor who had spent years working with theater groups across Canada, knew how to mimic all the voices in "Star Wars" - as well as the fluorescent hum of a lightsaber - when he set about adapting the trilogy for stage. Ross and director T.J. Dawe then devised ways to physically represent each character so that the audience knows who they're watching at any moment. At times, Ross seems to fully embody the roles he's playing; at other times, he relies on a simple gesture as a shorthand. Leia's infamous bun hairstyle, for example, is represented by hands cupped around the ears. The actor isn't afraid to editorialize, either - Obi Wan's nose does a Pinocchio every time he talks about how Luke's father died. --Stephen Humphries --How to do the Star Wars trilogy in 58 minutes (Christian Science Monitor)

The same actor also does a 60-minute Lord of the Rings -- and I'm sure he's spoofing the movies, not the books.

An interesting example of remediation. Much more creative and dependent upon performer talent than the Disney stage versions which re-create the cartoons that re-told stories from other genres. (Don't forget Stoppard's 15-minute Hamlet.)

Yay for the students who...

• ...hand in their assignment a week early and still manage to go above and beyond what is asked of them.
• ...write far more than the required minimum by the time you ask for a rough draft.
• ...progress from a C on the first exam to an A on the third exam.
• ...want their final papers back after the semester is over.
• ...produce a high-quality original video when asked to present a visual aid for their group presentation.
• ...e-mail me after the semester is over and ask what you're teaching next semester, so they can take a class with you again.
• ...consistently model your perception of exceptional performance on every assignment.

Yes, I do get these people. Not as often as I get the slackers who throw out all of their notes after an exam is over, but often enough. And they make me happy. --Adjunct Kait --Salute to the good people (Did we do anything important today?)

Thanks for the reminder, Kait.

It's hard to figure out where to draw the line, how to come across as personable and friendly in my role as newspaper adviser, but still establish a professional academic environment that holds students accountable for their actions. Which incidents or omissions do I let pass without comment, and which require a more serious response?

Even the best students are human, and you can't expect them to be their best all the time. Neither can I be always at my best. Sometimes students have smelled my weaknesses and used them against me in completely inappropriate ways, and sometimes students have sent personal notes that come at precisely the right time (thanks, Moira!).

So far, the good continues to outweigh the bad.

So let's say you popped up your news aggregator of choice and have subscribed to each of those blogs. How much would you read? How much information would you get? Our little analysis shows you would have read a bit under 22,000 words. That would amount, in terms of printed pages, to 44 single spaced pages.

Your alternative? Well, on that day, you could have picked up the New York Times and read every stories on the front page. That would have netted you 12,964 words, or about 22 single spaced printed pages. You could have listened to the evening news, are about 3000 more words. Ultimately, you would have consumed more words reading blogs than going with mainstream media: 5 TV shows would have netted you about 15,000 words. 5 newspaper stories (assuming a different report on each story) would have netted you about 8,000 words. So blogs are much more prolific in terms of words. --Tristan Louis --Secrets of the A-List Bloggers: Lots of short entries (TNL.net)

I've done this kind of analysis on student weblogs. Students who draft their work offline, then post it online don't tend to create links within their text. Students who post an entry that offers a well-thought-out conclusion don't often get comments more involved than, "Good post."

Students who pose stark questions don't tend to get replies, unless the question is posted within the context of an entry that shows the student is giving away the benefit of some significant thinking.

Students who are looking for comments from peers will sometimes get offended when their peers don't write back. I have resisted requiring students to respond to a given number of blog entries. I do plan to ask students to post entries centered around their analysis of excerpts from primary sources, and to ask them to respond to similar entries posted on peer blogs. There is room for students to get credit for "wildcard" blogging -- that is, an off-topic post that builds community or permits them to experiment with the weblog format. There is also room in my weblog evaluation rubric for students to get credit for the work they do to help their peer's blogs, such as posting links to those blogs, posting followups prompted by something somebody posted on another blog, or leaving long comments on peer blogs.

But I want to preserve at least part of the "gift" value of a comment or an inbound link. I tell students that if they like getting comments, then they should reply thoughtfully to the comments left by their peers, and they should visit and contribute meaningfully to the weblogs of all peers who leave comments. The students will pretty quickly figure out who is not likely to return the favor of a comment, and they will invest their energies elsewhere. The students who put more than the usual amount of effort into their blogging will find each other. This can lead to a kind of digital divide, as knots of students who already know what their peers think about a certain text either dominate the in-class discussion or feel bored as the in-class discussion covers the same ground they covered last night.

So while I resist forcing students to comment on peer blogs, I think I might start each discussion period with a question based on something a student blogged about the day before, and/or a discussion that is currently productive. If I work that into a short reading quiz offered in the first five minutes of class, that creates an incentive for students at least to lurk on the blogs, and to come to class on time so they can write the mini-quiz. I recognize that not all students will have the time to check the blogs right before class, and I don't want to reward the kind of last-minute blogging that involves banging out something in the computer lab across the hall from the classroom. So I'll need to think about this for a bit.

A student has just shown up for a consultation, so ttfn.

• Make a list of the things you want to do before you die. Be as open to your heart as you possibly can. Now, throw that ridiculous piece of trash away and get your ass to work. The ball is over, Cinderella.
• Contrary to what you may have heard about business, you should not think outside the box. You should get your green-as-grass self back in the box and don't come out unless it's to bring me some hot coffee and do my work so I can take credit for it. Welcome to the working world, Rookie.

--Mr. Sun --Mr. Sun's Advice for Graduates (Mr. Sun!)

I love being a blogger, so I can link to what I don't have the guts to write myself. Mr. Sun leads with the best stuff, so the rest of the list isn't as good, though the anecdote about the Senior Vice-President of Bedwetting is worth checking out.

Sometimes I feel like I should start a new blogging category called "entitlement."

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mighty small: one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in chills when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike unclefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff. --Poul Anderson --Ander-Saxon (Wikipedia)

Anderson offered this scientific treatise, which replaces all Greek and Latin roots with their Germanic equivalent. Thus, "molecule" becomes a "bulkbit." I find this passage fascinating, due in part to the sensual, gut-level connotations of Germanic roots in the English language. French, Latin, and Greek were the languages of high culture, the intellect, and government -- because when the Norman conquerors came to England, they brought their own vocabulary with them. Meanwhile, the peasants out in the fields continued using their own words for their earthy activities, as we can see in the labor-related word elements used in coinages like "scourstuff" and "seedweight."

Do I dare introduce a translation exercise such as this into my Intro to Literary Study class next spring? We already have blank-verse writing assignments. How about "Blog in Ander-Saxon Day"?

As it happens, "web" is from the Old English "webb" and "log" is of unknown origin. Taking "log" to mean "record," that takes us back to the Latin "recordari," with "re" meaning "back" and "cor" meaning "heart." (It was thought that the heart was the seat of memory thus, "record" = "to bring back to the heart".)

The sense of "back" here really means "a return in time" rather than a spatial relationship, so I'll jump right to the Anglo-Saxon word "go," the past tense of which was originally "wend". Thus, I suggest "webwending" or "webheartwending" for "weblog."

The archives would probably be the "wendinghoard."

Permalink = "fastyoke" or "fastbind". (I like the idea of "yoke" rather than "bind", since you bind something to you to keep it getting away, but you yoke yourself to something else in order to use its power to help you move something. But I guess "fastlink" would do.)

Well, that's enough fun for this morning. I hear my daughter's woken up.

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

[...]

"We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We don't have an anthology of readings. We don't discuss current events. We don't exchange views on hot-button issues. We don't tell each other what we think about anything - except about how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function." The reason we don't do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show. --Stanley Fish --Devoid of Content (NY Times (will expire))

At Seton Hill, at present we have a two-semester course called "Seminar in Thinking in Writing," which attempts to cover freshman comp, an introduction to cultural studies (education, gender, family, race, etc.), and a first-year experience program. There are certain topics that I exclude from consideration -- abortion and gay marriage, for example (I've never read a student paper on those topics that takes "the other side" seriously, no matter what side the student takes). I should probably add "images of women in advertising media," since the student argument is pretty much always, "Advertisers should show healthy images of women," and the paper never actually spells out what kind of benevolent dictatorship would force publishers to follow that directive, or what punishments should be visited upon those who dare to exercise their first amendment rights.

A few weeks ago, a committee led by our newly-hired comp director, Laura Patterson, agreed to change the program so that it begins with a one-semester composition course that students can test out of, and that they must re-take as many times as necessary in order to pass it. Then they move on to a one-semester course on cultural studies (intended to focus on developing critical thinking skills), and then one or two subject-specific writing courses. In the humanities program, we are thinking of two courses -- one early in the program that covers all the humanities, and then another for the specific major. In fine arts, students learn in ways other than writing, so the faculty there don't think that a writing-intensive course will be helpful until after the students have done the studio courses and learned the material that they will need to write about in their upper-level courses. Nobody from the natural sciences or math was at that meeting, so we realize we have some information gathering to do.

One of the problems with our current two-semester plan is that students who are good writers have to take it anyway, since the cultural content delivered by the course is considered important to the core curriculum.

I won't be teaching Seminar in Thinking and Writing in the fall, but I will be piloting one of the mid-level writing intensive courses, specifically American Lit (which serves as a Gen Ed course for students seeking "American Culture" credit, as a required coverage course for English majors, and a broadening course for education students who may or may not be planning to teach English.

I spent more time on the grammar component in "Introduction to Literary Studies," and while some students were worried about it (writing essays that pleaded for leniency), when we spent a while on professionalism, I thought I noticed a slight shift towards realism. Several students who desired to m