July 2005 Archive Page

The woods were all a-twitter with rumors that the Seven Dwarves were planning a live reunion after their attempted solo careers had dismally sputtered into Z-list oblivion and it was all just a matter of meeting a ten-page list of outlandish demands (including 700-threadcount Egyptian cotton bedsheets, lots of white lilies and a separate trailer for the magic talking mirror) to get the Princess Formerly Known As Snow White on board. --Shelby Leung --Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: 2005 Results (San Jose State University)

The "winner" in the Children's Lit category. The purpose of the contest is, of course, to be terrible. This one fits the bill.

Don't get all more-grammatical-than-thou. "Like" and "totally" can help establish ironic distance. Using the present tense to refer to something past or future can lend immediacy and emphasis. A caveat: Use sparingly if you're over 30 and don't want to be seen as one of those pathetic old types who chat up teenagers at the mall. I mean, ick. --Jay Heinrichs --I'm, like, totally there! (Figures of Speech -- It Figures)

The other day I got an e-mail from Heinrichs, inviting me to check out his website, where he regularly takes a quotation or term from current events or popular culture, and examines it according to the principles of classical rhetoric. While he knows his stuff, he's clearly interested in reaching an audience beyond stuffy academics. His "What's in It for You?" section encapsulates a take-away message for busy professionals. Very Dale Carnegie.

Heinrichs also has a forthcoming book, In Praise of Argument. The promo page suggests the book will be well-written and catchy.

When I used Eats, Shoots and Leaves as a humorous way to introduce punctuation to my Intro to Literary Study class last spring, it's probably true that the humor and lively writing kept the students reading, but some students who found punctuation difficult didn't like the feeling that Lynn Truss was laughing at them. While I think it's important for English majors to learn proper punctuation, I assigned Truss's book as an example of creative non-fiction, and I was more interested in getting students to look at the author's strategies and critique their effectiveness. I didn't give them punctuation drills, so the subject matter was really secondary.

Perhaps, instead of a unit on punctuation, I should try a unit on rhetoric, and just keep working on punctuation on an ad-hoc basis, through the drafting stage.

Something to think about.

I might understand it if Wal-Mart said I ought to fire Mark because what he said wasn't accurate. But that isn't the case. Mark accurately reported that there are 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees in a health-care program that is costing Georgia taxpayers nearly $10 million a year.

Shouldn't we talk about that? --Randy Hammer --Here's why you can't buy the News Journal at Wal-Mart (Pensacola News Journal)

As a Jew, the swastika is an image that should repel me. But as a decades-long lover of Eastern religions, I understand the history and true intent of this ancient symbol. In the East, the swastika is actually supposed to bring good luck.

How did this ancient symbol of cosmic benevolence become a modern logo for evil?

According to scholars, the swastika may be as old as 10,000 years. --Eileen Weintraub --The REAL Swastika: The logo of modern evil has a benign ancient face (Aquarian Online)

Via MetaFilter.

Now, the notion that story doesn't matter is worst with the industry old-timers. "Just repeat that 30 seconds of gameplay, and you've got it," I've heard. Or worse: "We've never had to worry about of that story stuff before."

Maybe that's okay for a small audience of addicted gamers, but the new charter for platforms like Xbox 360 is to appeal to a mass audience, not necessarily people who have even played games before. That means that if games are ever to rise to the level of universal cultural experiences, the way movies have, we have to figure out the same story problems movies did in the last century. --What Every Game Developer Needs to Know about Story (Gamasutra)

Dear Sen. Clinton:

I'm writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent weeks against the notorious "Grand Theft Auto" series.

I'd like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids -- a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.

I'm talking, of course, about high school football. --Steven Johnson --Hillary vs. the Xbox: Game over (LA Times (will expire))

First, students simply cannot absorb and retain information that is given in one-shot. The beauty of classes that meet three times a week is that students have a chance to replay the information in their heads and practice. With the guiding hand of the instructor, they can get even more direction and be assured that they are “getting it.” An exception to this observation seem to be courses that have more than one part — a lecture and lab, for instance. In some cases, higher level literature courses work, too. There, students get enough time to “get into” the topic. Even in these courses, I still have concerns about the ability to actually learn material when a student is only given one contact period with the instructor.

Second, with courses that meet once a week, students often forget most of the material by the next week. Only the most disciplined students who practice outside of class will be assured that they will succeed. Marginal students often fail.

[..]

In many topics, trying to cover the same amount of work in 16 sessions rather than 48 is impossible. Not only do students retain less, but the nature of the three-hour course does not lend itself to reading a full-length book (or some other large task) every week. Students don’t keep up with work and end up dropping or failing.--Shari Wilson --Once a Week is Not Enough (Inside Higher Ed)

Last term, my evening class met only 13 times, and during one of those times I was away at a conference. What with Spring Break, my conference, and Easter Break, there was a three-week period where we didn't meet at all.

I'm teaching two sections of American Lit this fall. One meets Tu/Th, the other Wed evening.

I was glad to find that someone has so carefully investigated and categorizes the challenges that one-day-a-week courses face, though I can't say I'm very heartened about it.

Besides the simple fact that it's exhausting to be "on" for three hours, some students who only come to campus one day a week want me to meet with them after class. I've got children to bathe and bedtime stories to read, and I've also been on campus for 12 hours, so I'm perhaps not in my most helpful mood. And, of course, many of the students who sign up for night courses do so because they have 9-5 jobs.

Wilson doesn't talk about how an online component can help keep students in touch with the professor and with each other during the week.

There was not a soul on the road when we held hands in the water and began walking.

One of the girls was shorter than us, so we asked her to walk along the road divider holding our hands.

People took out boats to negotiate water logged streets
The water was deep - I mean if you were 5ft tall, you would easily drown.

As we waddled into the eerie, rain-whipped night, we felt like we were floating.

Water walk

As we walked on more and more people joined the trek, holding hands.

The water was black and greasy right up to our necks and swirled fast around our waists. --Anjali Krishnan -- Wading all night through Mumbai (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. A great account of how the human spirit can rise to the occasion.

If you're in the news business you see this stuff all the time. I mean, when a corproate CEO is quoted as saying, "I am gratified by the performance of our frabjab-widget business unit during the quarter, when the trajectory of widget sales continued to move in a favorable direction," you can be fairly sure that this line was written, not uttered, and not by the guy being quoted.

Now, I grant that it's even more stupid than usual for a PR person to use the same (probably fake) quote in separate releases. And you'd think that the military could find a real person to quote. But this kind of thing is only a surprise to people who think that quotes in press releases have actually been spoken out loud by actual people, except on the rarest of occasions. --Dan Gillmor --Military Making Up Quotes? I'm Shocked, Shocked (Dan Gillmor's Blog)

Gillmor is no warhawk, so I found his scolding of the mainstream media's eyebrow-raising to be noteworthy.

For the most part, we are blind to the mediated nature of desire. But the great writers, according to Girard, are more lucid about this. They reveal the inner logic of desire, including its tendency to spread -- and, in spreading, to generate conflict. When several hands reach for the same object, some of them are bound to end up making fists. So begins a cycle of terror and retaliation; for violence, too, is mimetic. --Scott McLemee --Violence and the Sacred (Inside Higher Ed)

Taken in isolation, NO always means NO. But in a conversation, there is always a surrounding context for the use of the word “No.” In a routine conversation, we extrapolate or infer a ton of non-verbal information and automatically apply it to attempt to determine the “real” meaning.

For example, let’s say I offer you a sandwich. You say “No.” Now, in isolation you’re refusing the offer of a sandwich by saying “No.” However, based on the surrounding circumstances (or possibly body language) I would likely infer certain things – perhaps that you’re not hungry, or you are wanting to be polite because it’s the last sandwich and you know I haven’t eaten in a week, or whatever. All that additional information is processed in connection with the word “No” and we have to call it “subtext” because there’s nothing else to call it. It isn’t on the surface of what is said, but it exists. --Bill Wallo --Screenplay Subtext (Wallo World)

I'm dusting off a drama survey course I haven't taught in several years, and thought I'd see what I can find online. I hope that this article, which demonstrates how much effort writers put into creating subtext, will help encourage my students to put the time into developing the ability to recognize subtext without the benefit of music cues and the expressions on actors' faces.

"Look," I said. "I happen to know that the address www.abc.com has not been registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical computer guy, and have him register www.abc.com immediately. Don't even think about it. It will be a good thing to do." They thanked me vacantly. I checked a week later. The domain was still unregistered. --Kevin Kelley --We Are the Web  (Wired)

Vannevar Bush actually started putting his ideas together in the 30s; the article simplifies the process to the date 1945.

My brother, a political scientist at a Scottish university, has always worn a coat and tie to class. "Why do you dress up like that?" I asked him once. I knew it didn't relate to his teaching; he runs a very interactive classroom, with plenty of discussion and argument. He's also a nice, laid-back guy.

"I don't know, "he said. "I like dressing up."

Weirdo. --James M. Lang --Looking Like a Professor (Chronicle)

My favorite line from Oscar Wilde: "If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated."

When I taught technical writing, I was a suit-and-tie guy. Now I kind of miss the suit, but it's always a dress shirt, usually a tie, and usually a jacket.

While gangsta rap is seen as celebrating the violence and aggression that claimed two of its brightest stars, "geeksta" rap is a hip-hop genre celebrating coding skills and school grades.

Also dubbed "nerdcore," this branch of hip-hop is for geeks, by geeks. --Robert Andrews --Rap Marketing Comes to Nerdcore  (Wired)

Fazio said there are only eight people left trained to hammer the stones into place, a task that requires considerable skill and, he says, "no little muscle," while supplies of the cobblestones themselves have been stretched in recent years as the last workshops producing them closed down.

The stones were produced from deposits of volcanic rock that once spewed from the hills around Rome.

Though sampietrini that are removed are recycled, the city resorted to importing machine-made cobblestones from China amid efforts to spruce up Rome for jubilee celebrations in 2000. Fazio said that the experiment was dropped after engineers complained about the quality of those stones. --Aidan Lewis --Rome Ending Cobblestone Era (AP|MyWay)

--United States of America: Geography -- Level 6 (Sheppard Software)

This is a Flash game that asks you to place each of the states on a map. My average error was 14 miles. (Hint: look at the rivers.)

If you put a state in the right location, it disappears -- which means it's not visible to help you place the next state. If you get a state wrong, the outline appears on the map in red. So if you're good, the game won't get easier as you continue. If you make a lot of mistakes, the game will get easier.

Via Metafilter (which has links to some other country maps, too.)

Discovery and seven astronauts blasted into orbit Tuesday on America's first manned space shot since the 2003 Columbia disaster, ending a painful, 2 1/2-year shutdown devoted to making the shuttle less risky and NASA more safety-conscious. --Shuttle Discovery Blasts Into Orbit (AP|MyWay)

Thursday on Oprah they were talking to bereaved parents and they had a mother on whose son swallowed a nail when he was two, but no one saw him do it, and I guess the thing just ripped him up from the inside over the course of a few days, and by the time she realized something was wrong and took him to the hospital it was too late, and he died. It was so sad.

[Pause]

Did you get enough salad? --Ian Bakke's mother --Types of Stories My Mother Tells (The Morning News)

?Hello Georgie,? Condi said. ?Did you come to see Condi?? Condi rubbed my hair and it tickled.

?Dont go messing up his hair,? Dick said. ?Hes got a press conference in a few minutes.?

Condi wiped some spit on her hand and patted down my hair. Her hand was soft and she smelled like Xerox copies coming right out of the machine. ?He looks just fine,? Condi said.--Sam Apple --2005 Faux Faulkner Winner (Hemisphere Magazine)

The happiest and most peaceful parts of the World Wide Web are the places where people are buying things. The nasty parts of the Web are where people are doing what the Founding Surfers intended: expressing themselves and forming communities.

[...]

Having spent a decade working at the devil Microsoft and then at a big "old media" institution, the Los Angeles Times, I am amazed by the hostility that greets any effort to stroll into the clubroom and buy the boys a round of drinks.--Michael Kinsley --Cybercreeps Run Amok: Internet Libertarians Should Learn Civil Discourse (Washington Post (will expire))

Of course the cyberutopians are lofty idealists. And yes, there are plenty of people who choose to express themselves by cursing at people who disagree with them. The anonymity and immediacy of the internet draws out that part of human nature.

"Give me meatspace any day," writes Kinsley, curling up in his mainstream media bubble. Oh, for the good old days, when the only way the unwashed masses could complain was in carefully vetted letters to the editor.

I don't mean to fisk Kinsley, who's a talented journalist who's earned his place of prominence as a liberal commentator. I was thus surprised to find the implied praise of commerce and restrictions on dissenting voices.

Kinsley probably didn't write the article headline, which doesn't have room for the qualifying words (like "often" or "maybe") that Kinsley puts in his essay. Still, Kinsley is approaching the issue with a particular mindset, so I'm amused with his suggestion that the problem lies within cyberspace.

In this essay, we will explore the idea of emergence. We will examine how objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive. We will present examples with simple squares that turn on and off, but the underlying ideas will provide you with a new perspective for thinking about many phenomena in the everyday world. --Resnick and Silverman --Exploring Emergence (Life-Long Kindergarten -- MIT)

An interesting series of short web pages, each with a JavaScript box that demonstrates a concept from Life (a game in which a set of simple rules turns on and off blocks on the screen). Created in 1996.

There are already educational and psychotherapeutic treatments for writer's block, some fairly effective. But remember, not many people want to be treated for hypergraphia. Their writing is usually very important to them. That raises an important point: What right do I have to give a medical name to a character trait that people value in themselves? The reason I do so is that I think talking about creative drive in neurological terms does not have to degrade the experience or value of creativity. The medical terminology can coexist with the equally important, more subjective language that we are more comfortable with. And this approach can also bring in the increasingly powerful ability of neuroscience to treat brain conditions.

As for treating writer's block, there is much more consensus among people who have it that it needs treatment. And there is a long history of writers self-medicating, usually not very successfully, with everything from alcohol to coffee to amphetamines. There are many ways to get blocked. For instance, some writers have a feeling of emptiness, as if they have no ideas. They might benefit from an antidepressant that is on the stimulating side. Other writers are crippled by perfectionism -- they feel as if they have ideas but can't get them out. In some ways this problem can be treated like stage fright or anxiety disorder. A very unfortunate number of writers have used alcohol to calm this sort of anxiety. It may work in the short term, but in the long term it clearly damages creativity. Recently, although this is very experimental, there has been some evidence that transcortical magnetic stimulation through use of a wand over the temporal lobe can produce in some people the sensation of being visited by the muse. That opens up a new world of medical treatment that is not pill-based for problems of creativity. Although it sounds science fiction-y, this kind of technology is already being used for treatment of Parkinson's disease and depression. --Alice Flaherty on her book, The Midnight Disease --The Midnight Disease -- Press Release (Houghton Mifflin)

I'm Humbler than You Are! Na na-na na-naah! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've been thinking a lot about improvization in education, thanks in part to recent posts on Pedablogue, but also due to Mike Rubino's occasional blog entries about The Cellar Dwellers.

Kids offer great material for improvisation.

I’m immune to the “Are we there yet?” question, because I will deadpan something like the following:

1) “I don’t know… do you see the Children’s Museum yet?” or “Are we parked in Aunt Julie and Uncle Glenn’s driveway yet?”
2) “Just six more days.”
3) “We’re there now.” [Continue driving without comment.]
4) “You were asleep when we got there, so we turned around and we’re headed home now.”
5) “All the good children are already there. Only the naughty children are still here in the car. Since I know you’re both good children, I know that you’re both there already.”

Okay, so perhaps it wasn’t my greatest Dad moment when I pointed to a bunch of decapitated child-sized mannequins and told them they were children who actually yelled their heads off. But when it comes to the family thing, sometimes, I think I’m pretty good at thinking on my feet.

I’ve blogged before about The Obedience Game, which is basically Simon Says without the rule about having to say Simon Says. Sometimes when we’re waiting in line, the kids will beg me to play the obedience game.

“Walk to the chair on the other end of the lobby, turn around, and walk back,” I’ll say. Or, “Jump up and down, while saying three nice things about your sister.” That’s usually good for about ten minutes. The combination of physical action, plus the fact that they’re getting my full attention the whole time, makes the game enjoyable.

It’s harder to find harmony on long car rides, when the kids are strapped in, and when I have to pay attention to my driving.

Last Christmas, my brother offered to give me his 2000 Pontiac Sunfire. Anybody who’s got a brother who’s a bachelor software engineer next year, call up when you know he’s not home, and have your kids sing him a Christmas Carol, then hang up real quick so you don’t use up too many of your Wal-Mart calling card minutes.

Yesterday, the kids were yapping and kicking so much in the back seat that I couldn’t hear a word my mother was saying as she was sitting right next to me. In a fit of desperation, I revoked the privilege of speaking whilst riding in Uncle John’s Racecar.

Once the kids settled down, I felt bad about insisting on total silence, so I asked Peter, “What was the most interesting thing you learned during today’s swim lesson?” After he answered, when Carolyn started yapping again, I silenced her by asserting my right to ask Peter a follow-up question that caught her interest: “If Carolyn were a dolphin, what would she be able to teach you about swimming?”

And in so doing, I invented The Press Conference Game.

After everyone took turns, the kids begged to play it again. I improvised a bit, and instead of asking simple questions, started first telling anecdotes about children who dropped lollipop sticks on the carpet or who kicked the driver’s back seat, causing horrible crashes, and then asking them their reaction.

When it was her turn, my mother, with shining eyes, told the following story:

One day a little boy saw a bright, fancy, shiny car drive up. When the driver got out, the boy said, “That’s a wonderful car!” The driver smiled and said, “Yes, I know. My brother gave it to me.” When the man walked away, the boy stood there, transfixed. “Wow!” he said. “When I grow up, I wish I can be a brother like that!”

When we got home, the kids were practically crawling over each other to set up chairs and wait in an empty room for more moral instruction.

I leaned over to my mother and said, “When I see how well The Press Conference Game went, I can’t help but think I’m pretty good… and after hearing that story you told, now I see where I got it.”

Today my kid-controlling capacity was put to the test. Our family went to a wake.

My wife’s Uncle Glenn was a retired truck driver and a fire and rescue volunteer in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. He’d had a bad heart for years. When we arrived, his open casket was in one room, where a big crowd of his friends my wife’s relatives were paying their respects.

In another room across the hall, his two grandchildren were sitting glumly – a boy a year or two older than my son and a girl a year or two older than my daughter. They immediately started playing just as they always do at family get-togethers.

Their father poked his head into the room from time to time, and I took my cue from him what noise and activity level he thought was appropriate. When he saw Rebecca turning somersaults on the rug to amuse my daughter, he just smiled at her and rubbed her head.

He didn’t see that the older couple sitting in the back of the room was scowling. They began enforcing their own opinion of what they thought was acceptable behavior. At one point, when five-year-old Becca danced too close to them, the man shook his finger at her and snapped, “Your grandfather is lying dead in the next room! How can you behave like that?”

Obviously this old couple wasn’t comfortable sitting in the room with the casket, and obviously they were trying to grieve in their own way. So I volunteered to take all the kids outside.

I got the kids to act the story of Rapunzel, with Becca in the lead role. That went pretty well, with my daughter Carolyn as the wicked witch and son Peter as the handsome knight. Becca’s brother Josh was feeling a bit left out, until he decided that the witch had a warlock husband, whose presence necessitated a violent confrontation that pretty much shot the plot to hell.

My wife had given me all the candy she’d brought with her – two small boxes of Nerds and two packages of Smarties. My daughter the sugar fiend could slurp all that candy down in seconds, so I knew I had to make it last.

“And then Rapunzel, her brave knight, the wicked witch, and the evil warlock all found a magic troll, who guarded a treasure chest filled with four items: The Nerds of Kindness, the Two Smarties of Bravery, and the Nerds of Smartness.”

“We are now competing to see who is the kindest. I will ask each of you a question. Whoever’s answer shows that he or she is the kindest will receive the Nerds of Kindness. Here is the question:

Q: If I gave you The Nerds of Kindness, what would you do with it?”

Carolyn: (Age 3) “Eat it!”

Becca: (Age 5) “Eat it!”

Peter: (Age 7) “[With a knowing smile.] Give it to you!”

Josh: (Age 9) “[Pause.] Do we really have to do what we say we would do? [Pause.] All right, I’d give it to Carolyn!”

Judgment: “Carolyn and Becca gave sensible answers, because Nerds are indeed tasty candy, and candy is wonderful to eat. Peter gave a kind answer, because he said he would give away the Box of Nerds. Josh also gave a kind answer, and he gave it even though he suspected I would actually make him give away the box. Josh wins!”

Josh dutifully handed over the box to Carolyn.

In the competition for the Two Smarties of Bravery, I gave a little mini-lecture on how being charitable means taking a risk, then managed to manipulate both Peter and Josh into saying that if they received the Two Smarties of Bravery, they would give them away. The, of course, I gave one to Peter and one to Josh. They traded, just as I hoped they would.

For the contest for the Nerds of Intelligence, I talked a bit about how important it is to have a good memory. I asked Becca to give me her shoes, and hid them. Then I promised to give the Nerds of Intelligence to whomever could tell me what color were the flowers on Becca’s shoes. Only Becca got that one right.

I’m not the sort of guy who leaves well enough alone, so even when the candy was gone, I announced the theme of the next contest: “Who is the most humble?”

All four kids, already itchy and irritable in their dress clothes and now wired on sugar, started jumping up and down. “I’m the humblest!” “I’m more humble than you are!” “No you’re not!”

After I explained what “humble” meant, soon the kids were pretending to put bandages on each other’s wounds, etc. Peter won a special commendation for his rendition of a sick person’s spasms producing projectile vomiting. The others won some kind of recognition, too.

And that stretched out what might otherwise have been a 30-second infusion of sugar into 45 minutes of socialization and moral instruction. Now each child felt like a winner.

Later on, we tried "Rapunzo," the story of a prince who was imprisoned in a tower, and rescued by a heroic lady who cried, "Rapunzo, Rapunzo, let down your beard!"

I think the funeral home employees may have been trying to tell me something when they brought out colored pencils and drawing paper.

My wife, who saw part of this blog entry in progress, wishes that I append the following: “If, on the other hand, the problem were to be a child’s foot tapping the back of the seat while he drives, he has zero capacity to handle it.” (She’s exaggerating, but not too much.)

I began pondering what life would be like if zombies came around. How would I react? What would my use be to society (because nearly everyone in a zombie movie has a distinct purpose)? How would I survive? What would I be like as a zombie if I did get bitten?

There are obviously a lot of things to think about.

The most pressing issue in my mind, though, is what mall I would live in. --Karissa Kilgore --A to Z-ombie: which malls you should live in (Sugarpacket)

Zombies and shopping malls... a match made in heaven.

Once when my wife chastised our kids for "screaming their heads off" in a mall, we were passing a kids' clothing store that had little mannequins in cute (expensive) kid clothing, but the figures had no heads.

I adopted a very serious expression. "See those kids?" I asked, pointing at the window. "They screamed their heads off. And look what happened to them."

My daughter, who was two at the time, looked around at the floor. "Where did their heads go?"

"They put them in milkshakes," I said. Or something else equally ridiculous. But the kids stopped screaming.

Oh, the power of language.

P.S. With a name like "Kilgore," how can she not love zombie movies?

The evolution of the Internet as collective, public dream via electronic interfaces, and the evolution of human beings into civilizations, has many striking parallels. The earliest networks were often protected by their owners, and communities were relatively secretive or ?cave-dwelling.? The wiki, on the other hand, is out in the open field, where its vulnerability is on display and under attack. The process of its growth resembles agriculture and farming more than anything else.

In a certain sense then, the hyperlink is an extension of the wheel, allowing the traveler to go from one location to another, while the search engine is an explorer ship with its set of built-in navigational instruments. One could say that the word-of-mouth phenomenon is recreated by blogs, and farming on virtual terrain is akin to wikis -- or fertile land. --Rohit Gupta --The avatar versus the journalist: Making meaning, finding truth (Online Journalism Review)

Okay, analogies are useful. This isn't bad, though I'm not sure that "navigation" is the best overall metaphor for working through information. Maybe the first time you find it, but I'm often not so interested in finding something for the first time than I am in finding it again months or years after I came across it for the first time. That's when information-gathering skills really come in handy. So, to me, map-making is a more resonant meatspace term for what helps me use cyberspace effectively. Your mileage may vary.

Oh, and since I'm on a caving kick, there are a few more references to caving in this story.

As I write, I am one week into my retirement from six years as assistant to the president of a Research I university. In many ways, this was a great job. To gain a perch on the heights of academic responsibility while being responsible for very little; to learn the ropes without having to pull strings; to meet persons with political power or money or both and not have to seek favors from them -- might be imaginable ambitions of a (cautious) young person interested in academic administration.

Like Washingtonians picnicking at the battle of Bull Run, to be satisfied as an assistant-to you need to prefer to be a spectator in battle, comfortable away from real action, prepared to retreat when threatened with harm. There are some not constitutionally suited to these jobs. Those who have problems with authority will find having no say-so to be frustrating. Writers may be among those unsuited to long term service as assistants to great persons. --Margaret Gutman Klosko --Picnic at Bull Run (Inside Higher Ed)

A candid article about the atmosphere in which one professional writer was expected to work. The author worked for University of Virginia President John T. Casteen. Back around 1990, I had an internship in the public relations office at the University of Virginia, and while getting my Virginia MA I wrote for the Virginia Engineering Foundation (the fund-raising arm of the e-school). Casteen came on board roughly around that time. (The outgoing president gave our graduation speech -- a fact that I understood and appreciated, though I couldn't help feeling a little shortchanged. Hadn't I seen this guy all over the place during my undergraduate career? Oh, well.)

For the press office, I wrote an article on Thomas Jefferson for inclusion in a press packet given to reporters who were covering a convention of U.S. state governors (attended by then-president Bush the Elder, former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, and a black-haired William Jefferson Clinton, who made absolutely no impression on me a at the time, but who I recognized with a gasp several years later when I was sorting through my photos from the event).

For the engineering school, I mostly wrote newsletter articles, but I helped write advertising copy, and I occasionally helped my boss write letters to donors. I even drafted a speech that the e-school president gave at the opening of a new building. (He used only about 40% of it, and the joke I wrote for him fell completely flat.)

I enjoyed the job and the people, and it was great having the experience and the position as a backup when I applied to PhD schools.

In Indiana, the $9.6 million railroad project funded by state, federal and railroad monies is a cooperative effort that is the "product of a great partnership of private and public officials," according to David J. Collins, president of B&P.

"It was truly a railroad lost to the wilderness," Collins said, explaining the track had been in poor condition for years prior to the project.

Next year, Collins said, it is expected that 1 million tons of coal -- equal to 40,000 truckloads -- will move on the rail line to the power plant. --Amanda Cochran --Rail line reopens in Indiana County (Tribune-Review)

Cochran (a SHU journalism major) mentions the presence of protestors and the concerns of city officials, but the placement of these alternative voices suggests that she's doing her job without making the challenges seem like a groundswell of citizen rage. Note also how she doesn't stick just to one story -- the governor came to our area in order to accomplish several things, so they get a mention in this story.

Yes, the news is less entertaining than Friends, so we need other reasons to watch. But those reasons -- including voter participation, party affiliation, and educational expectations about following the news -- have weakened in the past three decades. We need to turn the tide. But what can we do?

Plenty. First, we must raise our expectations for high-school students. To offer a model of how this might be done, consider the fact that while political participation and news consumption have declined, volunteerism is on the rise. When I posed that anomaly to Brandeis students, one offered what is probably the most plausible explanation: Volunteerism is a requirement for the National Honor Society and an expectation at many colleges. Why not make civic knowledge a requirement for college admissions?

[..]

Students who don't pay attention to politics cede their political power to their elders and their more-involved peers. And without political power they are screwed. An e-mail message about that would be a scary one indeed. --David T. Z. Mindich --Dude, Where's Your Newspaper? (Mindich|Chronicle)

With the summer break starting to wane, I'm pondering the task I face when I teach "Newswriting" this fall.

If you think of journalism as a noble civic vocation, one of the chief virtues of a good journalist is the ability to make the important seem interesting. A trained chimpanzee could make a TV news story out of hidden-camera footage of car wash attendants stealing change or nannies smacking their children, but campaign finance reform?

Okay. It's true, as Johnson says, that video games can be intensely challenging and absorbing, and that book-loving snobs tend to be oblivious to this fact. It's true that "The Sopranos" is complicated and subtle as well as violent. And although you yourself don't watch "24," your smart colleagues talk endlessly about its intricate plotting.

What's more: You love how comfortable your kids are with new technology. You totally agree that "the ability to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly is a talent with great real-world applicability." Maybe they can support you in your old age!

In fact, if you ignore the absurdly sweeping assertion of Johnson's title -- and hey, he says, if you can't see that "Everything Bad Is Good for You" is winking at the reader, we've really got a failure to communicate -- his core argument seems reasonable enough.

To summarize briefly: He's talking trends, not absolutes, and over the past 30 years, the trend in both video games and television shows has been toward forms that are more cognitively demanding. (He doesn't dwell on the Internet, which he thinks needs little defense.) --Bob Thompson --The 'Bad' Guy: Steven Johnson Thinks Video Games And Violent TV Are Good for the Brain (Washington Post (will expire))

Grist for the e-mail forwarding mill. Whatever you call them, Web fads are entertaining, unintended consequences of life on the World Wide Web. Once the masses could put anything online easily, they turned up weird fetishes, hilarious parody, jaw-dropping narcissism, and moments of brilliance. And over the past 10 years, some of these ideas broke through to the mainstream. Whether it was dancing hamsters, a kid enjoying his day as a Jedi Knight, or the sudden ability to publish your thoughts online with just a few simple clicks, the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs. --Molly Wood --Top 10 Web fads (C|Net)

I felt a rather pathetic rush of geek pride when I realized that I'm familiar with all 10. Not a lot of heavy cultural analysis, but still pleasant to read.

I didn't recognize Ellen Feiss's name right away, but her picture is unforgettable.

I haven't actually used Friendster or its clones (I still feel guilty that I never responded to Torill Mortenson's invitation to join Orkut),

"Even if you have seven people together eating TV dinners, they are eating in a line and that's not conducive to communication," Dr Spungin said.

"Eating together has always been a mark of family life. You also eat together as a sign of hospitality and welcome.

"[The TV dinner] is a big problem in the UK and America but I think in countries with a stronger food/family tradition, like Italy and Spain, the concept of the TV dinner is probably regarded with horror." --Laura Smith-Spark -- Death of a 'TV dinner' salesman (BBC)

While the article does the usual "tell the story of the unknown person behind a well-known product" thing, it also includes some serious quotes offering alternative opinions. I remember one summer when I was a news intern at a radio station, the new cute blonde TV news reporter did a total puff piece on people eating ice cream. I ran into her at some civic event, and, when she fished for a compliment about her story, I asked her why she didn't interview a heath food expert or a vegan to get an opposing view. Looking back, I can see that was a bit harsh, but I took my job very seriously.

The title of the BBC story is a cute allusion to Willy Loman, who would probably have been baffled by the concept (as he was by whipped cheese and car radios). (Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.)

I've never liked TV dinners.

The social component of meals is important. During the school year, I do make it a point to eat in the faculty cafeteria about twice a week... and sometimes when I take the wife and kids to school, we'll spend an hour or so in the cafeteria, since I like the idea that my kids get to see me interacting with students so they have at least some concept of what I do during the day.

We do the family dinner thing each night, but during the school year my wife often seems to be in the bedroom, where she's on the phone or doing the bills or otherwise hiding from the chaos in the kitchen while I feed the kids dinner.

As an undergrad, I went through a phase where I ate a lot of frozen pot pies and microwave noodles, but there are less salty ways of minimizing meal prep time. By now, I've progressed to the point where my favorite meals are sometimes Powerbars or even sometimes rice cakes and ginger ale.

If I can learn to photosynthesize via the photons coming off my CRT or do some kind of thermal transfer through the fabric of my computer chair, I'll be happy.

What was I blogging about? Oh, yeah, the TV dinner guy. I think I was originally planning to say something about the design of the box, but I don't think I'll go back and edit this digression out. I'll just leave this rambling online in order to threaten my career. (Take that, Tribble!)

Each book in "For Pittsburgh" has about 450,000 characters, and will take about 20 hours, on average, to cycle through the LED tubes. Each side of the display has about 750 tubes stretching from the bottom edge of the convention center's roof up to its peak.

The letters, about 3-foot-high-by-1-foot-wide, scroll vertically up the horizontal tubes, which are about 2 inches wide, 14 inches long and spaced about 7 inches apart. --Patricia Lowry --Blue light special of a different kind tells a good story (Post-Gazette)

Sounds like a cool installation... it's at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, in Pittsburgh.

Credit for suggesting this one goes to my wife.

Such are but a few of the reasons I make errors of fact, not regularly but often enough to provoke eternal vigilance. What I hope my students get out of analyzing their professor's foibles is that everyone -- they, I, the authors of textbooks, the president, Nobel Prize winners, and so on -- makes mistakes. The crucial questions are why the mistakes are made, and what is to be done about them. Our duty as teachers is not to produce students who will always get their facts right, but to foster young thinkers who appreciate that facts are indeed worth getting right, and who then take the most important step of candid self-analysis when they get them wrong. --David D. Perlmutter --To Err Is Human; It's Also a Teaching Tool (Chronicle)

The other day, when I came across the latest article written by a Seton Hill University journalism major who's interning at the local paper, I proudly blogged it (to encourage her and the other journalism majors who need to start looking for internships soon).

The first comment in response to that blog entry was from someone who chastised the journalist for making a mistake. But the student responded, and now it seems the student was right after all. I felt bad that the blog entry I had posted prompted public criticism of my student's work, but of course that's what happens when one publishes anything.

Doohan, whose role was immortalised in the line "Beam me up, Scotty", had been suffering from pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, his agent said. --Star Trek's Scotty dies aged 85 (BBC)

Just as Sherlock Holmes never said, "It's elementary, my dear Watson," nobody in the original show ever said "Beam me up, Scotty," but that's OK.

(Favorite line: "It's... green.")

Scotty was definitely my favorite character when I was a kid. I actually managed to work a reference to Scotty into my dissertation, in reference to a machine-loving engineer character in an early Eugene O'Neill play.

Thanks for telling me about the sad news, Rosemary.

First, you see no letters. No, you don't a row of letters along the top informing you of what game you are playing - you've got to figure it out all by yourself. Next, you have 9 columns and 3 rows of numbers. You have two ways to win: you either get a line straight across or a full house. Each game has two parts and when you win, you don't shout "BINGO!" you call "YES, ERIC!" or "HEREY'ARE!" When you win, rather than shoot you dirty looks, the people cheer, as they did for me three times last night! --Moira Richardson --BINGO, British Style (Literary Tease)

A great post from a student of mine who's been traipsing through Europe. A nicely fleshed-out, informative feature.

When playing Rogue, I'm almost as into the game as when playing an uptodate game like Diablo. The atmosphere is almost the same. How on earth did you achieve that?

"I don't know. In a lot of ways, I think playing Rogue is to playing Diablo as reading a book is to watching a movie. When reading a book, you don't see the characters or special effects or action, but you imagine it in your mind, and the effect of the book is just as strong as the effect of a movie.

The difference is that you get to make up the images in your own head.

Just as some people prefer reading to watching a movie, there are still some (including myself) who prefer Rogue to the newer, more graphically intense games. --I talked with Glen Wichman about Rogue! (Cybergoth)

Found while Googling for information on Rogue, which I found on a computer in the graphics lab at the University of Virginia drama building back in the 1980s.

Long live Rodney the Adventurer, who looks like this: @

(See also "A Natural History of the @ Sign," which is an amusing read, though where it should cite Rogue, it instead cites NetHack, mistakenly dating it from the 1960s.)

Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was ''framing.'' Exactly what it means to ''frame'' issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are talking to, but everyone agrees that it has to do with choosing the language to define a debate and, more important, with fitting individual issues into the contexts of broader story lines. In the months after the election, Democratic consultants and elected officials came to sound like creative-writing teachers, holding forth on the importance of metaphor and narrative.

[...]

''I can describe, and I've always been able to describe, what Republicans stand for in eight words, and the eight words are lower taxes, less government, strong defense and family values,'' Dorgan, who runs the Democratic Policy Committee in the Senate, told me recently. ''We Democrats, if you ask us about one piece of that, we can meander for 5 or 10 minutes in order to describe who we are and what we stand for. And frankly, it just doesn't compete very well. I'm not talking about the policies. I'm talking about the language.'' --Matt Bai --The Framing Wars (NY Times (will expire))

The author does a thorough profile of George Lakoff, the Berkeley linguist whose book, Don't Think of an Elephant, introduces Democratic activists to cognitive linguistics. I never blog about politics unless there's some rhetorical or journalism angle that I want to discuss, and this article offers plenty to chew on. In the end, though, the article questions whether simply coming up with new words to describe existing ideas will really make much difference in the political landscape:

Lakoff's detractors say that it is he who resembles the traveling elixir salesman, peddling comforting answers at a time when desperate Democrats should be admitting some hard truths about their failure to generate new ideas. ''Every election defeat has a charlatan, some guy who shows up and says, 'Hey, I marketed the lava lamp, and I can market Democratic politics,''' says Kenneth Baer, a former White House speechwriter who wrote an early article attacking Lakoff's ideas in The Washington Monthly. ''At its most basic, it represents the Democratic desire to find a messiah.''

Here's one more passage that sums up Bai's argument:

Consider, too, George Lakoff's own answer to the Republican mantra. He sums up the Republican message as ''strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government and family values,'' and in ''Don't Think of an Elephant!'' he proposes some Democratic alternatives: ''Stronger America, broad prosperity, better future, effective government and mutual responsibility.'' Look at the differences between the two. The Republican version is an argument, a series of philosophical assertions that require voters to make concrete choices about the direction of the country. Should we spend more or less on the military? Should government regulate industry or leave it unfettered? Lakoff's formulation, on the other hand, amounts to a vague collection of the least objectionable ideas in American life. Who out there wants to make the case against prosperity and a better future? Who doesn't want an effective government?

I'd have to agree... the cynical libertarian in me cringed at the nearly oxymoronic "effective government". When my freshmen composition students choose such weightless thesis statements as "racism is bad" or "women should not be abused," I call it a "puppies are cute" argument, framed in such a way that there is no credible evidence against the thesis, which means the thesis isn't worth arguing.

As an news intern at WINA-Charlottesville, I drafted a completely innocuous story summarizing a local politician's speech against illegal drugs, and one of the seasoned professionals gently pointed out that it would be unlikely for any politician to come out in favor of drug abuse.

Still, liberals have had great success inserting certain concepts into the public discourse, such as the cheerful "it takes a village [to raise a child]", not to mention "affirmative action." And journalists typically refer to "pro-choice" and "anti-abortion," (or even "abortion foes"), thus framing the issue in a manner that differs from what you would get if you used terms that both groups apply internally ("pro-choice" vs. "pro-life", or "the right to choose" vs. "the right to life").

Bai doesn't seem to think Lakoff has answers that will help the Democrats, but I was impressed with the linguistic creativity of Nathan Piazza. A Google search for "liberal memes" led me to "Dead Reckoning: Applied Memetics for Disillusioned Dems," which, in one section, argues that the concepts of "rights" resonates positively with the liberal message, but that the word "right" also invokes "right vs. wrong" and "right vs. left," which create conflicting emotional responses that automatically invoke the idea of opposition.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has demonstrated the seriousness of its commitment to digital media by reaching a deal to buy Intermix Media Inc. for $580 million in cash.... The announcement -- one of the biggest commitments to the Web by a big media conglomerate in recent memory -- underscores how important online advertising has become to traditional media companies now that the online ad industry has recovered. --Ken Magill --News Corp. To Acquire Intermix (Click Z Network)

One of the websites involved in this deal is myspace.com, which several of my students have referred to as a bit less angsty version of LiveJournal.

On Saturday, the National Governors Association released the results of a poll of 10,000 teenagers (16-18 years old), including both students in high school and those who had dropped out. Significant numbers of students reported that high school was not challenging enough and that they were willing to take on more work. --Scott Jaschik --High School Students Want Courses That Challenge (Inside Higher Ed)

This is good news. Of course, what people say in response to a poll question, and what they actually do in real life aren't always closely related. Still, it's good to see evidence that the kids are alright. (Will this poll be used as a cudgel in a political battle against teachers' unions? Should it be?)

All this week the BBC News website is speaking to people whose creativity has been transformed in the digital age.

From blogging to podcasting, millions of ordinary people are becoming writers, journalists, broadcasters and film-makers thanks to increasingly affordable and accessible tools. --Darren Waters --Digital Citizens: The film-maker (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Computer technology is an invaluable supplement for research, but it becomes inefficient when it is used as a substitute for the hands-on investigation of the stacks. In any large, old library, there are unknown quantities of printed materials that cannot be found in electronic catalogs. Some of them were missed during the shift from cards to databases; others were never cataloged at all.

Sometimes librarians think a book that hasn't been checked out in decades is seldom used. But many books are consulted in the stacks without being borrowed; if those books are not there, they will have to be obtained by more labor-intensive and costly methods. Most of my discoveries as a researcher come from the efficiency of being able to spend 10 seconds glancing at the contents of nearby books instead of having to make an elaborate and time-consuming plan to track down tangential leads. --Thomas H. Benton --Stacks' Appeal (Chronicle)

Well, of course, if you're lucky enough to have access to the Harvard Stacks, the internet can't duplicate all the resources available to you. But for the rest of us, the internet is pretty convenient. Still, Benton's worries are well-phrased:

Many entering students come from nearly book-free homes. Many have not read a single book all the way through; they are instead trained to surf and skim. Teachers increasingly find it difficult to get students to consult printed materials, and yet we are making those materials even harder to obtain. Online journal articles are suitable for searching and extraction, but how conducive is a computer for reading a novel?

Of course, fretting about ye goode olde dayes won't help our students, who can't help it that they were born into a digital generation.

Journalists are worrywarts. We worry about toxins in the drinking water, graft at City Hall, opposition leaders in countries you've never heard of and the rotator cuffs of journeyman pitchers. We worry about greenhouse gasses, decorum in the Senate, childhood obesity, abandoned pets and the fall lineup on ABC. If there's an asteroid headed in our general direction, if too many Harvard students are making A's, if long-distance truckers aren't sleeping enough, we worry. When gas prices are low, we worry about SUVs smashing defenseless sedans. When gas prices are high, we worry about the effect of the SUV sales slump on GM's bottom line. We worry about floods when it rains and drought when the sun shines.

And still there is time to worry about ourselves. Journalists worry like mad about the fate of our own particular jobs. For more than 20 years, roughly since the dawn of the desktop computer, people have been telling us that micro-chips are going to put us in the soup kitchens. For a while, we could console ourselves with the fact that computers were heavy and had to be plugged into a wall. But now people get video on their portable phones, and . . . well, that's worrisome, if you're in the business of producing neatly folded stacks of dried wood pulp printed with columns of readable ink stains.

Readers may think we in the press are arrogant and out of touch, but that's just an act. Really we're sick with anxiety about the Death of Print. What began with the Gutenberg Bible often seems to be headed for an ignominious and fast-approaching end, around 2009, with the publication of the last printed work guaranteed to find a market: Mitch Albom's The Five Diets You'll Be on in Heaven.

Who's going to finish us off? Currently, we're worried about bloggers. --David Von Drehle --Fighting Words (Washington Post (will expire))

At first, I thought this was just a gimmick article that pitted a liberal blogger and a conservative blogger against each other, a fringe freakshow orchestrated to show the world how nutty the blogosphere is. But the article treats both bloggers with respect, and offers some very candid and insightful reflection about the American psyche.

Filing this one to show my "Newswriting" students this fall. (The link will expire soon, so if you want it, download a copy now... It's really worth reading.)

The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook's drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world is the precise sequence of events by which some White House guy came to mention the kook's wife to some reporter, then you've departed the real world and you're frolicking on the wilder shores of Planet Zongo.

What's this really about? It's not difficult. A big chunk of the American elites have decided there is no war; it's all a racket got up by Bush and Cheney. And, even if there is a war somewhere or other, wherever it is, it's not where Bush says it is. Iraq is a ''distraction'' from Afghanistan -- and, if there were no Iraq, Afghanistan would be a distraction from Niger, and Niger's a distraction from Valerie Plame's next photo shoot for Vanity Fair. --Mark Steyn --Plame security breach? It just ain't so, Joe (Chicago Sun Times)

I've been finding the Plame blame game endlessly fascinating. On the surface -- it's all an accusation that the president's trusted advisor outed a CIA agent as retaliation against a diplomat who dared to question a crucial part of the US case for war against Iraq. Two reporters who investigated the story, but never published anything on it, were threatened with jail when they declined to talk about their anonymous sources. One reporter talked (or, rather, his bosses released his notes), but the other went to jail. Even though Karl Rove, the trusted advisor, released a statement saying that he didn't have a problem with the reporters talking about him.

The whole thing is perfectly phrased as a case study in reporter ethics. Valerie Plame was a CIA agent, but she had a Washington desk job that didn't require a serious cover. Her identity and profession were well known in social circles, and her name (though not her profession) was published on the mideast.org website (now archived by the Wayback Machine).

Steyn is obviously playing down the case, but I think he's onto something when he notes that, despite the First Amendment angle (which gets the attention of journalists and libertarians) the moral outrage doesn't seem to be roiling too far outside Washington. I don't watch TV news, and truth be told since I'm mostly a househusband this summer, and spending less time at my desk, I haven't been reading the punditblogs either.

Anyway, Steyn uses words deftly, in an attempt to take the wind out of this scandal, and rile up the populist ire against "the elites". The trouble is, when put alongside the missing children, shark attacks, hurricanes and terrorist bombings that fill up the time between commercial breaks, the Plame Affair is mostly a talking head story. As far as I can tell none of its subcomponents has the slightest connection with thong underwear or presidential cigars. Call me cynical, but since the blue people and the red people already know what to think out of the situation, the coverage isn't going to matter much to them.

Everyone that plays video games knows Grande [sic] Theft Auto and it's [sic] reputation for violence, especially GTA 3, GTA: Vice City and now GTA: San Andreas. Lately, however, GTA:S.A. has come under more fire than its predecessors and it's all because of something called the "Hot Coffee Mod." Apparently the .mod,which unlocks minigames that involve explict sex scenes, was created by Patrick Wildenborg, who claims his code merely opens content that is already included in the code of each off-the-shelf game. In an e-mail to the Associated Press Wildenborg had this to say:

"If Rockstar Games denies that, then they're lying and I will be able to prove that, my mod does not introduce anything to the game. All the content that is shown was already present on the DVD."

As of late, Hillary Clinton has come onboard to announce she will introduce legislation to help keep mature video games out of the reach of children... --Troy Rogers --Hillary Clinton: She Got Game (The Deadbolt)

One minute, I'm watching families talk about how they don't know how to buy school clothes for their kids on their minimum wage salaries; the next, I'm watching spoiled 18 year olds watching martial arts films on their $1000 toys, under the pretense of taking notes in a classroom. --Mike Arnzen --Getting By In Class...with HP Pavillion Notebooks (Pedablogue)

Great post, Mike.

The ad would be great to show as part of the "Education" component of our freshman composition course, "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" (which I'm not actually teaching this year). Sounds like it should have run on MTV or during Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network. While driving to and from Kentucky last week, there were many stretches when the only radio selection was country music. Several times, I heard a Kenny Chesney song, "Keg in the Closet". Talk about the celebration of anti-intellectualism...

We went to class just to pass the time, back in '89
We had a keg in the closet, pizza on the floor
Left over from the night before
Where we were going we didn't really care
We had all we ever wanted
In that keg in the closet

But maybe I'm too sensitive. I'm still annoyed by the Pringles ad that showed cool students playing around in the quad with their Pringles, and showing a stuffy middle-aged prof kind of wiping his greasy, potato-chip stained hands on his vest.

Pringles only cost about a buck at Wal-Mart. Wouldn't a professor with an office like that be eating, I dunno, cucumber sandwiches or Turkish delight, or maybe swilling brandy?

"Psychiatrists believe that these auditory hallucinations are caused when the brain spontaneously activates, creating a false perception of a voice," says Professor Hunter of the university's psychiatry department.

"The reason these voices are usually male could be explained by the fact that the female voice is so much more complex that the brain would find it much harder to create a false female voice accurately than a false male voice," he says. --Sean Coughlan --Why 'imaginary voices' are male (BBC)

You learn something new every day.

This story comes straight from the press release. But note how the university states the scientists "have explained" a scientific truth, while the news story says the researchers say they made a discovery. (If the research turns out to be junk science, it's still true that university researchers said they accomplished something.)

I don't know whether the journal in which the research appeared is one of the top publications in the field or a fly-by-night operation, but one would hope that an operation as like the BBC would check something basic like that. Still, I was looking for a paragraph that says something like, "Jim Smith, a University of Somewhere neuroscientist who was not involved in the study, says the findings are significant because..."

- You are Albus Dumbledore, a great wizard. You find yourself in a small room. There are exits to the north and west. There is a table in the corner.

> Examine table

- On the table is a wand and a suspicious pipe

> Smoke pipe

- As you begin to smoke the pipe you realise that it is a joke pipe left by the Weasley twins. It was filled with laxatives. You stop smoking and put the pipe in your pocket. --Dumbledore's death in the style of the old, text-based computer game, Zork (Guardian Books)

Just about any reference to interactive fiction is good enough to deserve a link to me.

Of course, this text description demonstrates a common problem found in text-adventure games written by beginners. Every time you enter this room, you'll be told that you are Albus Dumbledore. Plus, the game announces that you pick up the pipe, without giving you the chance to interact with the world by typing "take pipe".

Still, it was pleasant to find this in the list of spoofs.

--Scrollbars (Leegte.org)

Interesting sculptural installation that uses Windows scrollbars.

Via the very interesting Information Aesthetics.

She banned competitive activities during school hours. --The Evil of Excellence (JoanneJacobs.com)

There's a good discussion sparked by an American School Board Journal article (the content of this URL will probably change when the next issue comes out) that strongly discourages any kind of competition in the classroom.

Even a teacher who praises "Madison" for cutting straight lines and nicely gluing glitter on her letter M is singled out for censure.

Managers had held out hope, however slim, that they might be able to launch Discovery within a few days. But with engineers no closer to figuring out why the fuel sensor malfunctioned Wednesday - a potentially deadly problem - NASA had no choice but to call for a lengthy standdown.

NASA is up against the clock. If extensive repairs are needed and the shuttle has to be moved off the launch pad and into the hangar, the flight could end up being bumped into September to ensure a daylight liftoff. --Marcia Dunn --NASA Delays Discovery Launch Indefinitely (AP|MyWay)

Bummer... but of course it's nothing at all compared to what might have happened if the shuttle had launched with a major unexplained problem.

Ku Klux Kryptonite (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Are comic books suffering because they are trying to emulate the action of videogames, rather than the edgy, thought-provoking content that only a fringe medium can provide?

In a striking series of radio episodes in the 1940s, Superman took on the Ku Klux Klan, after activist Stetson Kennedy spent time undercover with the organization, and fed the Superman producers information on the Klan's secret procedures.

In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner write,

The Grand Dragon tried to run a normal meeting but the rank and file shouted him down. "When I came home from work the other night," one of them complained, "there was my kid and a bunch of others, some with towels tied around their necks like capes and some with pillowcases over their heads. The ones with the capes was chasing the ones with the pillowcases all over the log. When I asked them what they were doing, they said they were playing a new kind of cops and robbers called Superman against the Klan.... I never felt so ridiculous in all my life! Suppose my own kid finds my Klan robe some day?"
[...]
It happened because Kennedy understood the raw power of information. The Ku Klux Klan was a group whose power -- much like that of politicians or real-estate agents or stockbrokers -- was derived in large part from the fact that it hoarded information. Once that information falls into the wrong hands (or, depending on your point of view, the right hands), much of the group's advantage disappears.

In a meeting today, I learned that there is such a place as the ?blogosphere.? I thought the speaker was joking, and so appropriately, I giggled. The stern look I received in response jolted me to the realization that not only was this not a joke, but that I was the fool for not knowing that this was a valid term in? well? the blogosphere. At that moment, I felt as tech-illiterate as my mother (who recently called to ask how to bold and italicize font in her Yahoo e-mail.)

Weeks ago I had been tasked to write my first blog for the Ardell site. Never short on opinions (someone once told me that I am ?as subtle as dynamite?) I was nevertheless scrambling for what to say. --Kelly --Confessions of a First Time Blogger (imPRint)

Welcome to the blogosphere. (Are you watching the "drive-by blogging" meme, Evan?)

Like you, I haven't seen the film, but I have read the script, I've talked to a lot of people who worked on the set, and I've seen the raunchy t.v. commercial. Frankly, I think the whole project shows an arrogant disrespect for our show, for our cast, for America's families, and for the sensibilities of the heartland of our country.

Unless they clean it up before the August 5th release date I would strongly recommend that true blue Dukes fans hold their noses and pass this one up. And whatever you do, don't take any youngsters to see it. As plain as I can put it, the only thing this movie shares with our show is the title. Oh, they do have the General Lee flying through the air, although according to the New York Times, they didn't even use stunt drivers. --Ben "Cooter" Jones --The Dukes Movie: Don't Go Unless They Clean It Up! (Cooter's Place)

Oh, well... I wasn't a huge Dukes of Hazzard fan, but since my wife was a teenager near Dallas during the height of the show, she absorbed it via the ether down there in Texas.

I felt the same way when I first started hearing about the Battlestar Galactica remake, which I hear is a great show, just not one that I'm planning to watch with my son.

Washington loves farce the way Vienna loves the waltz. It once extravagantly inflated a sex act into the impeachment of a president, and it has now reduced the momentous debacle of the Iraq war into a question of what Rove or someone else said to a reporter on the phone. Soon, the question will turn on whether Rove or others actually cited Plame by name and whether the president's oath to fire anyone who identified Plame as a CIA operative applies to someone who just mentioned her job title. It will all depend on what "is" is or, to put it another way, whether Bush will concede that he inhaled.

None of this matters -- not really. The persistent criminalization of politics does no one any good. This is a parody of Clausewitz. He said war is the continuation of politics by other means. Now, we have special prosecutors as the continuation of politics by other means. The New York Times called for one and now, as a result, its own reporter is in jail. --Richard Cohen --Rove Isn't the Real Outrage (Washington Post (will expire))

I don't usually blog politics, unless there's an obvious rhetoric or media angle to the item, but when reporters start going to jail for doing their job, it's definitely blogworthy. Plus, Cohen's use of "farce" attracted my attention.

"Middle world is like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see," he said.

"Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large."

He mused that perhaps children should be given computer games to play with that familiarise them with quantum physics concepts.

"It would make an interesting experiment," he told the BBC News website. --Jo Twist --Universe 'too queer' to grasp (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Evan.

In general, the more code you put into making the page look a certain way, the more time a user spends wondering why the page hasn't loaded yet. For example, the store locator page that started me on this month's topic was packed with large menus carefully rendered in alternating color schemes. Every menu had a substantial chunk of extra code to change the way it looked, which I suppose someone thought made the Web site seem exciting and daring. The net result was a painful display of angry fruit salad.

Exercise caution when coding for effect. Remember the price you'll pay in download time and ask yourself whether the effect is really worth it. --Peter Seebach --My not-so-invisible enemy: Page bloat is the visible culprit behind long load times (IBM DeveloperWorks)

Great article. I flip back and forth between viewing pages on my fast work connection and my painfully slow home modem. The sheer amount of crap that some designers put on their sites is astounding.

While I don't discourage my students from making their websites look good, since I'm a writing teacher, I make sure that students understand that the time they put into fiddling with color schemes and layouts will not help them if their writing doesn't meet the course requirements.

Good web pages need good design, of course -- you can't completely separate form and content. (Well, with CSS you can, but that's a technical, rather than aesthetic, distinction.)

In his office with its towering view of midtown Manhattan, Pearlstine boasted that if I'd been writing for Time or Fortune, or any other Time Inc. publication, he would have backed me all the way to the Supreme Court. "We take the First Amendment very seriously around here," he said.

I couldn't help but recall this conversation when Pearlstine announced last week that Time Inc. would comply with a court order to hand over subpoenaed records to a special prosecutor and grand jury looking into the Valerie Plame affair. Pearlstine, who in a June 30 memo to Time staffers called it "the most difficult decision" he has "made in more than 36 years in the news business," was forced to act when the Supreme Court decided not to review a lower court ruling that held the reporters in contempt. --Who's to Blame for Valerie Plame? (Wired)

Here's a flashback to October 2003, where I wondered whether the whole Plame affair was a farce. At the time, the accusation came in two flavors. One concerned the publication of the name of Joe Wilson's wife, and the other concerned the outing of Plame as a CIA agent. A biography of Wilson on the mideast.org website said he was married to Valerie Plame, though it did not mention her name [oops] profession. (That page has been taken down, but it's still available via the Wayback Machine.)

According to the students, the less they were taught, the better. But I knew better. And I had been on the receiving end of some of these half-taught students. One of my colleagues at a large community college in California had confessed that he passed any student who would sit through his course. With no work to grade them, he simply gave them all C’s. He was not the only one, I realized.

When I had struggled with a student whose grammar was shockingly poor and who could not form a decent paragraph or essay, I sometimes wondered if they had simply tested well on the eligibility exam or if an unwitting colleague had passed them on to me.

And what did the students get out of this? --Shari Wilson --Rip-Off (Inside Higher Ed)

An angry part-time teacher launches a heart-felt discussion. I can't say I've ever come across anything as bad as the examples in this essay. Students aren't all this bad, and teachers aren't all this jaded. But I can understand her emotional reaction.

While I wish all students would find the pleasure and personal satisfaction of learning to be sufficient motivation for them to do the work that they need to do, athletes (who are singled out in this essay) have a support network that other students don't have. In my experience, that support network encourages students not to flunk, but I know several athletes who could get better grades if they did more work, but who choose not to. And I don't simply mean skipping class in order to play games... speaking as a teacher, I find that frustrating, but manageable. I'm talking about not turning in rough drafts, not taking revision opportunities seriously, etc. And students may have all kinds of obligations other than sports (including jobs, family, health) that might keep them from doing their best. (I worked through my own feelings about athletics in an essay, "Football Slouches Toward a Former Women's University".)

It's hard to resist the urge to sit around like the men in the Monty Python sketch, telling tall tales about how hard I had it when I was young, but I certainly teach fewer novels and more short stories than I myself was taught.

And I teach some courses that I never took as a student. In the 80s, only CS majors would be talking about interface design, but my "Writing for the Internet" students get a good dose of it. So it's hard to make any kind of direct comparison.

Still, the pressure is there, but it's not just athletes -- it's the whole entitlement culture. They've paid their tuition, so my job is to spoon-feed them exactly what they are supposed to get out of every assigned reading, and test them on whether they can memorize the "right" answers.

Sorry, but that's not why I became a college teacher.

Since I have some job security, I respect the guts (or recklessness?) of an adjunct willing to bring up this topic in this forum.

Community voices have always contributed to local and national papers.

Citizen journalism is different. It often covers a wide territory from soliciting arts and entertainment coverage to providing the angle on the city council budget that the cub reporter might have missed.

The London attacks moved the trend to a new level. Web sites from the BBC's to the Guardian's provided eyewitness accounts, some showing up as little as an hour or two after the first bomb went off. Rather than relying on unfocused, rambling blog entries, the London papers and the Beeb ran pithy postings from the people who were there. They ran alongside the staff reporters' accounts and presumably with the same amount of editing.

[...]

With any luck, the performance of Great Britain's daily papers and their Web sites will take us beyond the blogging-versus-journalism debate. They showed us regular people keeping their wits about them in a traumatic situation, and sharing what they experienced with the rest of us. The news staffs showed that they could blend that with their professional operations. --Robert MacMillan --Witnesses to History (Washinigton Post (will expire))

The BBC is well ahead of the US when it comes to using citizen-provided content, but there are a few news outfits on this side of the Atlantic that are taking the plunge.

Media firms should be able to protect their copyrights. And without any copyright protection of digital content, they may be correct that new high quality content is likely to dry up (along with much of their business). Yet tech and electronics firms are also correct that holding back new technology, merely because it interferes with media firms' established business models, stifles innovation and is an unjustified restraint of commerce. The music industry is only now embracing online sales (and even experimenting itself with P2P) because rampant piracy has demonstrated what consumers really want, and forced these firms to respond.

The Supreme Court tried to steer a middle path between these claims, and did a reasonable job. But the outcome of the case is nevertheless unsatisfactory. --Rip. Mix. Burn. (The Economist)

Self-reflection is a hallmark of many teachers' blogs, according to the creator of weblogg-ed.com — the first stop for most teachers who want to try blogging. But thinking of them only as online journals shortchanges the medium, said Will Richardson, the nationally known lecturer on the topic who runs the site.

"More and more teachers now are finally starting to wrap their brains around the idea that you can do some really interesting things" with them, Richardson said.

He estimates there are about 3,000 teachers like Young. When he began four years ago, the number of teachers blogging on the information highway could have fit into one car.

"There were three of us," Richardson said dryly. --Cynthia Kopkowski --More and more e-savvy educators using blogs (Palm Beach Post)

That number might be an exaggeration... he probably means that he know of three blogs written by people who identified themselves as teachers.

In some cases, a Google search of the candidate's name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn't fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow up in each of those instances, and it turned out to be every bit as eye-opening as a train wreck. --"Ivan Tribble" --Bloggers Need Not Apply (Chronicle)

A troubling essay. When jobs are scarce, employers look for any trivial reason in order to reject a candidate. While on the one hand the author notes that the blogs weren't themselves responsible for shooting down the candidate's job hopes, at the same time, the author suggests that it's the fact the author has a blog, rather than the content on the blog, that's the deciding factor.

Since one of the three vignettes describes a job seeker who was thrown out due to something somebody else said on a different blog (that is, not the job seeker's blog), in that case the blog helped the committee members that the candidate's application seemed to include a misrepresentation. So the lesson there seems to be "Don't misrepresent your work."

I am slightly more sympathetic towards the blogger whose public diary revealed too many rants and too much teen angst, but only slightly. That blogger could have easily kept a private, anonymous LiveJournal.

I am the most sympathetic towards the candidate whose blog expressed a passion in a subject that was not exactly the one the search committee was searching for.

Students who keep a blog for a class, and then don't touch it after the class is over probably have little to worry about. If they did well in the class, their blog will reflect it. If the class isn't important to their major or their job, the hiring committee probably won't worry about it. If the blog is full of typographical errors, or long gaps interspersed with complaints about falling behind, then it's probably revealing work traits that have already revealed themselves in other venues.

It would be too glib of me to say, "If these folks are so shallow as to reject an applicant for keeping a blog, then a blogger probably wouldn't be happy working with such people." But probably only a bit too glib.

Employers reject candidates because of what they are wearing, how they answer the telephone, what bumper stickers they have on their car, and countless other reasons.

A committee member who's looking for an excuse -- any excuse -- to throw out a candidate and thereby winnow the stack of applicants might find something in a blog. The idea that an individual can publish research results without going through a vetting process is still threatening to many in academia, just as the citizen journalism movement threatens mainstream media, and grass-roots political activity threatens oppressive governments.

Update: I didn't have the time or inclination to fisk this essay, but check out "The Trouble with Tribble"

Update, 18 July: For some reason, I missed Matt Kirschenbaum's excellent response to this article.

Observation is good. If you want to write about caves, go look in one. If you're actually an adventurer, and not a wimp like me, go caving. Report back. We're curious what it's like beyond the handrails. --Andrew Plotkin --Likely To Be Eaten By A Bottomless Pit (rec.arts.int-fiction)

When I read this Usenet posting in 2001, I started thinking.

Now, I am a probationary member of the Cave Research Foundation (CRF). Later today I embark on a week-long exploration trip to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. Among the cavers I'll meet will be Roger Brucker, co-author of The Longest Cave, a chronicle of Pat Crowther's completion of the Everest of caving -- making the connection between two huge networks of caves that were previously thought to be separate.

Pat and her husband Will mapped the Cave Research Foundation's progress on a PDP-10 in the 1970s. After the Crowthers divorced in 1975, Will used the PDP-10 to write Adventure -- which lent its name to a new genre of computer games. And the rest is history.

Nick Montfort’s excellent Twisty Little Passages, while named after a maze in Adventure, has far more to say about Zork. Booker’s recent article on digital medievalism does a good job of connecting the dots that are already laid out in canonical sources that explore the influence of Middle Earth and Dungeons and Dragons on Adventure, supplying a context that Buckles did not supply in her 1985 dissertation on Adventure. Still, much of that history contains nooks and crannies that deserve further attention. In caver lingo, any one of those leads might “go” – that is, might open up new, hitherto unmapped regions that that contain new wonders to be examined, and new connections to be made.

Pardon the fanboy geekery, but it seems appropriate here to quote part of Gimli’s praise of caves The Two Towers

Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap -- a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day -- so we would work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. (194-95)

I'll be sure to bring extra coins for the battery vending machine, though Lynn Brucker says she’s bringing a gas carbide lantern for me to try out. I hope someone with the National Park Service has the keys. I guess I’ll have to supply the tasty food and the water bottle myself.

The unmanned probe of the Deep Impact mission collided with Tempel 1, a pickle-shaped comet half the size of Manhattan, late Sunday as thousands of people across the country fixed their eyes to the southwestern sky for a glimpse.
--NASA Cheers Probe's Direct Hit on Comet (AP|MyWay)

Homeless and broke at age 53, he allowed the domain registration for robotwisdom.com to lapse and can't afford to re-up it. He has abandoned his Chicago apartment and is staying on Andrew's floor while he tries to get back on his feet. He's looking for work - sort of. After a few hands-in-pockets attempts at small talk, we give up. I continue up the hill. --Paul Boutin --Robot Wisdom on the Street (Wired)

Be sure you read to the end. It's a short article, with a big payoff.

Barger coined the term "weblog" in a 1997 Usenet posting (cross-posted to several groups).

States spend nearly a quarter of a billion dollars a year on remedial writing instruction for their employees, according to a new report that says the indirect costs of sloppy writing probably hurt taxpayers even more.

The National Commission on Writing, in a report to be released Tuesday, says that good writing skills are at least as important in the public sector as in private industry. Poor writing not only befuddles citizens but also slows down the government as bureaucrats struggle with unclear instructions or have to redo poorly written work. --Justin Pope --Poor Writing Costs Taxpayers Millions (AP|MyWay)

Writing is hard work.

You have to learn to find the point of diminishing returns... yes, another draft will improve this text, but taking that coffee break, or going home on time, or starting on the next task all seem far more immediately productive tasks than checking a draft yet again for wordiness or inaccuracy.

You're never "finished" -- you just run out of time.

And the "right answers" aren't in the back of any book.

I was a bit worried this article would end up being a valentine to the new writing component of the SAT, but the author acknowledged the limits of that test.

Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders.

[...]

The "a", "s", "d", "f" keys control one of the spaceships. The "k", "l", ";", "'" keys control the other. The controls are spin one way, spin the other, thrust, and fire. --Spacewar (on PDP-1 emulator) (MIT)

Spacewar was created in 1961. The link goes to a Java applet that's a fairly faithful recreation of the original: "1)The spaceships have been made bigger and 2) The overall timing has been special cased to deal with varying machine speeds."

Fubon said that the trader was unfamiliar with new computer systems and will be fired. --Bad keystroke leads to $251 million stock buy (News.com)

What kind of an interface lets a worker spend $251 million with a single keystroke?

The real problem here isn't the worker -- it's a whole inhuman mindset that expects human beings to live with terribly designed software.

But firing the worker is a much easier way for the executives who approved the software to make it look like the situation is being taken care of.

How much usability testing would those millions of dollars have paid for?

My 7-year-old son envisions random evildoers coming into our house and abducting him -- and we don't let him watch TV news. But how can anyone miss the danger teases that blast through prime time like buckshot?

And while we debase ourselves by playing voyeur to the pain of families immersed in tragedy, we ignore far more ominous problems that don't as readily lend themselves to televised emoting. How many of us read the New Yorker's three-part series on global climate change this spring? That was scary, and you can't escape it by staying west of Hwy. 100.

Lest I harp on the passive citizen too much, ultimate responsibility has to lie with my colleagues in the press. Though not all of us have the wherewithal to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (one of the pithier old saws articulating journalism's purpose), none of us should be willing to rationalize leaving the world more ignorant than we found it. --Adam Platt --Gone, but not forgotten by the media (Star Tribune)

A good critique. Platt notes that TV journalism returns to the same subjects -- the abduction of attractive young women -- because the public eats it up.

The occasion for this essay is the 10th anniversary of the disappearance of an Iowa news anchor -- a tragedy that's still being milked by TV journalists.

This reminds me of the excellent Onion article that asked, as the anniversary of 9-11 approached, which network will best help the nation deal with its grief?

And to Platt I say, there's a great way to avoid the sensationalistic prime-time news promos: turn off the TV.

Let's say you picked a specific number of people in the United States at random. What then is the chance that the people you picked do not accurately represent the U.S. population as a whole? For example, what is the chance that the percentage of those people you picked who said their favorite color was blue does not match the percentage of people in the entire U.S. who like blue best?

(Of course, our little mental exercise here assumes you didn't do anything sneaky like phrase your question in a way to make people more or less likely to pick blue as their favorite color. Like, say, telling people "You know, the color blue has been linked to cancer. Now that I've told you that, what is your favorite color?" That's called a leading question, and it's a big no-no in surveying.)

Common sense will tell you (if you listen...) that the chance that your sample is off the mark will decrease as you add more people to your sample. --Robert Niles --How Poll Sampling Works (Journalism.org)

Rushkoff's "A Computer Ate My Book" paints a more symbiotic relationship between the print and electronic worlds. He sees book writing and online publishing as two sides of the same coin. He appreciates the tangible appeal of books but also resents that his American publishers won't let him release electronic versions of his books. --Susannah Breslin --The Written Word Still Thrives  (Wired)

I probably blog Wired too much, but this book may resonate in English departments. (My own colleagues are very accepting of my web fixation, but not everyone is so fortunate.)

As befits its beginnings, the genre is planted firmly in pop culture's nerd division. The films most often given the fanfic treatment - The Matrix, X-Men, and Pirates of the Caribbean - wing straight out of dork central. There are thousands of fanfics online for each popular anime TV series, and many hundreds for sci-fi shows you might think no one even watches. When my wife was a teen in the early '80s, she secretly filled a notebook with a story about Superman leaving Lois Lane to take up with the heroine of Ice Castles. Contemporary fanfics have Roswell characters meeting the cast of Smallville. But since they're posted online, those fantasies aren't private anymore. Today's preteen girl will never be able to hide her embarrassing fantasy about taking the guy from Stargate: Atlantis to prom. --Neal Pollock --Spock the Sith Slayer (Wired)

The first thing I wrote on a word processor was a Star Trek short story. It was a comedy piece about Klingons invading the Enterprise. I had McCoy worried about the interruption to his golf game, and I gave the Klingon commander a dumb sidekick who kept interrupting his speeches to ask, "Duh, commander, do we loot first and then burn, or burn first and then loot?" Some other parts are still making me smile as I recall them, but they were predicated upon a fairly intimate knowledge of the show. But since I wrote them mostly for my sister, brother, and my dorky comrades at school, that didn't matter.

This is another instance of the remix culture. (Larry Lessig has spoken eloquently on the collision between the current draconian digital copyright laws and equally extremist youths who turn theft into a virtue and even a right.)

Edmund Wilson once wrote, "Doorbell broken--please knock." How might this sentiment be applied to Cheever's Neddy Merrill, who finds himself looking through the windows of his own deserted house? Compare Neddy Merrill's feelings at that moment to the feelings of, for example, a fictional Assistant Professor after a humiliating and unfair performance review by the head of the English Department. Describe the head of the English Department. How pompous do you think he would be? Would he be fat and smell of adult diapers? --Jim Stoddard --Updiking the Ante: A disturbingly close reading (Modern Humorist)

A great parody of a set of discussion questions. I was always uncomfortable with discussion prompts that beg the question and narrow the focus of inquiry. In some cases, if you're introducing a text specifically in order to teach a point that the students will need to know later, discussion questions can save a lot of time. But since I'm more interested in teaching the skill of critical reading than in teaching a set of facts for students to memorize, I've shied away from discussion questions. I'm rethinking that decision, since some students who really do feel at sea appreciate getting a little help.

When I was a kid, I once saw a nature show that featured two hatching eggs. A hand came and removed the shell of one of the birds, but the other was left to struggle out of the shell on its own. The bird who fought its own way out of the shell exercised its muscles in the process, and was able to stand on its own and move around much sooner than the bird that got the "benefit" of the shortcut.

Of course, it's probably fallacious for me to put too much emphasis on the implied analogy, but this really is the image that comes to mind when I think about creating more of the worksheets and study guides that my students got used to in high school.

This page provides the usual list of links to writing resources on the Internet... but instead of trying to cover everything in a long list, I have been very selective. The "Spotlight" section features links to articles about academic writing. If you have suggstions for this page, please let me know. --Dennis G. Jerz --My 1999 Protoblog (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last year, I had a mathematics blockage and prematurely announced the sixth anniversary of my weblog.

If you're curious, here's a cache of my protoblog on June 22, 1999, and a brief history of my weblog. An excerpt: "My site didn't mention the word "weblog" until 2000, when it appears exactly once, when I linked to the Feb 2000 Wired article noting the boom in weblogging."