August 2005 Archive Page

You say ''Looting,'' I say ''Finding'' (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Two interesting discussions on Flickr, regarding the ethics of captions that accompany stories about the looting in New Orleans. See: "Racism on Flickr."

It's certainly worth noting that in one picture, a black an is identified as "looting," but in a different picture, two other people (initially represented as white, but the woman seems to be Hispanic) are described as "finding" food.

Both these pictures appear on Yahoo!, but it's ridiculous to accuse Yahoo of racism, since Yahoo! didn't write the captions. One poster demands, "AND HOW COME THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE PICTURE OF THE BLACK PERSON DOESNT PUT HIS NAME UP THERE?" but obviously didn't look very closely. (Yahoo gives the photographer's name as Dave Martin.). The caption is just longer in that picture -- the name doesn't appear in the little frame that Yahoo uses to hold the caption. (Another reason why frames suck.)

Fortunately, someone who knows about such things as news services and photojournalism corrects some of the angry misconceptions.

Here's one example where the instant-publication culture can cause more trouble than it's worth.

Update, 05 Sep: Editor and Publisher looked into the matter.

The Associated Press said its policy was clear. "When we see people go into businesses and come out with goods, we call it looting," said Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography. "When we just see them carrying things down the road, we call it carrying items."

Lyon said the photographer who took Tuesday's photo, Dave Martin, had seen the man go into the store and take out the items.

As for the other photo, Getty said it stood by its caption and its photographer, Chris Graythen, who says the subjects of his photo were simply picking up items floating by in the dank waters.

Mayor Cabot," he wrote, "cast the only dissenting vote."

Then the editor reconsidered. Without altering its meaning in any way, he recast the sentence to read, "The mayor cast the lone dissenting vote."

With a stroke of the pen, so to speak, he had achieved a line of perfect iambic pentameter. The MAY-or CAST the LONE diss-ENT-ing VOTE. He had added a touch of cadence to his story -- and for a split second he had made it a more readable piece.

[...]

To add a pinch of cadence to a broth of prose is trickier. Such seasoning surely can be overdone, but in moderation, like amending "only" to read "lone," the pinch can be remarkably effective. Consider, for example, a perfectly acceptable sentence from an account in The New York Times last May about an expensive motor home: "The electronics on board ... rival those of a Silicon Valley bachelor pad."

Could that sentence have been usefully tweaked? It generally is a bad idea to dragoon proper nouns, such as "Silicon Valley," into service as adjectives, but we can reach for a pinch of cadence. Suppose we try, "a bachelor pad in the Silicon Valley." The bachelor pad begins to swing.

Two years ago, the Times editorialized on capital punishment. In her final sentence, the editor warned that the United States is becoming isolated "as a growing number of nations become unwilling to extradite prisoners if they may be executed."

Let us tinker. The final sentence of an editorial (or a short speech or essay) ought to end with a bang, not a whimper. This one ended on the multisyllable "executed." It sort of, you know, kind of, drifted off ... Suppose we recast the concluding clause: "become unwilling to extradite prisoners if they may be put to death." The sentence gains the final snap of a hangman's noose. --James J. Kilpatrick --Reading with Our Ears (Yahoo! News (will expire))

An inseparable but special part of the feeling of words lies in the fact that they have to be produced by a human body -- with an exception noted for parrots and the like. The act of producing a word involves breath and muscle, and various kinds of muscular activity tend to produce various kinds of feeling. Thus, aside from all other considerations, the bodily involvement in sounding the word is a distinct part of the word's personality. "Elate" feels one way and "thud" feels another. So for sheets, burble, spit, clack, snip, bang, buzz, alleluia, prestidigitation, indubitably, liquescent, uluate, majestic, and anything else one cares to cite from the total language -- some words involve more specific and localized muscular play than others, and some have their denotations more involved in the resulting sound than others, but every word has a muscular feel of its own. When the muscular play tends more or less definitely to enact the denotation of the word as in "prestidigitation" or "oily" (one has only to protract the "oi" sound to produce an oily suggestion), then the word may be called mimetic. When the sound of a word imitates the sound of what the word denotes (as in buzz, link, splash, crunch), then the word may be called onomatopoetic. Any conversation attentively linstened to will offer examples of both kind of words. The more excited the conversation becomes, the easier it will be to see in the emphases and gestures of the speakers how the muscles and the nervous system are involved in the process of spech and its meaning. --John Ciardi and Miller WilliamsA Word Involves the Whole BodyHow Does a Poem Mean?)

A charming presentation of formalism, which presents literary study not as the investigation of what the poem means, but rather how. Diction, metaphor, rhythm, counterrhythm, and form, all in the service of what Ciardi calls a performance.

The book uses horse-racing examples, which at first made me think the book was dated. I can't help but think of Nicely Nicely from Guys and Dolls: ("I got the horse right here/His name is Paul Revere!")

Then I noticed the introduction advocates always teaching two poems together, never one alone, so that a student can always see a comparison. Suddenly the horse-race metaphor makes more sense.

--Classes Start (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Today is the first day of classes. I'm teaching News Writing, Drama as Literature, and two sections of American Literature I. I also advise the student paper, The Setonian.

A memo sent to departments ranging from residential life to counseling to public safety reminds employees: "We will not solve problems for students because it robs students of an opportunity to learn."

[...]

"We get quoted the price tag frequently," said Dean of Student Affairs Jim Terhune. "But what you're paying for is an education, not a room at the Sheraton, and sometimes that education is uncomfortable." --Colleges try to deal with hovering parents (USA Today (will expire))

When my parents drove me to college, 19 years ago (yipes!), I remember being sullen and annoyed because my dad wanted to stop to eat before dropping me off.

But once the car was unloaded and I had my keys, they gave me hugs and took off. I don't think I had even met my roommate yet.

There I was: a college student. I wouldn't have minded another meal with my folks, but instead I headed down to the cafeteria, and started a new chapter in my life.

Engelbart encountered the idea of the Memex while serving as a radar technician in the U.S. Navy during World War II. It took root in his imagination and, in 1950, he had an epiphany, one that guided him and his work for the next two decades. Markoff writes that Engelbart "saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols....He would create a workstation for organizing all of the information and communications needed for any given project....he saw streams of characters moving on the display. Although nothing of the sort existed, it seemed the engineering should be easy to do and that the machine could be harnessed with levers, knobs or switches. It was nothing less than Vannevar Bush's Memex, translated into the world of electronic computing." --Bill Joy --The Dream of a Lifetime (TechnologyReview.com)

Mayor Ray Nagin told folks to make sure they fill their upstairs bathtubs with water, and in case of real trouble, make sure you have a way of hacking through your roof -- so you are not trapped by rising water. --Miles O'Brien --Miles O'Brien's Hurricane Blog (CNN)

The CNN newsman is blogging Katrina.

Two or more movies, combined to make one much funnier movie. --Mate a Movie 10 (Worth 1000)

Mike Arnzen, you might enjoy "Freaky Friday the 13th," but keep scrolling until you find the Robin Williams movie.

Via Sarcasmo.

In his pockets, Jefferson carried such a variety of portable instruments for making observations and measurements that he's been dubbed a "traveling calculator." Among his collection of pocket-sized devices were scales, drawing instruments, a thermometer, a surveying compass, a level, and even a globe.

To record all these measurements, Jefferson carried a small ivory notebook (pictured) on which he could write in pencil. Back in his Cabinet, or office, he later copied the information into any of seven books in which he kept records about his garden, farms, finances, and other concerns; he then erased the writing in the ivory notebook.

--A Day in the Life of Thomas Jefferson (Monticello.org)

Interesting version of a colonial PDA. The Romans used wax tablets, which could easily be resurfaced.

See also "Drudging at the Writing Table".

And don't miss the QuickTime panorama of Jefferson's office, which has some stuff you can click on and fiddle with as if you're in a Myst game. Get your virtual mitts on the bookstand, which lets the user easily juxtapose the contents of one book against four others, creating a kind of ad-hoc hypertext, or the polygraph, a lever-based manuscript duplicating machine.

Jefferson was truly a geek.

This essay is full of mistakes. Idea after idea and sentence after sentence is simply wrong. This sentence, for example, is false. Worse yet, this not even complete sentence! A long time ago (so the legend goes) a Cretan prophet by the name of Epimenides declared that "All Cretans are liars." This paradoxical statement has come to be known as the Epimenides paradox or the Liar paradox This Adam (or atom) of paradoxes has been reformulated into countless variants, yielding such gems as "I am lying," and "this sentence is false." It has been split, ("The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.") boxed, translated and quoted in the Bible. In short, one would assume that the Liar Paradox had been beaten to death. --Tim Maly --This is Not the Title of This Essay (Singlenesia.com)

I did not get this link from Metafilter.

Podcasting is liberating, even for regular broadcasters. You are no longer tied to the programming schedule, you can have listeners in Llanddewi Brefi, and you don't have to have an editor if you don't want to.

Still, we may need to draw up some rules for podcasting. Or maybe rules is not the word, let's call them guidelines. Here's a list that I would LOVE to revise after some discussion here. --Steffen Fjaervik --A First Pass at Podcasting Guidelines (Poynteronline)

As an avid gamer for over 20 years, I've begun to wonder if I'll ever feel the immersive sense of wonder brought on by Infocom or the old Sierra adventure games. Maybe I have become jaded over the years—many a gamer lost faith during the dreaded CD-ROM/Full Motion Video 'Game' era—and look at today's over-licensed, cross-promoted clones as the standard for the future. Perhaps I frown upon today's meager offerings because I hold out hope that a new generation of entertainers will engage us with virtual delights previously thought unmarketable. --Nobula --Desperately seeking wonder. (Eclectika)

I think Nobula hits it right on the mark with this comment:

Perhaps the problem it is the abundance of these games which dilutes the experience of a single adventure—get stuck or bored with your current game and there are a dozen standing by to become your new time sink.

Good point.

I think Nobula needs to play Jigsaw, Christminster or So Far, all of them non-commercial games that rival Incofom at its best.

For EL250, a four-step process that helps you prepare for a productive class discussion using the SHU weblog system.

Read the assigned text, react by posting an agenda item to your weblog, respond to 2-4 items posted by your peers, and reflect on the experience in a 200-word informal essay.

Your 200-word reflection should include a direct quotation from and several specific references to the assigned text. It should also refer to a specific statement made by at least one of your peers. (See "Reflection Paper" in the glossary.)

Bring a printout to class. (I might not always collect it, but I'd like you to be able to consult it if called upon.)

The Portfolio assignment will ask you to post on your weblog an expanded version of one of the agenda items (yours or a peer's). If you put a little extra work into your reflection now, you'll have less work to do later when you compile your portfolio.

The process of reading, reacting, responding, and reflecting is part of all critical thinking and writing. In our online community, we will practice, in an informal manner, the intellectual activity that goes into the production of a college-level research paper.

While your agenda items and lengthier reflections should be a little more formal, when you leave comments, don't worry too much about typos or grammatical mistakes. Feel free to use :) and LOL if you like. --Dennis G. Jerz --RRRR (Read, React, Respond, Reflect) (Drama as Literature (EL 250))

Some students instantly "get" weblogs, but others don't see what the big fuss is all about.

I resist assigning word counts and posting frequency, because nobody wants to read "forced blogging," including myself.

This term, I am trying to specify more contact points, and separating the grades for "keeping up with the readings" and "posting thoughtful, well-digested reflections".

I can't make every student fall in love with blogging, but I can try to tie the practice more closely with the course's educational objectives. We'll see how it goes.

"Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears" --Klingon Fairy Tales (McSweeney)

Silly. Making the rounds of the Net. I actually like "Other Poll Questions That May One Day Appear on an Unnamed Internet News Website, Given Its Recently Asked Question "Have You Ever Been in an Accident Involving a Plane?" Following the Air France Crash." and "Fish Names That Sound Like Unfortunate 7th-Graders" better.

August Wilson, 60, one of America's greatest playwrights, has told the Post-Gazette he is dying of liver cancer.

"It's not like poker, you can't throw your hand in," he said by phone from Seattle. "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready." --Christopher Rawson --Playwright Wilson says he's dying (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

I'll be teaching Wilson's Fences in my "Drama as Literature" class.

Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant's little girl--a precocious, blond-haired child they'd grown to love--was now an orphan.

They all knew that Kodee Kennings' mother had died when Kodee was about 5. The little girl's fears and frustrations about her father being in harm's way had played out on the pages of the Daily Egyptian for nearly two years, in gut-wrenching letters fraught with misspellings, innocent observations and questions about why Daddy wasn't there to chase the monsters from under her bed.

It turns out Daddy didn't exist. And neither did Kodee. --Casillas, Heinzman and Huppke --HOAX!
Did Sgt. Dan Kennings die in Iraq? Not really.
Did Sgt. Dan Kennings even exist? Well, no.
So who was that little girl writing the letters? (Chicago Tribune)

Michael Gee, ex-Boston Herald sports writer, posted his ill-advised commentary on the ?incredibly hot? student with the ?bitchin? bod? on a message board. Check out the WaPo article, and click on the link to the ?blog? Robert MacMillan cites: SportsJournalists.com.

There is no blog present.

What you see is called a message board, or a forum, and has existed for quite a long time.

By calling this a ?blog,? MacMillan stamps this sordid little episode with a certain stigma - throw in blogging vs. journalism and ?should educators blog?? and you end up with the oh-so juicy headline ?Don't Blog So Close To Me.?

Love the headline, hate the complete lack of attention being paid to different methods of communication. --Ryan Sholin --The Washington Post Doesn't Know a Blog from a Message Board (Ryan Sholin's J-School Blog)

Via Dan Gillmor.

Cuneiform, the world's first script, was born in southern Iraq, and carbon dating indicates it originated between 3400 and 3300 B.C., writes Robert Biggs in one of the book's finest essays. There must have been quite a burst of innovation, because within a century or two the wheel appeared as well. It was quickly put to use in war, on chariots pulled by recently domesticated donkeys. Cuneiform found its first use in record keeping: receipts for barley bales, notices of gold shipments, more the work of accountants than poets. But before long, people went wild for cuneiform. Clay tablets with its spindly arrangements of flicks and crosses started to appear by the thousands, recording paeans, epics and incantations.

Cuneiform tablets became so common in ancient Iraq that they were used as packing material in building foundations and tossed into trash pits with animal and fish bones. In the 1980s archaeologists found a library of 800 tablets arranged on their shelves at a site called Sippar and sent them to the Iraq Museum, where they were widely and mistakenly reported to have been lost in the 2003 looting. The museum currently holds more than 100,000 tablets, and thousands more circulate elsewhere. Biggs recounts how the Chicago department store Marshall Field's was selling cuneiform tablets from Ur for $10 each as late as the 1960s. --Roger Atwood --The Story of the Iraq Museum (

At the height of the conflict, Britain guaranteed freedom to any slave who fought for the king against George Washington's slave-owning rebels. And in 1772, in London, Lord Mansfield, nudged by the advocacy of Granville Sharp, an abolitionist, judged that Africans could not be transported against their will. It sounded good. Thousands of slaves, lacking a better offer, joined the king's cause.

It goes without saying that Britain's pledge was issued with only token expectation that it would need to be honoured?victory would surely render it irrelevant. But military incompetence and American resolve turned it into a disquieting political reality. After much smudging, a liberal haven?an 18th-century African Zion?was marked out in Sierra Leone. African-Americans began to go ?home?.

It was a disastrous enterprise from the start; what began as a rescue mission was later seen as a ?racist deportation?. As revolutionary echoes from France made London's potentates tremble, cargoes of ex-slaves were dumped on a malarial strip of impossible land. Some were seized as slaves again; others, in an even more horrid reverse, became slavers themselves. It was the only business they knew. --Slavery in America: Black and white -- and red all over (The Economist)

A review of Simon Schama's Rough Crossings.

Podcasts get their name from combining iPods with radio broadcasting. It all started when a few folks started recording indie talk radio programs and releasing them online, intending them to be uploaded to iPods and listened to on the road. Of course, Apple, knowing what was happening, decided to push the technology into the mainstream with its release of iTunes 4.9, which offered podcast subscriptions. They made an entire department of their wildly successful iTunes Music Store just for the podcasts, and featured many of the more commercial releases, as well as the indie ones that started it all. It seems like almost every talk radio DJ now has a podcast of their radio show, including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Inside Mac Radio, and more. Podcasting is quickly becoming a louder companion to the blog.

But how does podcasting work? --Mike Rubino --WTF is a Podcast? (Tranquility Lost)

A good informal overview of the latest thing these crazy internet kids are doing. Mike is a junior at Seton Hill, and though he's somehow managed to avoid taking any of my classes so far (was it something I said blogged?), he's a core member of the SHU blogging community.

The fact is, there will be no more books to restock. The UT library is undergoing a radical change, becoming more of a social gathering place more akin to a coffeehouse than a dusty, whisper-filled hall of records. And to make that happen, the undergraduate collection of books had to go.

This summer, 90,000 volumes were transferred to other collections in the campus's massive library system - leaving some to wonder how a library can really be a library if it has no tomes. --Kris Axtman --Bye, Bye, Library (CBS News)

Nick Montfort posted an amusing take on this over at GrandTextAuto.

While the news lead told the five Ws and the H, the lead of a sports story (though not limited to one paragraph) must contain certain elements. When editing sports, check the lead for:

1. Who was involved
2. What happened
3. When
4. Where
5. Name of the sport
6. Score
7. How won

How the game was won is usually the lead emphasis on a sports story. --Writing a Sports Story (Ellsworth Air Force Base)

A good find. I wonder who the author is. The last few paragraphs offer specifics for dealing with military ranks, so this handout was at least personalized by someone in the military. (I've sent an e-mail to Ellsworth Air Force Base. We'll see what happens.)

User interface agents are increasingly used in software products; perhaps the best-known user interface agent is the Microsoft Office Assistant ("Clippy the Paperclip"). This thesis explores why many people have a negative response to the Office Assistant, using a combination of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative studies. Among the findings were that labels--whether internal cognitive labels or explicit system-provided labels--of user interface agents can influence users' perceptions of those agents. Similarly, specific agent appearance (for example, whether the agent is depicted as a character or not) and behavior (for example, if it obeys standards of social etiquette, or if it tells jokes) can affect users' responses, especially in interaction with labels. --Luke Swartz
--Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents (Stanford University)

Brilliant!

A Microsoft Corp. product is headed to the big screen for the first time -- but don't worry, moviegoers won't be asked to suffer through two hours of Clippy.

The company's "Halo" video-game franchise and its hero, Master Chief, will provide the basis for a major movie under a deal between Microsoft and movie studios Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox.

Microsoft confirmed the agreement Wednesday after months of speculation in Hollywood and the video-game world. --Todd Bishop

--'Halo' is headed for the big screen: Live-action film to be based on Microsoft video game (Seattle PI)

This movie is likely to join the ranks of the immortals.

The "Clippy" lead is clever.

"I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster," Henderson affirms. "It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him."

He writes "to formally request that this alternative theory be taught in your schools, along with the other two theories [creationism and evolution]." --Feedback -- The Flying Spaghetti Monster (NewScientist.com)

I love the bit tying global warming to the decline in the number of pirates since 1800, but I'm not so sure that ridiculing one's opponents is the best way to change the situation.

At any rate, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a hoot.

If you're older than about 38, words and phrases like "frotz," "xyzzy," "maze of twisty passages all alike," and "eaten by a grue" trigger sharp remembrance, like Marcel Proust eating a madeleine. You'll instantly reminisce about text games like Infocom's Deadline, Suspended, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a zillion Scott Adams titles from Adventure International. You'll grit your teeth recalling the hours it took to put the Babel fish in your ear in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you're a male secure in your masculinity, you may even join the manly men who say the death of Floyd the robot in Planetfall was the only time a computer game ever made them cry. --Allen Varney -->Read Game (Escapist Magazine)

I'd replace "38" with about "33," but this is still an excellent overview. It doesn't contain any significant original interviews, but the quotations from the games themselves put this article in another category -- the author is really putting his money where his mouth is, in terms of his claim that IF is a literary genre with a culture worth exploring.

The article does a good job of sorting through the existing online information and presenting it in a comprehensible way.

Text games circa 2005, however, are called interactive fiction or interactive storytelling. Some are book-length, requiring 20 to 30 hours to play and read. Others are more akin to short stories and can be completed in a half hour.

“The goal is to make you forget you’re sitting at a computer and to make you feel like you’re sitting inside the game,” said Paul O’Brien, a computer programmer at the University of Colorado and former editor of an interactive fiction newsletter. --David Hayes --Playing with words (Kansas City Star (registration required))

Also quoted: Nick Montfort, Adam Cadre, Chris Crawford. Games mentioned: Photopia, 1893, Galatea, Slouching Towards Bedlam, along with plenty of good links.

The best news story I've seen coming from the Malinche Entertainment press release.

The article refers to "dwarfs," but Adventure actually spelled it "dwarves".

2. Desi Arnaz, Orson Welles, Roy Orbison, Ted Bundy, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Cary Grant have always been dead.
3. ?Heeeere'sJohnny!? is a scary greeting from Jack Nicholson, not a warm welcome from Ed McMahon.
4. The Energizer bunny has always been going, and going, and going.
5. Large fine-print ads for prescription drugs have always appeared in magazines.
6. Photographs have always been processed in an hour or less.
7. They never got a chance to drink 7-Up Gold, Crystal Pepsi, or Apple Slice.
8. Baby Jessica could be a classmate. --Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2008 (Beloit College)

There are a total of 50 items on the list.

I graduated from high school in 1986, the year most incoming freshmen were born. Events such as the destruction of the Challenger (Space Shuttle Orbiter) and the "Baby Jessica down the well" media circus have been in my psyche so long I can hardly remember my own mindset before I knew those things.

The world's grown too complex for journalists to cover using only literary skills. A generation ago, forward-thinking journalists developed computer-assisted reporting techniques, uncovering stories from public databases, including crime reports, school test scores and census data.

Unfortunately, CARR has remained a specialty within journalism, rather than a core skill. Part of this can be attributed to journalists' collective hostility toward math and science. I've been training journalists in basic math for a decade, and in my experience, it is far easier to teach someone with high math aptitude how to report and write a journalism story than it is to teach a typical journalist math.

Why not, then, try to recruit more math-savvy students into journalism? --Robert Niles --What's in the works for the next 12 months at OJR? (Online Journalism Review)

Like a zombie from a George Romero flick, the PointCast model refuses to die.

The latest incarnation? Google Sidebar aggregrates news headlines, plus custom local weather reports and stock quotes in a desktop application window. Sidebar also adds new features, including the ability to read messages sent to a Gmail account and reader-selected RSS feeds within the Sidebar app. --Robert Niles --Google launches Sidebar in latest attempt to make 'push' model work online (Online Journalism Review)

Blogs and do-it-yourself RSS feeds have changed the media landscape since the original PointCast era. I never saw a use for the old push mode, but I installed Google's new sidebar on my home computer, and I like it. It doesn't feel like push, because most of the content on the panel is plain old text. I can control the rate at which the photos change.

I'll leave it off my work computer, since I'd rather not be distracted. But on my widescreen laptop, it's a good use of the extra horizontal pixels -- which don't do me any good on the fixed-width web designs of many sites, including OJR.

Other cyberbuzz: Google Talk, a new IM service. (I once unintentionally got a sympathetic "Awww!" from my class when I told them that I don't have any friends with which to chat online. That doesn't mean I don't have any friends, it just means that those friendships were formed in an era before IM. One very kind student said something like, "I'll chat with you online!")

I know I should worry. I am a historian, after all, and if people will not read fiction, surely they will read less history. And I’m a teacher, and like everyone else in the humanities, I know students just do not read like they used to do.

The trouble is, I am not sure the changes in our cultural context are necessarily a bad thing. I read many airplane novels, and I have to say that if the younger generation is doing something else with their time, not much is lost. I read New Yorker fiction when I feel the need to be literarily virtuous, but the pieces tend to be mostly depressing stories about lives that do not work out in rather low-level ways.

Then I go online. --John V. Lombardi --Students Read Less. Should We Care? (Inside Higher Ed)

>open can
The can is now open. Worms pour out and spill everywhere!


Counting the number of novels students read is a poor index to their literacy in an information age. Lombardi is correct to note that cyberspace offers a wide range of texts, at all levels of cultural and aesthetic value.

A pig may be a pig may be a pig, but a web page is not a web page is not a web page. Too often, bibliophiles who have encountered some of the worst the web has to offer close their mind to the possibility that not only can they and their students find the good stuff if they look for it, but they and their students can help the rest of the world find that good stuff if they post web links to it (so that Google and other search engines will be more likely to point web surfers to it).

What happens when the title of a hit movie doesn't conform to AP style?

That question was answered in recent days when newspapers started reviewing and writing about the new box office hit whose official name is "The 40 Year-Old Virgin." Of course, as any reporter or editor worth his or her salt knows, there should be a hyphen between 40 and Year. As it reads now, it's almost as if the movie is about 40 virgins who are still toddlers (not exactly unusual). --Lesley Messer --Press Wrestles With Grammatically Incorrect 'Virgin' (Editor & Publisher)

The final joke about an album by The Who is funny.

Despite "the rhetoric of student culture," she writes, students are not only studying less, they are also spending less time socializing than students a generation ago.

The reason why, she offers, is that they're too busy holding wage-paying jobs. In addition, efforts to create a more cohesive college community are stymied because the "sheer number of options in college life generate a system in which no one is in the same place at the same time. --Jacob Gershman --On the Trail of an Undercover Professor (New York Sun)

An anthropoloy professor in her mid-50s goes undercover as a freshman.

A childhood interest in the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, would lead Moog to a create a career and business that tied the name Moog as tightly to synthesizers as the name Les Paul is to electric guitars.

Despite traveling in circles that included jet-setting rockers, he always considered himself a technician.

"I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers," he said in 2000. "They use the tools."
--Synthesizer Innovator Robert A. Moog Dies (AP|MyWay)

This calls for some sad organ chords with the left hand, some resonant bell chimes on the right, with maybe a very slow Bossa Nova background.

On the first day of classes, the ritual has been the same for decades: Professors hand out copies of the syllabus and walk students through it. But in most courses at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh this fall, the only thing professors may hand out is a URL.

That’s because the dean of the College of Letters and Science told professors that — for financial and educational reasons — they should put their syllabuses online, and stop distributing them on the first day of classes. --Scott Jaschik --The End of the Paper Syllabus (Inside Higher Ed)

My syllabus contains a notice that the official syllabus is always the online version, and that the paper copy I hand out on the first day is only for the convenience of the student.

On the first day, I give students printouts of the first one or two assignments, but after that I tell them that they'll be expected to check the website and print out copies on their own.

Once in a while I will distribute a printed handout, often while asking the students, "How often do I give you printouts? What can you deduce about the importance of this document if I'm putting it into your hands today?"

One problem I've had with online syllabi is that my faculty peers sometimes get confused when they read them offline, since a well-designed online document doesn't always make sense on paper.

The cool gadgetry on the classic TV series has made dreamers drool since the first time Captain Kirk barked the words "Beam me up, Scotty!" into his little black box and snapped it shut. --Holly J. Wagner --Star Trek Phone Set to Thrill  (Wired)

Cute, but Kirk never actually said that line, just as Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."

Kirk said "One to beam up," or "Energize," or all sorts of variations.

So it was, late on Saturday evening in a valley five miles outside the soulless resort town of Aspen, that Thompson's final request was granted. On a calm, still night lit by an almost full moon, a combination of fireworks and the writer's ashes were blasted into the sky from the top of a 153ft tower in a series of red, white, blue and green flashes. --Andrew Buncombe --Going, going, gonzo: Hunter S Thompson blasts off (The Independent)

The nerve of Harjo! What started as a woman's disdain for the yummy delicacy suddenly became the great fry bread debate. Ask any Indian about it and you'll either be greeted with rolled eyes - or sparkling, hungry eyes.

After all, fry bread is synonymous with Indian culture. --Angie Walker --Indian Fry Bread Sparks Health Debate (AP|MyWay)

Great writing makes what could have been a standard "yet another thing bad for you" into a human interest piece. I happen to be hungry right now... rather than writing a sanctimonious article that makes those who indulge seem foolishly short-sighted, Walker researches the cultural significance of the targeted food.

If the number of blogs is growing, the medium must be real. Right ?

Right in concept. Unfortunately its impossible to count the number of blogs in the blogosphere due to the number of spamblogs, splogs, zombies, whatever you want to call them.

While the number of blogs has been placed by those who like to speculate about such things in the 15mm range, new blogs per day in the 30k to 80k range, and blogposts per day in the 500k to 900k range, no one seems to want to put an asterick next to any of those numbers and try to remove the number splogs.

Whats a splog -- --Mark Cuban --A splog here, a splog there, pretty soon it ads up… and we all lose (Blog Maverick)

The world needed a term for "thing that pretends to be a weblog but is really just spewing out commercial links to confuse search engines." And "splog" is definitely better than "blam".

Four schools in the UK will be testing a new program idea to use video games for educational use. An IT researcher, along with Electronic Arts (the software game giant) are funding the proposition. 'We're looking at developing some of the softer skills that are needed for the 21st century, such as problem-solving, resilience, persistence and collaboration.' --Your Homework is Play Video Games (Slashdot)

I'm filing this so I can get a sense of what kind of (mis)conceptions students might bring with them when they sign up for my videogaming culture course this coming January.

Yes, students will play videogames, but they will also read scholarly works, and write researched essays that I will evaluate on the same criteria that I apply to any other college essay. (And an academic essay is not the same thing as a game review.)

I tried an experiment, changing the ad copy in two publications in very subtle ways, just changing the superlatives I used to describe the product. In one publication I said it was flexible, in the other I said programmable, for example. Sure enough, when the editorial came out in each pub, they used the adjectives I had used in my ads. Exactly the same ones. It was as if they wrote the editorial by massaging my ad copy.

Also it was amazing to me how often my ads ran adjacent to editorial about the products.

All these are indicators, but not proof, that advertisers have at least some control over what appears in editorial. --Dave Winer --Doc on Ad Age (Scripting News)

In the scenario, there are two versions of the gene for magical ability -- the M version, which creates muggles, and the W version, which is needed for wizardry. But everyone gets two copies of the gene -- one from each parent -- and even a single M scuttles any hope for a magical career.

Only the lucky few with the genes WW will have magical ability. Those who are MW will be muggles, but there is still a chance for their children. If two muggles who are MW have a child, there is a one in four chance that the child will be WW -- and able to cast spells. --Matthew Harper --Harry Potter and the genetics lesson (Forbes|MSNBC)

A diverting little speculation.

It'sprobably true that the easiest eye-catching technology to apply to comics, that some artists are doing, is to use techniques like Flash, and yes, that risks changing the form so much that they?re not comics anymore. --Andrew Stern --Keeping Digital Comics Comics (Grand Text Auto)

A good overview of the tension between online comics and other genres.

Today the theory era is effectively ending and the public intellectual tradition is reasserting itself, along with a renewed attention in the aesthetic that many theorists dismissed as no more than an ideological formation. But thanks to tenure and the intellectual investments we make as graduate students, theory will have a long afterlife. It will also continue to inflect how many important issues are discussed, including the role of language in literature, the degree to which literary works reference the world outside the text, the role of social construction including class, race, and gender in forming our conventions of representation (as writers) and interpretation (as critics). Critical movements leave behind a residue of common sense after the dust of their polemics has settled and the most extreme positions have been abandoned. The New Criticism left its mark on how everyone reads, especially poetry, long after its assumptions about the organic unity of the text had been roundly rejected. Deconstruction terminated the notion, never entertained by any great critic in the past, that a literary text could be cracked open with a single definitive interpretation. Poststructuralism in general helped us question the belief that we could find a disinterested stance that would make some kind of definitive critical understanding possible, perhaps even objectively true. --Morris Dickstein --Thinking About Theory's Empire (The Valve)

A thoughtful review of Theory's Empire.

Disregarding third-party candidates, Professors DellaVigna and Kaplan found that towns that offered Fox by 2000 increased their vote share for the Republican presidential candidate by 6 percentage points (to 54 percent, from 48 percent) from 1996 to 2000, while those that did not offer Fox increased theirs by an even larger 7 percentage points (to 54 percent, from 47 percent).

When they made statistical adjustments to hold constant differences in demographic characteristics and unemployment, and looked at differences in voting behavior between towns that introduced and did not introduce Fox within the same Congressional district, the availability of Fox had a small and statistically insignificant effect on the increase in the share of votes for the Republican candidate. Thus, the introduction of Fox news did not appear to have increased the percentage of people voting for the Republican presidential candidate. A similar finding emerged for Congressional and senatorial elections.Voter turnout also did not noticeably change within towns that offered Fox by 2000 compared with those that did not. --Alan B. Kreuger --Fair? Balanced? A Study Finds It Does Not Matter (NY Times)

An interesting claim: "The tendency for people to regard television news and political commentary as entertainment probably makes filtering easier."

The PoMos are right: Narratives don't get built out of facts. Narratives tell us which facts matter. Within a narrative, it's important that journalistic reports be accurate. But accuracy is not enough to bring about intelligibility or to tear down an existing intelligibility. --David Weinberger --Jay Rosen's New Lessons (Joho the Blog)

A great take on "Things I used to teach [about journalism] that I no longer believe."

Existing legislation already prevents non-official sponsors from using distinctive "Olympic marks" like the Olympic rings.

But the new bill will make it illegal to combine words like "games", "medals", "gold", "2012", "sponsor" or "summer" in any form of advertising. --Olympics bill comes under attack (BBC)

Note that the Olympics Bill seems to apply only to advertising connected to the 2012 London games.

The skinny bar is made up of old and red stars and is about 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than previously believed. The bar is at a 45 degree angle to the line between our Sun and the center of the galaxy and may put the Milky Way in a small class of galaxies with the unusual shape, researchers say.

--Study Describes Bar at Center of Milky Way (AP|MyWay)

I guess that's where people go after visiting "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe."

Oh give me some foam, whose pieces won't roam,
from the tank, on which its attached,
with seldom the sight, of pieces in flight,
the shuttle, it hardly gets scratched.

Foam! Foam on the tank!
Stay stuck, to the place you're attached!
With seldom the sight, of your pieces in flight,
The shuttle, it hardly gets scratched.

Where the foam is so pure, application so free,
the makeup, so balmy and light,
That I would not so yank, my foam from the tank,
For all the reasons so right.

Applying the foam, on that bright shining dome,
We shower each other in streams,
where the graceful white paste, we apply with such haste,
on ourselves more than tank, so it seems.

Foam! Foam on the tank!
Stay stuck, to the place you're attached!
With seldom the sight, of your pieces in flight,
The shuttle, it hardly gets scratched. --John L. JerzFoam on the Tank! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My brother, an engineer, wrote this in honor of the space shuttle's safe return. (Sing it to "Home on the Range.") He's also written about chads.

A magical Walt Disney World family vacation was ruined last weekend by the stringent policies and protocol of the Walt Disney Company.

[...]

The Mahaffeys' dissatisfaction began soon after their arrival. Despite being in a huge, open park with dozens of attractions, the family was unable to roam freely, confronted at every turn by signs commanding them to remain on the clearly delineated brick-paved paths. This thwarted an unspoken but keenly felt sense of wanderlust in the family.

"There was a lot of gorgeous greenery, but most of it was roped off," said Amy Mahaffey, 34. "You could only leave the path if you wanted to go into a shop or café. It made me imagine some behind-the-scenes pencil pusher wanting to save the company a few bucks on sod and petunias, or to ward off potential injury lawsuits. I wanted to be a kid again, but I might as well have stayed at work." --Disney Family Vacation Ruined By Walt Disney Company (The Onion (satire; will expire))

Jesus suffered (i.e. "permitted") the little children to come unto him. Some were probably squalling.

Emily Kasky blogs about an inconsiderate mother who didn’t take her disruptive child out of Mass. I wouldn’t be so hasty to equate non-spanking with lack of discipline, or to equate spanking with the teaching of empathy. I don't mean to excuse a parent who encourages misbehavior, but I do want to suggest that parenting is complex and stressful. (But thumping against other people’s seats? That’s definitely an actionable offense. I hate that.)

As the parent of two children whom my wife occasionally calls “your spawn,” I’ve developed the ability to filter out a certain amount of chaos. I no longer even notice behavior that once I might have found very annoying. I’d say it’s reasonable to expect parents to take fidgety children out of restaurants that don’t offer crayons, or concert halls where nobody is playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” But at Old Country Buffet, or at a church service, some kid noise is going to be inevitable.

I remember riding in a car with friends in high school, when the driver, who dismissed my warning that he was about to top a rise too fast, crossed the yellow line and broadsided another car. I have a vivid memory of this kid squatting down by the side of the road, howling, “My dad is gonna kill me!” He didn’t even check to see whether anyone was hurt first, didn’t care that his moment of arrogance almost cost six people their lives. His immediate response was fear of parental wrath.

As a result, I tend to try talking through my children’s misbehavior. Even though that means they might not stop the bad behavior as quickly, they do get practice examining their conscience, recommending reparations, and suggesting privileges to lose. (Peter sometimes suggests “no videogames for four months,” which I think is extreme for poking his sister, but I digress.)

I can understand complaints about permissive parenting and calls for more discipline, but it’s a third parenting style that is associated with the upbringing of Holocaust rescuers -- that is, ordinary citizens who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis. “Authoritative” parenting emphasizes reason and empathy over discipline and sternness. (See "Discipline Isn't Enough," a newspaper article that mentions research by Diana Baumrind, Fiona White, and Jonathan Glover.)

By the way, if you ever have a kid who acts up in public, I just might be the guy who's smiling at you. I've been there.Suffer the Little Children (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

If daily life is not concerned with familiar economic activities and the whole of life is not informed with religious purposes, then what is life all about in Star Trek? Well, the story is about a military establishment, Star Fleet, and one ship in particular in the fleet, the Enterprise. One might not expect this to provide much of a picture of ordinary civilian life; and it doesn't. One never sees much on Earth apart from the Star Fleet Academy and Picard's family farm in France -- unless of course we include Earth's past, where the Enterprise spends much more time than on the contemporaneous Earth. Since economic life as we know it is presumed not to exist in the future, it would certainly pose a challenge to try and represent how life is conducted and how, for instance, artifacts like the Enterprise get ordered, financed, and constructed. And if it is to be represented that things like "finance" don't exist, one wonders if any of the Trek writers or producers know little details about Earth history like when Lenin wanted to get along without money and accounting and discovered that Russia's economy was collapsing on him. Marx's prescription for an economy without the cash nexus was quickly abandoned and never revived. Nevertheless, Marx's dream and Lenin's disastrous experiment is presented as the noble and glorious future in Star Trek: First Contact, where Jean Luc Picard actually says, "Money doesn't exist in the Twenty-Fourth Century."

So what one is left with in Star Trek is military life. --Kelly L. Ross --The Fascist Ideology of Star Trek: Militarism, Collectivism, & Atheism (Friesian)

Great suggestion, Will.

Much of this article points out the problems that come from a show that encompassed several different series, with a profusion of writers, directors, designers, and producers. Star Trek began in the 60s, during a time when TV shows were seen once or twice on their first runs, then syndicated in reruns, in an age when people couldn't freeze-frame to note that the background matte painting for the lithium cracking station from "Where No Man..." is the same painting used, with a few modifications, for a penal colony on another planet in "Dagger of the Mind." So many of the problems with inconsistencies in the depiction of such concepts as finance, religion, and military service are due to the fact that the various episodes were written by people who emphasized different things at different times. It's a bit silly to criticize Star Trek for not following the protocol of naval ships, but it's also sloppy and careless of the producers of a show with such an intense following to let obvious continuity errors slip into the show. What was with the signs in the elevator shaft in Star Trek V that showed something like 75 decks? Where, in the Enterprise, is there room for an unbroken vertical shaft with that many levels? (Okay, maybe that number "75" wasn't supposed to represent the floor number. Still...)

If the producers of Star Trek can't even agree with each other about such things as how many decks the Enterprise has, it's no surprise that their depictions of such complex things as money and religion are also muddled.

While Star Trek often had its heroes deposing an alien computer posing as a god, I think the treatment of religion in the Star Trek world is more complex than Ross suggests.

The article also doesn't acknowledge that the original series contained several specific references to religion. In "Bread and Circuses," the original series Enterprise officers dismiss religious references to "the sun," only to be told by Uhura, who monitored their planetary communications, that the people were really talking about "the Son of God." Kirk's final line before a "happy music" fade-out, something like, "And the word is spreading only now," suggests acceptance.

In an early episode, Kirk performs a marriage ceremony in a room identified as a chapel, where we later see a crew member grieving (kneeling, if memory serves).

In "Dagger of the Mind," a woman named "Helen Noel" refers to an encounter with Kirk during a "Christmas party."

It's true that The Next Generation went out of its way to challenge traditional religious notions, as when Picard is prepared to die in order to prove to the natives in "Who Watches the Watchers" that he is not divine. And the "Q" entity is a farcical rendition of an omnipotent being who finds himself eternally confounded by the humanistic logic and integrity of the mere mortals with whose lives he eternally meddles.

It's also true that Klingon and Bajoran religious practice is a mishmash.

I'd have to Google to find the specific reference, but the original series show "The Empath" features a scene -- possibly viewed via record logs -- of a brief conversation between two researchers, one of whom quotes a Psalm (and identifies it as a Psalm), shortly before both men are zapped and disappear from the research facility.

Rather than pull up more examples from my memory, I just Googled and found a page that has collected references to "Religion in Star Trek."

In 2003, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey reported that his group had found “the biggest dinosaur that we know of in Virginia.” Earlier this year an Indian newspaper reported on a dinosaur discovery that they termed the “oldest fossil record from Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh.” Not long after, papers in Rio were reporting on a small plant-eating dinosaur that was the “oldest of 11 dinosaurs found in Brazil.”

A curator of a museum in Illinois promoted an exhibit by saying, “We have the oldest T. rex specimen, in terms of years when it died, and we have the youngest here.” Prospector Rod Peterson was recently feted for finding “the biggest dinosaur bone site in New Mexico."

Sometimes estness leads to disputes about who has discovered the estiest dinosaur of all. --Syephen Strauss --Smallest, oldest, fastest, dumbest dinosaur stories (CBC)

Bangerter and Heath studied 500 US media reports between 1993 and 2002 to see how classical music became a must for children, and considered in which states the articles were published.

They found a correlation between unsatisfactory education systems and the number of reports published about the effect. Some states even heavily promoted the use of classical music in schools and day care centres, or handed out CDs to parents of babies.

"Laws were passed," said Bangerter. "Since 1998, crèches in Florida have to play half an hour of classical music every day for the children."

The psychologists also found that after 1997 children were mentioned more frequently in articles about the effect than the university students who were actually tested.

"When the original submission to Nature was published, journalists jumped on the story," said Bangerter. "As time went by, articles no longer referred to the research and more and more errors crept progressively into reports that were being published on the effect." --Psychologists debunk Mozart myth (Swiss Info)

Insane, right? I mean, let's say our friend John has his Bonebiter (one of countless powerful weapons in WoW) and a man steals it somehow. Should the thief be convicted of a crime and punished in the real world? Did you snort with laughter at that question? Why?

The victim worked many hours to "earn" the object. The victim used it daily and depended on it. He derived happiness and satisfaction from it. So why shouldn't depriving him of it be punishable by law? If you say, "but it's just something he used in a game," I'll say that golf is also just a game. Want to see what happens to me when I steal a new set of golf clubs?

If you say, "but the Bonebiter doesn't even exist," I'll say it exists in exactly the same way that the songs and software I download off Bittorrent exist. And yet stealing them is a crime. The only difference is that when I steal a song, nobody else is deprived of the song. When that guy stole John's Bonebiter, he was left unarmed and forced to go find a replacement. That theft actually hurts more, not less. --David Wong --A World of Warcraft World (PointlessWasteOfTime.com)

E.D. Nixon, then a leader of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, had been waiting for a test case to challenge bus segregation and vowed to help Colvin after her father posted bail. But then came the second-guessing: Colvin's father mowed lawns; her mother was a maid. Churchgoing people, but they lived in King Hill, the poorest section of Montgomery. The police, who took her to the city hall and then jail, also accused the teenager of spewing curse words, which Colvin denied, saying that in fact the obscenities were leveled at her ("The intimidation, the ridicule," she often says now).

Some blacks believed she was too young, and too dark-skinned to be an effective symbol of injustice for the rest of the nation. Then, as local civil rights leaders continued to debate whether her case was worth contesting, that summer came the news that Colvin was pregnant -- by a married man.

E.D. Nixon would later explain in an oral history, "I had to be sure that I had somebody I could win with." Rosa Parks, for a decade the NAACP secretary who took special interest in Colvin's case, was "morally clean, reliable, nobody had nothing on her." --Vanessa de la Torre --In The Shadow Of Rosa Parks: ?Unsung Hero? Of Civil Rights Movement Speaks Out (The Cardinal Inquirer)

Fascinating study of Claudette Colvin, a black teenager who refused to give up her seat on a bus, nine months before Rosa Parks followed her example.

He was as rabidly hostile to conventional family life as Marx or Engels, but he was a much more effective and powerful critic, because his criticism did not remain on the level of philosophical abstraction. On the contrary, he laid bare the factions and revolutions of family life, its lies and miseries, in compelling and believable dramas; and while it has always been open to the reader or viewer to ascribe the moral pathology exhibited in these plays to the particular characters or neuroses of their dramatis personae alone, clearly this was not Ibsen'sintention. He was not a forerunner of Jerry Springer; his aim was not titillation or a mere display of the grotesque. He intends us to regard the morbidity his plays anatomize as typical and quintessential (to use Shaw'sword), the inevitable consequence of certain social conventions and institutions. He invites us implicitly, and explicitly in A Doll'sHouse and Ghosts, to consider alternative ways of living in order to eliminate what he considers the avoidable misery of the pathology he brings to light.

[...]

When, as I have, you have met hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people abandoned in their childhood by one or both of their parents, on essentially the same grounds (?I need my own space?), and you have seen the lasting despair and damage that such abandonment causes, you cannot read or see A Doll'sHouse without anger and revulsion. Now we see what Ibsen meant when he said that women'srights were of no fundamental interest to him. He was out to promote something much more important: universal egotism. --Theodore Dalrymple --Ibsen and His Discontents (City Journal)

Dalrymple, a psychiatrist who works in prisons, is critical of many cultural values often found in modern literature. That's not to say he dislikes literature; rather, he questions the habit of literary critics who romanticize the notions that the disengaged cultural elites hold about the underclass that their literature claims to celebrate.

In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight's Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web.

The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple.

When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium. --Tim Berners-Lee

--Berners-Lee on the read/write web (BBC)

It's a beautiful day in this bloggerhood
A beautiful day for a blogger
Would you read mine
Could you read mine

It's a bloggerly day in this bloggerhood
A bloggerly day for a blogger
Would you read mine
Could you read mine

I've always wanted to read a blogger just like you
I've always wanted to live life through a blogger just like you

So, let's make the most of this bloggerhood day
Since we're together we might as well say
Would you read mine, could you read mine
Won't you be my blogger
Won't you please, won't you please
Please won't you read my blo-og. --Kickstart70 --''Bloggerhood''? (MetaFilter)

A comment posted to a thread about conservative and progressive echo chambers.

--Writing Machines (Flickr)

Great photos of old typewriters and old computers.

When the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad was being built in the mountains just after the Civil War (last week I walked on its old tracks), the work crews were worked hard. The most famous worker was John Henry, a steel driver who hammered spikes into the mountainside to make space for sticks of dynamite that would blow away mountain to make room for the tracks. The steel driver and the man who placed and turned the spikes had to work with speed and split-second precision. The men laying down the tracks worked to their rhythm. Words came out of this, out of the rhythm of the hit and the hammer and haul, and the words became chants and poems and folk songs, and they spread from the tracks to the town and then out to the country. --Peggy Noonan --Almost Heaven: A Visit to West Virginia (Opinion Journal)

Recent scholarship challenges the claim that Talcott, WV is the best claim to the origin of the John Henry legend, but Noonan has pretty much written the article I wanted to write when I requested some funds to take a drive through Kentucky and West Virginia this summer. (I ended up not going to West Virginia, but I did crawl around in a cave in Kentucky.)

In the 1960s, Walt Disney joked that one day he'd replace his elite corps of animators, known as the "Nine Old Men," and their slow, expensive way of making hand-drawn movies, with Audio-Animatronic figures.

At the end of last month, Walt's joke came true. The studio bearing his name announced that, due to a "changing creative climate and economic environment," it will be shutting DisneyToon Studios Australia next year. The studio, which turned out sequels (such as "Tarzan II," "The Lion King II" and "Bambi II") was the company's last remaining facility creating hand-drawn (or 2-D) traditional animation. To compete in the 3-D computer-generated imagery (or CGI) arena, the house that a hand-drawn mouse built will become a pixels, rather than a paper-and-pencils, place. --John Canemaker --Disney Erases Hand-Drawn Animation (

It's no surprise that Disney's recent sequels didn't come close to matching the quality of their animated originals.

Without Pixar, I wonder whether Disney can still produce quality 3D animation.

Today is the 10th anniversary of the Netscape initial public stock offering (IPO). To say that the IPO changed things is an understatement. --Dan Gillmor --The Netscape IPO, a Decade Later (Dan Gillmor's Blog)

· 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population
· Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had more than 1 million visitors each
· Of 400 of the biggest blogs observed, segmented by seven (nonexclusive) categories, political blogs were the most popular, followed by "hipster" lifestyle blogs, tech blogs and blogs authored by women
· Compared to the average Internet user, blog readers are significantly more likely to live in wealthier households, be younger and connect to the Web on high-speed connections
· Blog readers also visit nearly twice as many web pages as the Internet average, and they are much more likely to shop online --Behaviors of the Blogosphere: Understanding the Scale, Composition and Activities of Weblog Audiences (PDF) (ComScore)

A business report, with numbers that confirm a trend many have noted about the blogosphere in general, and that I have seen in my own student blogging. A small number of blogs dominates the scene, with a few sites that stand an order of magnitude above the average, and then a long line of sites with less and less activity, followed by an even longer line of dead sites.

The categories reported by the study aren't exclusive, but those women bloggers -- what do they write about? Something other than politics, hipster lifestyle, and technology? "Wonkette" is listed under both "Politics/News" and "Women (Authored)".

The study credits Peter Merholz with the term "blog," without noting that "blog" is short for "weblog," a term coined by Jorn Barger, and that the form of the blog dates from the earliest "What's New" and "Link of the Day" sites on the World Wide Web.

But these are nitpicks. Since the report is designed for people who want to think of bloggers as potential customers or as targets for advertising, naturally I'm not all that inspired by the report's approach. Still, a study that claims that bloggers are geekier and richer than the average internet user challenges the feel-good technosocialist "blogs free you from oppression and help you fight The Man" rhetoric that many bloggers (including yours truly) would like to believe about their favorite medium.

Is there something about blogging that attracts affluent high-tech geeks with high-speed connections, or are affluent high-tech geeks with high-speed connections simply visiting more websites of all kinds, and therefore showing up more frequently on ComScore's radar? Nothing I've read surprises me, but it's still useful to see some numbers.

Discovery swooped through the darkness of the Mojave Desert and landed on the Edwards runway at 5:11 a.m. PDT, well before sunrise. It marked the conclusion of the first shuttle re-entry since Columbia's tragic return. --Alicia Chang --Discovery Lands Safely in California (AP|My Way)

Whew!

They're a couple-of-dollars part on a $170 helmet, but even the smallest detail must be dealt with when you're building a football team from scratch.

"You can't play the game without chin straps," Snyder said.

And you can't play without coaches and a team and a field and helmets and uniforms and the myriad other people, places and things that Snyder has had to line up since Seton Hill, a former women's college, announced it would field a football team in March 2004. --Jennifer Reeger --Griffins get wings (Tribune-Review)

A meaty feature on big changes at Seton Hill.

Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.

As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process. That so much about the vehicle design is bizarre and confused is the direct result of the Shuttle's little-remembered role as a military vehicle during the Cold War. --Maciej Ceglowski --A Rocket to Nowhere (Idle Words)

Great writing, even if the author sounds like he's chummy with the tinfoil-hat conspiracy crowd.

Regarding the Canada-produced robot arm: I remember being amused when I was living in Canada, hearing news reports that went something like this: "The Canadarm launched safely into orbit today, and got right to work deploying a payload. A spokesman for Spar Aerospace, the Canadian company that manufactured the robot arm, said, 'This is a wonderful thing that should make all Canadians proud.' A Candian politician said, of the advanced Canadian technology currently in orbit, "It's really amazing what we Canadians can do when we put our Canadian heads together." A Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer paused while riding across Canada's snow-covered northland, looked up at the stars, and wiped a tear from his Canadian eye, thinking about the wonderful Canadian things the Canadarm was doing up there in space. The Canadarm is scheduled to return to Flor-- uh, return to Earth next Wednesday, along with the Space Shuttle Atlantis, if NASA doesn't screw this one up, too."

(Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating... but I really did encounter news leads that used passive verbs to describe the Canadarm being elevated to orbit by some unspecified, non-Canadian process.)

The death of Peter Jennings means an era in television news has ended with stunning swiftness, giving broadcasters the challenge of reimagining the nightly news in an age of instant Internet updates. --David Bauder --Jennings' Death Ushers in Uncertain Era (AP|MyWay)

Tom Brokaw retired from NBC last November, and Dan Rather gave up the big chair at CBS in March. While there will certainly be good journalists who will fill in the anchor desks, never again will such a small group of people offer such a small range of choices to mass audiences.

Thomson ?cannot hold back the realization that the movies have never been good enough.? As a form, he writes, movies are ?most acute when fixed on what happens next; whereas literature, sooner or later, is about the meaning behind events.? This explains better than anything else I know why it is that the finest movies seem to have been made not from first- but from second-rate fiction: The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett), The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain), Farewell My Lovely (Raymond Chandler), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (B. Traven). In all these books, plot takes primacy over style and penetrating observation.

Which brings us to screenwriters. ?Product,? the old Hollywood moguls used to call the movies they made. --Joseph Epstein --What Happened to the Movies? (Commentary)

Terugkerend thema in onze gesprekken met klanten is de wijze waarop het internet als beste ingezet kan worden.
Aandacht hierbij gaat vaak uit naar de wijze van communiceren.

Vandaar dat wij graag u hierbij een overzicht van interessante artikelen over dit onderwerp willen presenteren:
--Schrijven voor het web (''Writing for the web'') (Darwine Nieuwsbrief)

A newsletter from The Netherlands offers a list of URLs on writing for the web. Included are Jakob "Usability" Nielsen, Mark "Serious Hypertext" Bernstein, and Vincent "Web Pages that Suck" Flanders.

I'm particularly partial to item 2.7, which is a collection of instructional handouts written by a college professor in western Pennsylvania.

In my dream
he wanted the bathroom.

"What's that smell?"
he said.

"A gift," I said, and gave him
cheap soap

hugely wrapped in purple
with a golden bow, no less.

How thoughtful. How thoughtless.
Not only splash, but flash. --Rachel McAlpine --Four Dreams about Jakob Nielsen (Quality Web Content)

Jakob Nielsen is a web usability guru. What's the point of giving someone "cheap soap" in a fancy wrapper? Plenty of web pages have equally flashy veneers, obscuring what little content or functionality they offer.

How can you boost your web site's credibility?

We have compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people. --Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility (WebCredibility.org)

Am I supposed to compare this Bo (Seann William Scott) and Luke Duke (Johnny Knoxville) to their counterparts from the series, John Schneider and Tom Wopat? Perhaps I could contrast the Daisy Dukes: Jessica Simpson and Catherine Bach. Or, better yet, I could strip naked, douse myself in gasoline and run flapping down the interstate in search of the eventual blessed release of "death by cop." The movie is so obviously lacking in any positive quality that even discussing it makes me feel like I'm soiling myself. --RedEye --Just a good ol' bomb (Chicago Tribune)

I've read so many hilarious skewerings of this movie that I'm starting to feel sorry for it. Not that I'd actually go see it, of course.

I sometimes wonder whether graphics wouldn't be better off if graphics designers and developers had stayed with vector-based graphics. For all that pixels are wonderful (I have nearly two million of them in front of me right now), they sometimes make Web designers do really stupid things. --Peter Seebach --Oh, the Pixel Pickle (IBM DeveloperWorks)

I'm glad someone else noticed the fact that resizing the text in your browser doesn't affect the size of MovableType's menus. I'd really love to see the MT interface redesigned so that it's skinnable.

_ Humans are basic units of economics.
_ Humans are souls trapped in the physical prison of the fleshly body.
_ Humans are physical bodies dyspeptically infested by parasitic souls.
_ Humans are information just like everything else in the universe.
_ Humans are the orphans of the animal kingdom.
_ Humans are goooood eatin?.
_ Humans are a failed experiment.
_ Humans are basically sets of genitals.
_ Humans are out to get me. --Tom Buckner --Blues for Robots (The Nonist)

An early segment from a long online work (haven't read it all).

Hawthorne's description of the Custom House emphasizes the nearby dilapidated wharves and decayed wooden warehouses crumbling to ruin and his office "cobwebbed and dingy with old paint." Hawthorne offers us an almost gothic Custom House, a fitting element in the introduction to a romance novel.

The Custom House is, in fact, an airy, handsome structure, flooded with light. This is characteristic of Federal period buildings. Hawthorne does recognize these qualities when he describes the building as "a spacious edifice of brick" and mentions the lofty height of the ceiling in his office. --Jan Arabas
--The U.S. Custom House in Salem: Introduction (Hawthorne In Salem)

Hawthrone's The Scarlet Letter begins with a description of this building, where in an upper room the narrator tells us he found the historical documents that formed the basis of the tale of Hester Prynne.

I never envisioned this structure as nearly this solid. Imposing and boxy, yes, but still charming.

Because I teach this novel early in the course, I tell my students to skip the Custom House introduction, and begin with the first chapter. The pace of The Scarlet Letter is so different from modern fare that I find the students have enough trouble adjusting to it. Asking them to identify and appreciate the self-mocking humor of the Customs House introduction, where the narrator enacts in words the idleness and uselessness of the "work" done by the customs house officials, is just a bit too much to do right away. (We go back and pick up the introduction after we've finished the novel.)

"It's been said that a bunch of nerdy white guys are creating these games," Armstrong said. "The problem with a bunch of white guys creating the games is that the story isn't being created with balance."

Roughly 80 percent of video-game programmers are white, according to preliminary results of an International Game Developers Association survey. About 4 percent of designers are Hispanic, and less than 3 percent are black. --Wanted: Minority Game Programmers  (Wired)

See also an article about Christian videogames.

Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart and now Natalee Holloway all became household names because of the way television news divisions, particularly the cable networks, extensively covered the story when they went missing.

Each had another common trait: they were young, white, pretty and female. Some have questioned how they became stories, when more than half of missing people are male and nearly three in 10 are black.

Mankiewicz follows the case of Tamika Huston, a black woman from Spartanburg, S.C., who disappeared last year. Her aunt, a public relations representative, told NBC she tried hard without much success to get national news outlets to report on the story. --David Bauder --'Dateline' Visits Missing-Persons Coverage (AP|MyWay)

If the blogosphere continues to expand at this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long, if not an actual reader of blogs. The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn't those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs - or bloglike manifestations - of their own. --Measuring the Blogosphere (NY Times)

This editorial responds to the recent Technorati State of the Blogosphere report.

A number of colleges and universities are having to assign full-time staffers or forming entire new departments to field parents' calls and email. Others hold separate orientations for parents, partly to keep them occupied and away from student sessions.

The University of Vermont employs "parent bouncers," students trained to divert moms and dads who try to attend registration and explain diplomatically that they're not invited. At one parent-student orientation session in June, more parents than students attended, swamping the meeting hall, says Jill Hoppenjans, the university's assistant director of orientation.

At the University of Georgia, students who get frustrated or confused during registration have been known to interrupt their advisers to whip out a cellphone, speed-dial their parents and hand the phone to the adviser, saying, "Here, talk to my mom," says Richard Mullendore, a University of Georgia professor and former vice president, student affairs, at the universities of Georgia and Mississippi. The cellphone, he says, has become "the world's longest umbilical cord." --Sue Shellenbarger --Colleges Ward Off Overinvolved Parents (Career Journal)

This year, SHU has separate orientation schedules for parents and students. The parents are welcome at a general Q and A session (where I made a promising contact with a parent who works for ABC News). Then the students come for one-on-one advising sessions.

In the past, I think my ability to advise has occasionally benefited from the fact that I had actually seen some parental pressuring going on during the advising session.

Reading this article has made me reflect. Am I too quick to blame high school teachers when new freshmen show up in class expecting me to hand then the "right answers" on a silver platter? It's not just the teachers who are carefully scrubbing all conflict and uncertainty out of their lives.

At SHU we get a high percentage of students who are the first in their families ever to go to college. This means that the parents may simply not know how important it is for their children to get things done themselves.

In 1945, an overwhelming majority of Americans regarded as a matter of course that the United States had used atomic bombs to end the Pacific war.... The critics divide over what prompted the decision to drop the bombs in spite of the impending surrender, with the most provocative arguments focusing on Washington's desire to intimidate the Kremlin. Among an important stratum of American society--and still more perhaps abroad--the critics' interpretation displaced the traditionalist view.

These rival narratives clashed in a major battle over the exhibition of the Enola Gay, the airplane from which the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, at the Smithsonian Institution in 1995. That confrontation froze many people's understanding of the competing views. Since then, however, a sheaf of new archival discoveries and publications has expanded our understanding of the events of August 1945. This new evidence requires serious revision of the terms of the debate. --Richard B. Frank --Why Truman Dropped the Bomb (The Weekly Standard)

The 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima approaches.

Terrorist cells in Baghdad are in mourning for suicide bomber Ahmed al-Khalaf, 19, who was killed by a car bomb Monday, 200 yards from an Iraqi police station, his intended target.
Suicide Bomber Killed En Route By Car Bomb

Sources within the insurgency said al-Khalaf was "on his way to becoming a glorious martyr" when he was struck down by the car-bomb explosion. Twenty-three other civilians were also killed. --Suicide Bomber Killed En Route by Car Bomb (The Onion (Satire))

Sick. Hilariously sick. A great example of irony.

What does it mean to read new media? How have digital spaces changed the activity of reading? How does reading digital texts?including games, instant messages, digital art and music, and other forms?enlarge our conception of what a text is? Is there a digital canon forming, and what are the consequences of such a move?

We also recognize that every act of reading is also an act of writing?a construction?and that reading cannot be separated from writing. We ask: What happens when writing morphs into composition or design? What sorts of composing processes inform the creation and reading of new media texts? What teaching possibilities lay at the intersection between reading and composing new media texts?

We invite essays and new media texts that reflect broadly on these issues. New media texts will be published in an accompanying CD with print connections (i.e., an author of a new media text can submit an artist'sstatement to be published in the book and which would point readers to the CD). The CD will also contain selections from the new media projects discussed in the essays. --Reading (and Writing) New Media

I've put this one in the way-too-long "to-do" list.

At a time when newsgathering techniques are under increasing scrutiny, big business tries to intimidate news organizations by filing lawsuits based on novel tort theories ranging from fraud to breach of duty of loyalty, courts order journalists to jail for refusing to disclose confidential sources, and government officials are finding new ways to close down access to public information in the name of national security, American journalists need to be aware of the many potential pitfalls that await them, and of how they might avoid them. They need to know their rights, and how to fight back when they are threatened. The First Amendment Handbook is an important weapon in that fight. --The First Amendment Handbook (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press)

Thanks for posting this one in HTML, RCFP.

Readers spoke compellingly of their experiences with newspapers and their observations about the behavior of journalists. Their comments evoked a sense of belief in the press as an important institution in our democracy, but they were unsparing, as well, in documenting their concerns about basic journalistic practices that they see as being unfair:

• Newspapers get too much too wrong too often; they are not factually accurate often enough.
• Newspapers are unwilling to correct mistakes fully, candidly, prominently and promptly, and with grace.
• The press is biased — not with a liberal bias, but with a negative one. There is too much focus on what is wrong and what is in conflict, and not enough on reporting and explaining what is working and succeeding. There is too much focus on the “failures” of the system and not enough on the “victories” of life and the people who live in our communities.

--Robert J. Haiman --Best Practices for Newspaper Journalists (PDF) (The Freedom Forum's Free Press/Fair Press Project)

A 73-page PDF booklet examining the reasons behind the public's perception that journalists are unfair, elite, incompetent, and otherwise not worthy of respect. (Focuses specifically on newspapers, and doesn't get at the heart of issues such as gate-keeping or what happens when the people start exercising their own freedoms via the internet.)

The entire concept of cyborgs or automated labor of any kind is inseparable from the contexts of economic production, and R.U.R. emphasizes this context much more than the first cyborg text, Shelley's Frankenstein. Some of the basic concepts of Marxist analysis involve recognizing the social and economic structure as consisting of a base and a superstructure. The base consists of the government structures and the superstructure consists of the markets, culture and society that forms "on top" of that base. A major claim of Marxist theory is that the base and the superstructure are controlled by the ruling class, but that class struggle, a constant element of capitalist economies, forces the ruling class to control not only the state but also as much of the superstructure as possible, including ideology. Through ideology, the labor component of society is brought to cooperate (continue to work for wages but remain complicit with the division of power) and continue reproducing new laborers (making and raising children). Of course, the introduction of automated labor, robots, changes everything. But the rebellion of the robots in R.U.R. can be read as a proletariat rebellion against the ruling management class. Volumes have been written by Marx and in his wake about the specific ways in which the ruilng class exploits the working class to both extract surplus value from their labor and also to retain its hold on power. As a literary study tool, Marxism can help us make sense of and recognize issues of class struggle and exploitation of labor in the dialogue and action of R.U.R. --Michael Filas --R.U.R.: Themes (Michael Filas)

A good chunk from an unfinished website analyzing Rossum's Universal Robots, one of my favorite literary works.

Both books are full of obtrusive directions, comments, questions and pictures that would hinder even the attentive readers from becoming absorbed in the readings. Both also "are not reader-friendly. There is no narrative coherence that a student can follow and get excited about. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that," says T.C. Williams reading specialist Chris Gutierrez, who teaches a course in reading strategies at Shenandoah University in Virginia. For kids who get books and reading opportunities only at school, these types of textbooks will drive them away from reading - perhaps for life.

Such texts bastardize literature and history, reducing authors and their works to historical facts to be memorized - what Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve, calls "the bunch o' facts" theory of learning. Students are jerked from one excerpt of literature to another, given no chance for the kind of sustained reading that stimulates the imagination. --Patrick Welsh --How schools are destroying the joy of reading (USA Today/Yahoo (will expire))

Where is depth?

I treasure the hefty, intellectually weighty Norton Anthologies that I ploughed through as an undergrad, during a rigorous two-semester 300-level survey on British Lit -- conducted as a stand-up lecture by a superstar professor twice a week, and smaller discussion groups once or twice a week, led by graduate students.

I had the luxury of taking that survey course with hundreds of other committed English majors who actually cared about the subject matter. No matter how engaged our majors are, and how diverse and well-informed the students from other majors, I simply cannot imagine that the instructional methods that my professors used to teach me will help me do my own teaching. If I had teaching assistants to handle all my grading, and taught only two classes a term, then of course I'd have more time to write craft wonderful lectures.

Now that our American Lit courses have been re-envisioned as writing intensive, and the class sizes are much smaller (capped at 18 as opposed to 35 last year), I'm looking forward to going into greater depth. But I understand the temptation to cram more, more, more into each term and each class. I am teaching more short stories and one-act plays than I myself studied, in part because I find starting the semester out with shorter works gives students time to absorb the fact that filling a page with plot summary or writing down the list of symbols Spark Notes provides rarely leads to the kind of critical thinking expected of a college student.

In college, I had a few blue-collar friends who were students at the nearby community college. I remember having a conversation with them about textbooks, and recall that they had a bit of difficulty understanding that, for one of my literature classes, there wasn't a big textbook with study questions and answers in the back of the book. For a course on modern drama, we read stand-alone paperback editions of each of the plays. For a course on novels, we simply read the novels. I remember changing the subject so it wouldn't look like I was being an intellectual snob, but the conversation stayed with me.

I feel like I have to work hard at the beginning of each semester to get across the idea that I'm not here to teach the one "correct" interpretation of literature... nor am I trying to teach "my" interpretation of literature. And because students need practice going into more depth than "Here's what I was feeling when I read this passage," or "Here's what this word makes me think of."

I'm not using any of these mega-anthologies in my classes. I do have a mid-sized anthology in my drama class, and I will probably put together one of those do-it-yourself readers for Am Lit 1915-present next term, but since all the texts in Am Lit 1800-1915 are out of copyright, I'm letting the students make do with online editions. (The only exception is the Riverside edition of Huckleberry Finn, which has critical notes and contextual materials, and also the "Child of Calamity" chapter that's not in all the cheap paperbacks).

A brain-dead woman who was kept alive for three months so she could deliver the child she was carrying was removed from life support Wednesday and died, a day after giving birth. --Matthew Barakat --Brain-Dead Woman Dies After Giving Birth (AP|MyWay)

Because there isn't any controversy that drove the coverage of the Torres story, it received less coverage than the Terry Schaivo story.

For now, the Pentagon officially tolerates this free-form online journalism and in-house peanut gallery, even as the brass takes cautious steps to control it. A new policy instituted this spring requires all military bloggers inside Iraq to register with their units. It directs commanders to conduct quarterly reviews to make sure bloggers aren't giving out casualty information or violating operational security or privacy rules. Commanding officers shut down a blog that reported on the medical response to a suicide bombing late last year in Mosul. The Army has also created the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell to monitor compliance. And Wired has learned that a Pentagon review is under way to better understand the overall implications of blogging and other Internet communications in combat zones.

"It's a new world out there," says Christopher Conway, a lieutenant colonel and DOD spokesperson. "Before, you would have to shake down your soldiers for matches that might light up and betray a position. Today, every soldier has a cell phone, beeper, game device, or laptop, any one of which could pop off without warning. Blogging is just one piece of the puzzle." --John Hockenberry --The Blogs of War (Wired)

Most interviews are not the kind of confrontations that we've come to associate with journalism due to the ambush-camera techniques of some TV broadcasts. The vast, vast majority are all about something simple: You want to learn more about a subject or person, or both, and the person you're interviewing wants to help.

Also remember that the interview is about the other person, not you. He or she may ask you some polite questions, which you may of course answer, but try to get to the topic at hand sooner than later. An hour goes by fast in a good interview. --Dan Gillmor --Interviewing (Bayosphere)

Some good interviewing tips from a seasoned journo.

An American journalist and author was found dead after being shot three times in the chest in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, a U.S. embassy official said on Wednesday.

Steven Vincent's death came four days after an opinion piece he wrote criticizing the rise of Shi'ite Islamist fundamentalism in Basra was published in The New York Times. --American Journalist shot dead in Basra, Iraq (Wired|Reuters)

Vincent was an art critic and freelance writer who kept a blog, In the Red Zone (which also promoted a book of the same name).

A sample of his recent blogged writing:

And there it was, the familiar Cultural-Values-Are-Relative argument, surprising though it was to hear it from a military man. But that, too, I realized, was part of American Naiveté: the belief, evidently filtering down from ivy-league academia to Main Street, U.S.A., that our values are no better (and usually worse) than those of foreign nations; that we have no right to judge "the Other;" and that imposing our way of life on the world is the sure path to the bleak morality of Empire (cue the Darth Vader theme).

But Layla would have none of it. "No, believe me!" she exclaimed, sitting forward on her stool. "These religious parties are wrong! Look at them, their corruption, their incompetence, their stupidity! Look at the way they treat women! How can you say you cannot judge them? Why shouldn't your apply your own cultural values?"

It was a moment I wish every muddle-headed college kid and Western-civilization-hating leftist could have witnessed: an Air Force Captain quoting chapter and verse from the new American Gospel of Multiculturalism, only to have a flesh and blood representative of "the Other" declare that he was incorrect, that discriminations and judgment between cultures are possible--necessary--especially when it comes to the absolutely unacceptable way Middle Eastern Arabs treat women. And though Layla would not have pushed the point this far, I couldn't resist. "You know, Captain," I said, "sometimes American values are just--better." --The Naive American

The group was frustrated that the disappearance of Latoyia Figueroa, 24, who is five months pregnant, did not get national press, though her case is similar to other widely covered disappearances like those of Natalee Holloway and Laci Peterson.

The bloggers argue that Holloway and Peterson, who are both white and good-looking, are more attractive to national broadcast media than someone like Figueroa, who is African-American and from a less affluent background. --Cyrus Farivar --Bloggers Champion Missing Woman (Wired)

By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists -- to reorganize our structures and our minds to make Web journalism, in forms that are both familiar and yet-to-be-invented, as natural to us as writing and editing, and to do all of this without losing the essential qualities that make us The Times. Our readers are moving, and so are we. --Jim Romanesko --NYT newsroom integration memo (Poynteronline)

The New York Times will no longer keep separate staffs for the online paper and the printed edition. Many smaller papers don't really have the choice, of course, but the move is a recognition that journalism has changed.

This is certainly a fun time to be a journalism teacher.

On the library home page at the school where I used to work, there was one link for "What's New at the Library?" and another link for "What's New on the Website?" The separation between the bricks-and-mortar library and the website was a sign of a turf war. While you might catch me sighing sadly at the thought that many students don't actually walk to the library and look at the books on the shelves, you won't catch me sighing wistfully for the days before keyword searching of the contents of journal articles.

I'm not to enthused about this Current TV thing. It's for the people...but you have to pay a cable subscription fee to media conglomerates to see it. It's apart from the establishment....except that it gets its revenue from the same corporate advertisers as every other channel. It's new and independent... except that it's headed up by a career politician, who presides over a team of fairly traditional corporate officers. It's a channel of substance, that talks about what matters...except that many of the topics they've mentioned are meaningless fluff, overscene by that great news commentator, Depak Chopra's son. I'd like this channel to be good, but I suspect it won't be. It'll be the MTV of news, that is, it'll be a place for people to watch "on the edge" programming that's really brought to you by the same old guys in suits that run the other channels.--unreason --Current TV (MetaFilter)

From the discussion thread on the debut of Al Gore's news channel for the young.

I don't know whether "unreason" has seen the channel, and I haven't either, because I don't have cable TV. But this comment did a good job of encapsulating the questions I had about the whole thing.

Rosenblum's idea is to bring "video journalists" to TV newsrooms and beyond, one-man bands that can report stories, shoot digital video, edit it on laptops and broadcast it. His client list already includes the BBC, New York Times TV and Oxygen, and he is currently helping to train VJs at local TV stations such as KRON in San Francisco and WKRN in Nashville.

Rosenblum sells his vision to station management by promising to cut the cost of production by 20 percent to 70 percent with no loss in picture quality or storytelling. In fact, he argues that TV news can improve by giving many more people the tools to tell stories rather than the four or five news trucks full of equipment that limit what they can cover.

But critics see him as the ultimate snake-oil salesman... Mark Glaser --'Video journalists': Inevitable revolution or way to cut TV jobs? (Online Journalism Review)

When I was in Toronto in the early 90s, CityTV would send a reporter out with a big TV camera, and put a camcorder into the hands of whoever was being interviewed. Then they would splice the two tapes together. The footage shot by the reporter's camera looked great, but the footage shot by the interview subject was shaky and grainy. The interview subject looked like a tourist, holding a tiny camera, while the reporter -- one eye blocked by the eyepiece of the shoulder camera -- looked powerful and authoritative.

They would also sometimes cue up a video clip on a tiny handheld TV, and play it for the subject to get their response. Of course, the gadgets would always be in full view of the cameras. And the guy who came on during the closing credits to tell you what was coming up next was also a TV news anchor. They are the station I would turn to for street life and city culture, but I wouldn't go to them for in-depth reporting or serious analysis. Of course, I would never go to any TV station for that (in part because I don't have cable TV -- but of course the reason I didn't buy cable TV is that I don't think the product is worth the price, so it's a feedback loop that started when I was a poor grad student with a modem).

I think Al Gore's internet-inspired TV station will have to change radically in order to survive, because more and more video bloggers are putting up good content on their own sites. (Current made some buzz a while ago with the idea that it would pay vloggers for their content, but first they asked for 6 months excusive use of contributed footage, then 3 months, then scrapped the idea.) But who wants to sit there and let Al Gore (or anyone else) tell you what order you are going to view things? If I see a promo for a feature on giant spider webs that's coming up in 20 minutes, why not just spend that time Googling for giant spider webs?

Nicknames and Grammar (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

While I was at home with my son, my wife took our three-year-old shopping. "We've got a lot of things to get," she said, "so we'd better get a move on, Honeycakes."

In a strangely mature and clipped voice, Carolyn replied, "Peter isn't here. So I am just one honeycake."

--Nanny Net News (4Nanny.com)

And the Award for Painful Obsiousness in Medical Reporting goes to the September 2000 edition of the "Nanny Net News" newsletter, which offers "tips...for preventing shaken infant syndrome".

The list begins with this particularly stunning insightful: "Never, never, never shake a baby..."

Who says you can't find solid medical advice on the internet?