December 2005 Archive Page

The Hard Way to Learn and Program

Aggression is the only way to accomplish anything. If you want a port,
grab it, if you want a channel, fight for it, if you want a channel off,
flood it, if you want a MOO, make yourself uncomfortably toaded over and
over again. If you want a port, play up to sysadmins, then stab them in
the back, take the machine over, grab superuser status as fast as you can
- you've got to do all of this with determination, aggression, and a sense
of occupied territory. Believe me, there's no other way - no possibility
of any other way. It's aggression that gets machines where you want them,
hundreds of them cross-connected on platforms, wired in/out, LANS, WANS,
and it's aggression that gets them disconnected as well. Why agro? Be-
cause no one knows what they're doing in this space - it's too new, the
territory still in the process of being charted, taken over by corporate
greed - but not quite there yet. So there are interstices, back doors,
back channels, undernets, darknets, trojan horses at work at war every-
where and you NEED them to get going, you NEED them to get going in the
morning, you NEED them for respect for the fast buck slow dance. Go for
it! You get violent, threaten violence; you get mean, flame once or twice,
make promises you can't keep, never intended to keep - there's not the
HINT of a problem with this, social engineering, causeways to hell and
back just where/wherever the action is. You @create the action, you Make-
file, breakfile, do whatever it takes.

You can't be afraid of anything. You have to vandalize, scavenge, use
whatever passwords you find lying around on slips of paper placed in the
back of porn novels where you'd most expect to find them. You've got to
use the same passwords everywhere you can, moving through systems. But
most of all you have to DEMAND a port because you need to connect to the
Net and be PART of it, not just email, but running your tongue along the
silver wires through the cables of light filmed and reduced to the last
degree. Listen: It's like this. This is the only way it is. It's not
popular. It will kill you. It will keep you going. You'll die broke but
someone will see what you have done and marvel marvel marvel. --Alan Sondheim --The Hard Way to Learn and Program (Alan Sondheim)

Insert "blogging" or "love" or "safety" and you've got an essay on any human endeavor. But the geek-specific language really grabs me. I'm about to start teaching my first online-only course, and I feel like it's really going to stretch my abilities. This post really helps get the adrenaline going!

Via MGK

Subjective journalism does NOT mean glorifying the writer. Notice how, by the end of "Bow, Nigger" we know everything about the player's experiences, the thoughts, feelings and theories that emerge during the short light saber battle, but we know nothing about the author him/herself. It's subjective, but it isn't self-publicising. It isn't autobiography. Hunter S Thompson's own best work -- in my opinion -- was his political journalism in which he made monsters out of Richard Nixon, George McGovern et al, rather than himself. The modern videogame consumer doesn't need gonzo heroes acting like Loaded staffers, it needs compassionate, knowledgeable writers. --Keith Stuart --State of play: is there a role for the New Games Journalism? (Guardian GamesBlog)

I added the link in the body of the above paragraph. Obviously -- there's offensive language on the other end of that link, but if you read it, you'll see why it's there.

The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.

Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.

Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.

"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " -- He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them." --Jean O. Pasco --Sinclair Letter Turns Out to Be Another Exposé (LA Times (will expire))

I'm going to have to look deeper into this when I get the chance... that's just stunning! The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was a cornerstone of literary political activism in the 1920s.

But according to the letter, Sinclair, who had initially thought the two were innocent, didn't want to change his story for fear of alienating his public and hurting sales: "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public."

WashingtonPost.com will now offer articles for free for 60 days, instead of the previous 14, before putting them behind the paid for subscription wall. --Pamela Parker --WashingtonPost.com Extends Free Content Window (ClickZ News)

Hooray! I have in the past few years consciously avoided blogging many good Washington Post stories because 2 weeks is simply not long enough.

The idea that religion can bring material advantages has a distinguished history. A century ago Max Weber argued that the Protestant work ethic lay behind Europe's prosperity. More recently Robert Barro, a professor at Harvard, has been examining the links between religion and economic growth (his work was reviewed here in November 2003). At the microeconomic level, several studies have concluded that religious participation is associated with lower rates of crime, drug use and so forth. --Wealth from worship (Economist)

The article carefully notes the difference between association and causation. Be sure you read all the way to the end for clever bit.

We have gone from the Sermon on the Mount to the Slammin' on the Mat. -- commenter Marshall --Revelation wrestling (Apocalyptics)

The race to transmit a simple message, staged by an Australian museum, was won — at a dash — by a 93-year-old telegraph operator who tapped it out using the simple system which was devised by Samuel Morse in 1832 and was the mainstay of maritime communication up until 1997.

Gordon Hill, who learnt to use the technique in 1927 when he joined the Australian Post Office, easily defeated his 13-year-old rival, Brittany Devlin, who was armed with a mobile phone and a rich vocabulary of text message shorthand. --Mark Henderson --A race to the wire as old hand at Morse code beats txt msgrs (TimesOnline)

ol jn hnry
txd hs cptn
wl a mns gt2
txt lk a mn...

In the game, you listen to a story about someone's death and the events leading up to it. There are five characters in the story; your job is to rank them from most culpable for the death to least culpable. The trick is that the story should be balanced in such a way that any ordering is defensible, and thus each listener's list shows something about that listener. But that kind of balance is hard to achieve. --Adam Cadre --23,040 Bridges (adamcadre.ac)

According to the aggregated stats, there's one character who seems to be too culpable. Perhaps things will even out over time.

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author "seems like a bitter man." In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there.

Except she didn't just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the way from England, pledging to re-examine an upcoming edition given her critique.

Junior Mike Rubino got a more extreme lesson about free speech in the blogosphere. His "10 reasons why Seton Hill doesn't need a football team," including a claim that "jocks" would bring more drugs, alcohol and fights to campus, irked arriving players who found his Internet posting months later.

"I even got calls to my room," he said. "They talked to my roommate, thinking it was me, saying things like they're going to kick my butt."

Awkward encounters? Sure. But instances such as these are providing teachable moments for faculty at a growing number of colleges nationwide, including Seton Hill. There, a professor and his prolific community of student bloggers are exploring the good and the ugly about a rough-and-tumble form of Internet discourse whose popularity has exploded. --Bill Schackner --Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer in the blogosphere (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Schackner did an excellent job looking past the stereotype of bloggers ranting in their pajamas from their parents' basements.

The article includes a picture of me in my office with two students. (That was a very wide-angle lens -- my office isn't very big, but I do manage to use the space very well.)

The article also mentions the comfy chair, and photos from the wreck my family and I survived in June.

I've been working on a new portal for blogs.setonhill.edu. What do you think? This is version 1.1.

The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for "The Little Red Book" by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story. --Aaron Nicodemus --Federal agents' visit was a hoax  (South Coast Today)

This does not come as a surprise to me.

Kudos to Nicodemus for posting a follow-up to the original story, in which he reported on flaws in the story. (See my first post on the Little Red Book hoax.)

"We are here to demand an end to the shockingly casual placement of dangerous blades in our places of work," said Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, who estimates that she has lost more than 600,000 lives to spinning, falling, swinging, and suddenly appearing blades this year alone. "This kind of thing has been going on since the days of Pitfall Harry, and it has got to stop." --Video-Game Characters Denounce Randomly Placed Swinging Blades (The Onion (Satire))

This is an oldie.

It reminds me of Sigourney Weaver's rant against the placement of "chompers" in the bowels of the ship in Galaxy Quest.

Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn't demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space for communal design, for discource through communal authorship.

[...]

So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog. --Tim Berners-Lee --So I have a blog (timbl's blog)

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Frosty Returns (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last week we watched "Frosty Returns," a 1990s sequel to the 1960s "Frosty the Snowman."

I don't see how you could say Frosty returns in the sequel, since this one is set in what appears to be a completely different town (someplace that has a long tradition of celebrating "Winter Carnival," where all references to Christmas are carefully avoided), and concerns the animation of a completely different snowman -- sans corncob pipe, button nose, and eyes made out of coal.

I can see the boardroom meeting now.

"The corn-cob pipe has to go. While the idea of re-using a corncob is itself environmentally friendly, the pipe is a patriarchal emblem of the cultural power of the tobacco industry. Perhaps if we put a line in there about Frosty smoking home-grown, organic marijuana -- no, maybe not. We'll save that for the director's cut. The button nose not only evokes the plight of third-world laborers in the garment industry, but with his white, white skin, the small nose suggests racial overtones. Perhaps if an ethnically diverse cast of children constructed a snow golem that went on a righteous rampage against SUVs... that would be something! And since coal is a non-renewable resource, it's simply wasteful to depict its frivolous use as a decoration."

While the original Frosty reverted to lifeless snow as soon as his hat came off his head, this one can operate independently from the hat. While the original was set up such that the special properties of Christmas snow prompted the Santa ex Machina ending, I really wouldn't have that much of a problem with generalizing the Frosty story to "the holidays," since it's not as if the story of an old silk hat was in the Bible. But the set of values and associations that replace Christmas in this story are weak..

In the new show, the villain is a businessman (white, old and miserly, of course) who invents a product that fills a cultural need. Who wouldn't want a spray that melts snow in an instant? I'd buy it!

The show suggests that adults who look at snow and think only of shoveling and traffic jams are short-sighted, heartless materialists who seek shortcuts to personal comfort and individual gain. (Not at all like the producers of Frosty Returns.)

I can see into the boardroom again...

"In that other show, remember the magician who wants his hat back? In our sequel, we should be careful not to offend professional prestidigitationists and believers in the occult. So let's make the little girl want to be a magician when she grows up. Oh, and just in case someone mistakes a story about the supernatural creation of life as some kind of intelligent design parable, better give the girl a sidekick who wants to be a scientist. Have the magician and the scientist join forces against big business, and so protect a completely secular and acultural civic tradition. Make sure to avoid red bows or green ivy or anything that could be mistaken for Christmas. We'll call it the 'Winter Carnival,' and we'll hope nobody notices that 'carnival' comes from the Latin for 'farewell to the flesh,' and carnival culture developed from the Roman Catholic tradition of celebrating in the days just before Lent begins. Oh, and just in case we get a sponsor from the chemical industry, make this Frosty really unlikeable, so that the audience will actually root for his chemical antagonist."

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program. --Aaron Nicodemus --Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior  (South Coast Today)

I've been watching this story. While columnists, bloggers, and activists have spread this story, I haven't seen it mentioned in any of the major papers or networks.

The key sentence for me is this: "The professors said the student was told by the agents..." What this means is that the reporter has talked to the professors who talked to the student who talked to the government agents.

That's hardly a rock-solid foundation for a story.

Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's an interesting discussion going on, which points out that unabridged copies of "The Little Red Book" are freely available on the Internet, so there doesn't seem to be much reason for an ILL request.

And on boingboing, someone writes that the Dartmouth library ILL form doesn't require a social security number.

While the reporters involved have made brief comments defending their story, at the moment all we have is the fact that two professors believe what one student told them.

While recent events have prepared many people to believe that the US Government is capable of outrageous acts, the fact that this story is also outrageous does not necessarily mean that it is true.

The American Library Association is following this story, which reportedly took place in October.

Update, 23 Dec: Nicodemus has published an update, which offers no new support for his original article, and accurately reports on concerns raised in the blogsphere and elsewhere.

I think it's important to keep an open mind, and it's good to see Nicodemus has not followed the strategy of Dan Rather and CBS, which ignored reports of holes poked into the Bush National Guard memo story.

After reading this article, I don't see any reason to give more credence to the original story, but I do see reason to continue trusting Nicodemus.

The truth will out.

Why do you love online publishing?

Here's why I do: As an American, I feel so fortunate to be alive at a time when, 200-some years after the ratification of the First Amendment to our nation's Constitution, the people of this country finally have a medium at their disposal which allows any person to speak and be heard by a global audience. If freedom of the press belongs to those who own one, now, we all do. And the world, ultimately, will be the better for it.

Unfortunately, the Internet is also being used by those who favor schmoozing the wealthy and well-connected at the expense promoting the welfare of all fellow citizens. I love that the Internet allows the rest of us a powerful collective voice with which to give all readers an alternative to such smarmy propaganda. Now it is up to us to be smarter, sharper and louder than ever when using this medium during the year to come. --Robert Niles --Why do I love online publishing? (Online Journalism Review)

Blake Ranking wrote "I did it" on his blurty.com journal three days after the October 2004 crash that caused a friend's death and left another seriously injured. He had previously told investigators he remembered nothing of the crash and little of its aftermath. --Teen Guilty Of Manslaughter After Online Confession (AP | The Pittsburgh Channel.com)

If you choose to exercise your right to free speech, the First Amendment does not promise there will be no consequences.

I've been reading blogs for a long time now, and I'm still amazed by what people write in them.

On the last day of class, I handed out index cards for our last collaborative piece of writing. I told my first year students to write something they learned this semester, in any class or in the residence hall. Then we shuffled the cards together and read them aloud. Here is what one class came up with: --What we learned this semester (Writing as jo(e))

I saw one ray of hope -- a "popular writing" program at Seton Hall University, where nontraditional students (i.e., grownups with day jobs) could earn a degree and, more to the point, gain serious professional training without having to attend a university full time. The fact that one school had dared to attempt such a thing suggested that maybe, someday, the teaching methods and subject matters I had developed over the years might be put to good use with serious students of writing. --Orson Scott Card --Why I Am Teaching at SVU -- and Why SVU is Important (Meridian Magazine)

Almost but not quite... isn't he talking about Seton Hill University's Writing Popular Fiction program?

The article itself is noteworthy because it presents Card's politically incorrect belief, as a Mormon, that Christian values are important to a society that wants to survive.

--Editing He-Man (Penny Arcade)

Who's been vandalizing the Wikipedia entry for He-Man?

(Warning, punchline requires knowledge of 80s pop culture.)

Thanks for the link, Matt.

If they want to deliver a written paper, they need to understand that, no matter how short they think it is, the odds are against their finishing it. They need a conclusion they can jump to when they get the five-minute warning. That conclusion must be brief. Rather than reading a full paper, it's better to summarize it and have copies of the full paper available. Presenters could also tell attendees that they will send copies to those who want them. Tell the presenters this: when you get the five-minute warning, do not take that to mean you must read the rest of the paper at double or triple normal reading speed. No one in the audience will be able to follow it, and you will probably hurt yourself. --Timothy J. Madigan --''Thank You Very Much. That's All the Time You Have'' (Academe)

Journalists “are not Emily Dickinson writing poetry on backs of envelopes, not caring whether anybody reads them.”

Given the state of the industry, with newspaper circulations dropping and publications closing, Collinger said that part of the plan is to develop data and “customer driven communications” is integral to making sure the “cobbler’s children have shoes,” he said.

With the rise of blogging and citizen journalism, delivering news the way readers and viewers want is becoming more necessity than luxury, even for major news outlets. The Medill students interviewed seem to recognize that any change in the interest of their business IQ is a good one. --David Epstein --Sign of the Times for J-Schools (Inside Higher Ed)

While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper's news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.

These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly. --Media Bias Is Real, Finds UCLA Political Scientist (UCLA)

It's true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers -- 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001 U.S. Surgeon General's report, the strongest risk factors for school shootings centered on mental stability and the quality of home life, not media exposure. The moral panic over violent video games is doubly harmful. It has led adult authorities to be more suspicious and hostile to many kids who already feel cut off from the system. --Henry Jenkins --Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked (PBS)

Because so many deaf children have problems with basic language skills, they get a disproportionate number of exercises related to these "abstract little pieces." And unfortunately, that's exactly what most educational games offer--more of the same thing that's been shown not to work for these people.

So what do I propose? For one thing, I think deaf students, like everyone else, need to write and get responses to work that's relevant to them. That's where blogs come in. --Tom Wright --Literacy, the deaf, and blogs (Kairos News)

Another thought-provoking passage: "[O]nline classes provide environments in which hearing isn't relevant. So do many educational games for children, although some of the preschool-level ones are useless for deaf children, because their directions are in audio. (It always annoyed me that I couldn't help my kids with these.)"

For some volunteers, LibriVox is a way to combine their love of literature with their passion for the spoken word.

Kristen McQuillen, 39, has recorded 21 different chapters across nine different books from her home in Tokyo. For her, reading a book aloud to someone can make the work more understandable.

"I'm giving people who wouldn't have exposure to some of these classics in a way that's not so intimidating," she said. --The Web Will Read You a Story  (Wired)

I've been thinking about ways to work podcasting into my Intro to Literature course this spring. I'll probably also introduce some kind of recorded audio presentation for my Videogaming course in January.

Gender in the Workplace (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

When two students followed me to my office after an exam, they gasped when I opened my door.

Student 1: "Dr. Jerz -- your office is clean!"
Student 2: "Did your wife come here?"

The shocked guffaws from myself and Student 1 attracted the attention of a colleague from across the hall, who said she wanted to see my office for herself.

For the record, I told everyone that I'm man enough to clean my own office.

The problem is this: if you want to teach Victorian literature at the university level, the path to doing so, while not easy, is straightforward: you go to a Ph.D.-granting university English department, take a doctorate, and apply for suitable jobs in other university English departments. But because all of the various fields and subfields in the digital humanities are so new and by definition interdisciplinary there'sno one equivalent path to the appropriate credentials. --Matt Kirschenbaum --So You Want a Ph.D. in Digital Humanities, Digital Studies, New Media, Electronic Literature . . . (MGK)

Great round-up. Like Kirschenbaum, I got my Ph.D. in a traditional field. Since I teach at a small liberal arts institution, where I'm expected to teach a wide variety of courses, the broad background really helps.

Electronic-entertainment giant Take-Two Interactive, parent company of Grand Theft Auto series creator Rockstar Games, released Stacker Tuesday, a first-person vertical-crate-arranger guaranteed not to influence young people's behavior in any way. --New Video Game Designed To Have No Influence On Kids' Behavior (The Onion (Satire))

Google Inc., the leading online search engine company, will open a new engineering and research office in Pittsburgh next year to be headed by a Carnegie Mellon University professor, the company announced Thursday.

The facility will be charged with creating software search tools for Google. It is expected to create as many as 100 new high-tech jobs in the Pittsburgh area over the next few years, said Craig Nevill-Manning, director of Google's New York engineering office. --Google to open new research facility in Pittsburgh (AP | Mercury News)

In the new world of interchangeable, interdependent entertainment modules - athlete performs four songs on soundtrack to movie based on videogame! - a football injury can have unexpected repercussions.

I'm here looking for some insight into the growing practice of adapting games into movies. There are plenty of them - Double Dragon, from Gramercy Pictures, in fall '94; Street Fighter, which Universal was to put in 2,000 theaters this Christmas; Mortal Kombat, from New Line, in spring '95. Beyond these loom movies based on Doom, the shareware phenom, and Myst, the fantasy-realm CD-ROM hit.

So far, though, insights are not exactly jumping out at me. --Scott Rosenberg --The Latest Action Heroes (Wired)

A 1995 article. Not much has changed, though the Myst movie didn't materialize.

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. --Internet encyclopaedias go head to head (News @ Nature.com)

Wikipedia stood up fairly well against Encyclopedia Britannica, in a review by Nature science writers.

Update: Wikipedia's articles were, on average, longer than EB's. So it's possible to spin these findings such that the news is Wikipedia has fewer errors per byte than Encyclopedia Britannica.

"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry... Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!" --Jonathan Baldino --Swiping goes high-tech in bar-code scam (Denver Post)

Defense Attorney: As you can see, Your Honor, my client used all caps for portions of his statement, and used three exclamation marks in a row.

Judge: Well golly... then HE MUST BE TELLING THE TRUTH!!!

Defense Attorney: I would like to introduce into evidence this follow-up statement. "I am extremely sad now, and I just want to go to bed... Please let me sleep in my own bed tonight."

Judge: What's this? The criminal justice system has made someone sad?

Defense Attorney: Besides, who really expects a 19-year-old to know right from wrong?

Judge: You're right. Case dismissed!!!

(Pause.)

(Judge and Defense Attorney burst out laughing.)

Defense Attorney (wiping his eyes): Man, they couldn't make this stuff up in Hollywood. Okay. Let's get back to work.

Many American academic libraries have sought to provide journals in both print and electronic formats for the past 5 to 10 years. The advantages of the electronic format have been clear, so these were licensed as rapidly as possible, but it has taken time for some faculty members to grow comfortable with an exclusive dependence on the electronic format. In addition, librarians were concerned about the absence of an acceptable electronic-archiving solution, given that that their cancellation of print editions would prevent higher education from depending on print as the archival format. Eileen Gifford Fenton and Roger C. Schonfeld --The Shift Away From Print (Inside Higher Ed)

Interview with open ended questions and, as with all interviews, use silence on your part to lead the subject to jump to unexpected comments. Most people cannot stand silence, so they will move in to fill it. Great salespeople know this and they use it to close sales. The salesman who closes the sale is the one who knows how to ask for the sale and then shut up. The next person who talks in this ensuring silence (usually the buyer) is the one who loses. (Keep quiet and amazing words tend to spew out of your subject.) --Good Habits Make Good Reporters: More Tips from the Tribune Newsroom (The Salt Lake Tribune)

Interwoven into the scarf material are pixels containing red, blue and green light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so adjusting the brightness of each type of diode turns the scarf a different overall shade. --Chameleon scarf coordinates with your outfit (NewScientist.com (will expire))

O brave new world, that hath such gadgets in it!
(I Googled for photos but I found none. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.)

In the 40 years since Derrida paid that visit to Johns Hopkins, succeeding generations of scholars have had time to fall in love with theory, fall out of love with it, and learn how to live with it. As in any long-term relationship, there's a continuing re-evaluation and reimagining of what works and what does not. Rei Terada, chairwoman of comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine, says: "As the 60s becomes a historical period... we can make finer distinctions and groupings among things that seemed all of a piece closer to the time. ... People are starting to sort out such legacies." No one still believes, for instance, "that all French theory is politically progressive," she says.

It may be neither fair nor accurate, decades after Theory hit its high-water mark, to keep using it as a whipping boy for everything that has gone wrong with literary studies. "The problem of the humanities is funding, lack of institutional support, lowering enrollments, lowering numbers of hires, the rise of part-time labor," says Andrew Parker, a professor of English at Amherst College. "This is the real crisis, not whether we have theory with a capital T or a small T." --Jennifer Howard --From the issue dated December 16, 2005 (Chronicle)

They enjoy learning. For nearly all professors, the chance to review and expand their own youthful education in a variety of fields is a treat that almost transcends the educational needs of their children. Mathematicians, for example, relish the chance to reread the literature they half-missed when they were mastering geometry, and English professors, like me, enjoy the chance to relearn the astronomy they once loved before calculus crushed their hopes for a scientific career. They often see themselves as learning with their children rather than simply teaching them.

They are confident in their ability to teach. Professors often see teaching their own children as part of a continuum of pleasurable obligations to the next generation; they seek to integrate the values of their profession with the values they live at home. Since professors often teach the teachers, they tend to believe -- perhaps with some hubris -- in their ability to teach effectively at all grade levels. But more often, they recognize their limitations and seek collaboration with other parents -- often professors themselves -- with different areas of expertise. --W. A. Pannapacker --For Professors' Children, the Case for Home Schooling (Chronicle)

Pannapacker's list doesn't don't completely overlap with the reasons my wife and I homeschool, but I enjoyed reading it.

Of particular interest to me is the one about how much time is lost shuffling students around during a typical day in what my son calls "the school building":

Without all the crowd control and level seeking, the formal requirements of education can be completed in only a few hours a day, leaving lots of time for self-directed learning and play. As a result, home-schooled children generally learn faster and with less boredom and less justified resentment.

I'm always extremely nervous about wasting time passing out papers or doing other housekeeping during class. Maybe too nervous.

I was surprised to see how prominently Pannapacker mentions bullying. Junior high was difficult for me. I remember horrible Machiavellian power struggles on the bus, where I spent an hour and a half each day, ducking spitballs. Desegregation meant that I was bussed past two junior high schools in more affluent suburbs, to a third school in a less affluent area. I remember a gang of tough girls tried to get me to hit one of them, presumably so they could tell their boyfriends to "protect them" by beating me up.

I remember my first week in Catholic high school, when it felt like I was floating down halls full of kids in crisp button shirts. Once a jock with four or five of his buddies dared me to step outside, but I had just dumped a carton of chocolate milk over his head, so I can understand why he was mad at me. I ended up getting out of the fight by confusing him.

Him: Why'd you throw chocolate milk at me?

Me: I wasn't aiming my chocolate milk at you, I was aiming at this total jerk who's been throwing food at me for three days in a row. He's really stupid and cowardly, since he only picks on me when he's with a group of his friends. You should go pick a fight with him -- he'd probably be a lot more challenging to pick on than a wiry, pasty-skinned loner who'd really rather prefer to study for his Latin test. But thanks for the suggestion that I'm a severe threat to your social status, such that you are forced to retaliate with violence.

Him: Why'd you throw chocolate milk at me?

Me: Were there some words in there that you couldn't understand?

Lunchroom Crowd: Ha ha!

Him (blinking): Why'd you throw chocolate milk at me?

(I got that survival tactic from "I, Mudd," a classic Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk confused a planet full of androids by flooding them with illogic.)

If what we today know as "Wikipedia" had started life as something called, let's say - "Jimbo's Big Bag O'Trivia" - we doubt if it would be the problem it has become. Wikipedia is indeed, as its supporters claim, a phenomenal source of pop culture trivia. Maybe a "Big Bag O'Trivia" is all Jimbo ever wanted. Maybe not.

For sure a libel is a libel, but the outrage would have been far more muted if the Wikipedia project didn't make such grand claims for itself. The problem with this vanity exercise is one that it's largely created for itself. The public has a firm idea of what an "encyclopedia" is, and it's a place where information can generally be trusted, or at least slightly more trusted than what a labyrinthine, mysterious bureaucracy can agree upon, and surely more trustworthy than a piece of spontaneous graffiti - and Wikipedia is a king-sized cocktail of the two.--Andrew Orlowski --There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility' (The Register)

While Orlowski makes many good points, he's a bit misleading. At the time he wrote the article, there wasn't an entry on "moral responsibility," but there was an article on "ethics" and an article on "responsibility."

And, Wikipedia being Wikipedia, of course there is an article on moral responsibility now.

Scientists are no different in their level of objectivity than are other professionals. They are careful in the analysis of evidence and in the procedures applied to arrive at conclusions. With this admission, it may seem that this myth is valid, but contributions from both the philosophy of science and psychology reveal that there are at least three major reasons that make complete objectivity impossible. --William McComas --Ten Myths of Science: Reexamining What We Think We Know

A 1996 article.

A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.

Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today. -- Wikipedia author: False entry was joke (CNN)

I used a dissasembled version of this story for part of my news writing final. It seemed appropriate.

Doctor Says Long-Term Video Game Playing Is Likely Cause

A central Iowa mother woke up over the weekend to find her daughter having a seizure.

After a trip to the emergency room, a family learned that the cause was most likely from playing video games too long, Des Moines television station KCCI reported.

Doctors said such incidents are not common, but they do happen. Certain people are prone to it because of the way their brains work. --Girl Has Seizure After 5 Hours Of Video Gaming (WTAE-TV)

The videogame marathon was not, in itself, sufficient to cause the seizure. The article does specify that some people's brains are susceptible to seizures induced by flashing lights.

Note the mom-focused anecdotal lead and the prominence given to videogames as the cause (as opposed to patterns of flashing lights, which can be distributed in other media). Theatre performances often mention whether strobe lights or other startling special effects will be used. See also the news coverage of Pokemon seizures.

Now if the story were about a guy who had a seizure after spending five straight hours of marking final exams -- that would be news I can use.

Wee, sneaky, glowrin, vill'nous thiefies,
O, how ye filch in half a jiffy! --Holy Tango of Literature

What poets and playwrights would write about if they wrote about anagrams of their own names. The above is from "Robber Runts," by Robert Burns (not).

I had heard of "Toliets" by T.S. Eliot, but I didn't see the whole thing in context. "IRS Law Code" by Oscar Wilde is a must-read, as is "An E-Mail" by A. A. Milne ("'Let's write an e-mail,' I say to Pooh.") and the following excerpt from "Horrid Planet" by Harold Pinter:

R2-D2: (Beeps ominously.)
C-3P0: What are you trying to say? Eh?
R2-D2: (Beeps ambiguously.)
C-3P0: What exactly are you getting at?
R2-D2: (Beeps angrily.)
C-3P0: You?re saying it'sall my fault.
R2-D2: (Beeps noncommittally.)

Thanks for the laugh, Matt.

Folding seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you're not supposed crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren't to be used in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company that issued them. "Spindle" is the word that most confuses people today. Spindling is an old filing system; a clerk would have a spindle, an upright spike on his or her desk, and would impale each piece of paper on it as he or she finished with it. When the spindle was full, you'd run a piece of string through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it off to the archives. (The custom still survives in some restaurants; the cashier spindles the bills as customers pay.) But you shouldn't spindle the cards: they are part of someone else's system of paperwork, not your own; they demand special attention.

"Mutilate" is a lot stronger than the other words. It expresses an angry intention on the part of the mutilator, or, from the viewpoint of the punch card user, a fear; people might take out their frustrations on their punch cards.... (Indeed, punch cards were mutilated: users could buy machines advertised to "recondition mutilated punch cards."[13]) Why would people mutilate punch cards? Punch cards were the interface between the public and the billing system. Metaphorically, they were where the person meshed with the corporate world. --Steven Lubar (Originally published in 1991.) -- (Steven Lubar's home page)

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate" is right up there with "Abort, Retry, Fail" of the DOS era, "CTRL + ALT + DEL" of Windows, and the following dialogue from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus:

Faust. Come on, Mephistophilis, what shall we do?
Meph. Nay, I know not. We shall be curs?d with bell, book, and candle.
Faust. How! bell, book, and candle,?candle, book, and bell,
Forward and backward to curse Faustus to hell!

In the modern retelling, the Cat in the Hat indeed comes back...but with a vengence! Wearing a full-body mech suit and accompanied by his Thug 2 and Thug 1, the Cat comes back to go head-to-head with the bon mot spouting goldfish. Invariable, the goldfish will triumph over the Cat (as Order must triumph over Chaos) - but that pesky Cat always escapes in the end, shaking his fist in the air, and promising to get his "Wacky Revenge." Fish taunts his foe by brandishing a shiny, hi-tech three-handled family gredunza whenver he's in public. --Where Have All The Flowers Gone? Long Time Passing? No! Updated for the Youth of Today. (Sarcasmo's Corner)

Via Girl Meets World.

"Let's walk around looking for people who are laughing to themselves because of something they've just thought of," I say. "When we find them, you take their photograph and I'll ask them what they were thinking about that was so funny." --Jon Ronson --The tickle inside (Guardiian)

There aren't actually any pictures on the website, but the story is a good read.

In a larger university context, I can’t be open and honest, I fear, because of my lack of tenure, lack of position, lack of a terminal degree. I’m reminded often that only those with tenure have the freedom to “take risks” with students because with tenure, one has some protection if the risks don’t work out. Yet I’m working with students who have great needs and who present great risks. But there is no protection for me if the risks don’t work out.

[...]

They resisted the work, resisted me, and resisted the system that had them in such a foreign place. They resisted and behaved badly because they were afraid of failure, because they had so many other pressures placed on them, and because by behaving badly, they could gain a little respect from their peers by not appearing “stupid.” Yet we all knew what was going on…. we all knew about the resistance and the face-saving. The students and myself, we all knew. And we all knew that many times they just played me. They sometimes played me because they are in a system where everyone is played in some manner because someone has to win and someone loses. That’s just the way it is. They put on a face that allowed them to survive a difficult and foreign system and that face was one of belligerence and defiance. But I wore a face, too. My face was one of the educated, of the elite. They would never see themselves in my face because they couldn’t see through the mask.

Look how we all lost.

How could I expect them to remove their masks if I didn’t remove mine? Removing my mask would have been to tell my story (or part of it), to be real to them, to be a little vulnerable. Yet I couldn’t. I feared. I failed. I failed them. --Rubicon --Basic Writers and the Academy (Pass the Rubicon)

What’s the magic formula? How do I take the “good” and catch it in a bottle, and let it out when I need to ward off the “bad”? Sometimes I feel like Willy Loman pleading with the image of his fantastically successful brother – What’s the secret?

Of course, there is no "right answer," but I'm pursuing this line of thought because in myself I can see elements of that first-semester freshman sitting in a classroom, furious and terrified, alienated from a discussion everyone else seems to understand, silently pleading that the professor would stop talking about concepts and rules and theories, and just write on the board the answers to the questions that will be on the final exam.

Beldner, an artist, teaches a St. Mary's College class called "Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism." Among his students' projects this term was the distribution of a news release touting a fictional bar to be opened near the Moraga campus.

The news release was sent to the Times, the Associated Press and several other Bay Area newspapers. None published the information as news, although the Times ran a brief item on the hoax itself after a reporter spent several hours researching the nonexistent bar. --Matt Krupnick --Prank class tries to fool news outlets (Contra Costa Times)

I teach my news writing students about Joey Skaggs, and we all had a good laugh when I told them about his annual April Fool's Day Parade press releases.

But I hope the college looks very closely at the ethics of teaching students to lie for credit.

First come the television weather forecasters, with their fancy Doppler radar and satellite imagery, warning of deep snow.

Then come the shoppers with their double coupons and grocery lists, seeking the essentials: bread, milk and toilet paper.

So it was yesterday at local grocery and hardware stores as local residents stocked up on supplies, preparing for last night's snowstorm.

AccuWeather meteorologists predicted that 3 to 6 inches of snow would fall overnight in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

It's not exactly blizzard conditions, but it was enough to send some into a tizzy.

Dr. Paul Friday, chief of clinical psychology at UPMC Shadyside in Pittsburgh, blames that on a part of the brain called the amygdala, an almond-shaped portion of the brain that regulates emotions and triggers our response to danger.

Friday calls it the "Chicken Little lobe."

"If there are 100 good things going on, it's the amygdala that will pick out the one that will kill us. Therefore, we get in line ... and load up on things that we already have at home." --Sam Kusic and A.J. Panian --Forecast triggers the 'Chicken Little' lobe in brains of shoppers (Tribune-Review)

This is some very clever writing.

McAlhany described Alpizar as carrying a big backpack and wearing a fanny pack in front. He says it would have been impossible for Alpizar to lie flat on the floor of the plane, as marshals ordered him to do, with the fanny pack on. "You can't get on the ground with a fanny pack," he says. "You have to move it to the side." --Siobhan Morrissey --Eyewitness: "I Never Heard the Word 'Bomb'" (Time)

One of my students has in the past ribbed me for wearing a fanny pack. This is just one of those weird little details that makes a news story seem so very real.

Pac Man today has been tossed into the "Retro" bin and is avoided by teens who think it lame, slow, boring and ugly. May as well call Akira Kurosawa's Ran crap because it's 20 years old, or write off all black-and-white movies because they lack "realistic" coloration, right?

[...]

[T]oday's teens grew up in a cultural vacuum. Their parents are generally too old to have grown up with Atari and Nintendo and therefore failed to pass on any understanding of what makes a good game a good game. These kids have failed to inherit cultural or critical literacy. Just as school children must read Dickens, Hemingway and Salinger as part of a proper education, so too should a proper diet of game classics be required playing. During summer breaks and by force, if necessary. --Vladimir Cole --Hardcore today, arcade tomorrow (Joystiq)

--Gillespie & Montfort's ''The Executor'' (BathHouse Magazine)

An intriguing piece of very short fiction, written by two authors who alternated sentences. The presentation works with color and type size in a simple but effective way. It's not long, and has a creepy but oddly touching payoff.

I'm using this sabbatical to work on a longer, more complex novel than I've ever written before. Even though I'm giving my writing, and my child, more of myself than they've ever had before, they both cry out for more. "Mommy, I wish you were there when we sing "Come In, Grown-Ups," my daughter says, referring to the fact that she goes to extended care after preschool, while some kids are picked up by their parents. Never mind that last year, she was both taken to preschool and picked up by the extended-care team.

Meanwhile, my book's pull is fierce. I've never had time for perfectionism before, but now I find it hard to let go of any pages. The book's demands sometimes out-shout my daughter's none-too-quiet voice. "Go play," I snapped at her this morning as I tried to finish a complicated scene, and then felt guilty when she melted into tears. --Lee Tobin McClain --Mom on Sabbatical (Chronicle)

Lee is my colleague down the hall.

After a faculty meeting ran a bit long yesterday, I dashed home, grabbed my seven-year-old son without giving him time to finish his daily root beer, and headed back out again for his piano lesson. We usually make it right on time, but the slightly late faculty meeting and a string of red lights meant that we were 20 minutes late to his half-hour lesson.

After the lesson, we came back to campus to help decorate the cafeteria for Christmas. While my son was worried that the event would cut into his computer game time, he had a grand time eating pizza and talking with our Spanish and French teachers. One of the Sisters of Charity handed him ornaments, one a time, bending the little metal hooks for him so he could hang them on the tree easily. Meanwhile, I strung Christmas tree lights. I dropped by The Setonian office just in time to watch the students resolve a photo caption crisis, and then went home.

When I woke up this morning, I realized I didn't want to go to work. I could have used a full day as Dad. My wife had cleaned the rugs and put a lot of stuff away, making room for bringing out our Christmas tree. The sight of big empty stretches of carpets, with neat piles of toys and stacks of library books, just made me want to stay home and have adventures with my daughter’s ponies, teach my son’s home-school lessons, and read aloud the six or seven chapters we have left until we finish The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

If I were working at a dot-com, or selling furniture, I wouldn't at all feel comfortable admitting something like that.

There was nothing about today that I was particularly dreading. In fact, the semester is winding down fairly nicely for me.

[Blogging] makes everyone a producer of news, for one thing. Not everyone does create news, some just transport them also. Every blogger does a bit of both, I guess. And that adds up to a sort of global brain, which digests ideas or discovers facts and such. The speed and variety of this conversation might be something very new in world history -- we'll have to see where it takes us, and if it improves certain things.

Personally, the strongest effect blogging had on me was that I could finally talk to people through my website in a sort of standardized way that would just work. I had a certain other site which I just shut down because it didn't find its audience? it was a "homepage" in the worst sense of the word. Every news bit I added to it was structured into some sort of navigational hierarchy, which is totally meaningless in terms of talking to someone. A blog is simple to explain technically, but the fact that it allows you to start a conversation is really what makes it so different from regular "homepages." --Philipp Lenssen --10 Questions with Philipp Lenssen (The Geek Guy Rants)

I stumbled into the blogging format for similar reasons. My blog started as a collection of instructional handouts that I was adding to regularly as I noticed patterns in my reaction to student work. It was a huge pain to change menus throughout my website every time I added a new document. Plus, every time I expanded a certain idea into a whole paragraph, I felt the need to rewrite other handouts on a similar topic.

It's one thing to create a single website or a collection of web pages, but it's another thing entirely to maintain a huge site as it develops and grows organically. Lenssen here does a good job capturing the essence of that difference.

What I have done is taken two blog entries from the same story: The Yellow Wallpaper. I have taken one blog from when I was a freshman, and another blog from this year's American Literature course. I feel that these essays are written from two completely different people. I am going to leave both of these with you, and hopefully you feel the same way. --Jason Pugh --How I've Grown..... (The Gentle Giant)

I had Jay for an "Intro to Literary Study" course his freshman year, and he's now a junior who's finishing up my American Lit I course. This blog entry illustrates his growth admirably. That's an unplanned, but not particularly surprising, side-effect of giving students individual blogs that they can keep when the class is over.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site, said Monday.

The change comes less than a week after John Seigenthaler Sr., who was Robert Kennedy's administrative assistant in the early 1960s, wrote an op-ed article revealing that Wikipedia had run a biography claiming Seigenthaler had been suspected in the assassinations of the former Attorney General and his brother, President John F. Kennedy. --Dan Goodin --Online Encyclopedia Tightens Rules (Breitbart | AP)

This is an important change in the techno-idealistic principle that formerly animated Wikipedia. Reality has come crashing through the door.

Non-registered users will still be able to edit existing articles, and the registration process does not sound difficult.

Abortion, legalised throughout the United States by the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade ruling in 1973, prevents unwanted pregnancies from becoming unwanted children. Higher abortion rates from the 1970s onwards thus help to explain why crime rates fell in America about two decades later.

That's the theory. But a paper published last week? by Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz, two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, finds an embarrassing hole in the evidence. --Oops-onomics (Economist)

I've blogged before about the flap Bill Bennett caused when he alluded to this study.

# If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already).
# This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this:
# 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a boring game because there are so relatively few combinations.
# 2) On the other hand, humans clearly play the game in a different way than the computer. The computer's playing style lets us make some observations about how humans play games.
# To the computer, the first move is the most complicated (takes around a second on my 2ghz machine). This is unlike human players who seldomly have any problem deciding what to do on the first move.
# The program assumes that the opponent does not make any mistakes. Humans do make mistakes, of course, so in actuality the program isn't playing optimally. --Jesper Juul --Tic Tac Toe (Half-Real)

From the website for Juul's new book. Looks good.

Art or not, games are much more than the just sums of their parts. Any idiot can write a review that simply describes a game'sfunctionality and tells you that it is technically superior to similar games that have come before it. A good writer can take the same game and evoke for the reader the experience of playing without directly explaning the minutiae of the control scheme, for instance. They can place the game into the pantheon of the medium and the wider culture it'sa part of and explain its impact, if any. This is the heart of good criticism, I feel.

Of course, this is easier for some games than others. The more derivative, generic and mediocre a game is, the harder it is to find something interesting to say about it. But the goal or the critic should always be to find that interesting angle, that evocative turn of phrase, that description of the game as experience rather than object. Anyone who is content merely describing a game and its most objectively measurable qualities (?killer graphics,? ?tight controls?) should stop writing game criticism and start writing instruction booklets or press releases.

This gets into what I consider a fundamental split of all game evaluation into two distinct types: game reviews and game critiques (Never mind that almost all outlets call every game evaluation a review, just bear with me here). In my mind, game reviews are mainly commercial tools, meant to help consumers decide whether or not a game is worth their money and time. Game critiques, on the other hand, are more concerned with the totality of a game'sdesign and what a game does to advance the state of the medium or even society as a whole. The former considers mainly whether a game is fun, the latter whether it is worthwhile. --kyleorl --It's Our Fault That Games Aren't Considered Art (VGM Watch)

I'm a bit puzzled by this: "A critic's writing should betray deep feelings of ownership for the industry they love and study and write about." That's a bit like saying drama critics should be chummy with the actors and directors whose work they evaluate. But if the author here means a game critique shouldn't be a negative, whiny rant, then I say amen.

There's a lot that could happen in between fanatical raves and petulant rants.

Maybe it's the word "industry" that troubles me. If you replaced it with "genre" I'd feel better.

Of course, novelists and dramatists and poets want to make money, too, but there are fewer technical enablers and middlemen in the "literature industry," so in literary genres, it's easier to maintain the soul-nurturing myth of the solitary author.

Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called ?ELIZA -- A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,? in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA to simulate the ?active listening? psychoanalytical strategies of the Rogerian therapy in vogue at the time.

[...]

When so many other games these days incorporate decision-tree ethics -- good or bad choices constantly influence your digital avatar'smoral and physical evolution -- Nintendogs seems to be missing the finishing touches. Ding Dong will never fully suspend disbelief as a permanent puppy, and a cheerful one at that. Nintendo personnel have recently hinted that dogs in the next iteration would have a broader range of behavioral development and would age. They should go one further and let them die. Consciousness has no stakes if it'snever-ending. For machines to become man'sbest friends, there must also be the prospect of losing those friends. --Joshua Bearman --Pass the Paddles: Man's Best Friend (LA Weekly)

First, most of what we call "news" today starts out as a press release, which then becomes a headline, a sound-bite, and eventually a story. In a parallel to the way government operates, in which special interest groups lobby to create or defeat legislation, most of our news stories come as a result of PR efforts paid for by special interest groups (businesses) who have a stake in what becomes "news." (I'd love to come up with a taxonomy of stories by type just to show how few types there really are but that's a different point.)

Second, reporters like to ask good questions for which there may not be good answers. However, they'll force an answer because you can't say "nobody knows."

The third is that everybody loves numbers, regardless of where they come from, and these are the best kind of answers, regardless of whether the numbers are true. -Dale Dougherty --How News is Made (Boing Boing)

A good deconstruction of the ubiquitous Thanksgiving holiday shopping story.

How long have people been calling the day after Thanksgiving "Black Friday"? I don't think I ever heard that term before this season. (I'm always grading papers anyway, so perhaps that's why I never pay attention to shopping stories during the Thanksgiving break.)

If you read newspaper headlines last week you would have thought that planetary warming meant an arid apocalypse was inevitable for Western Canada.

After a new review of what is projected to happen to the hydrology of snowy places like Canada was published in Nature magazine, the Globe and Mail thundered: "Drought threat looms over the Prairies' bounty."

"Canadian Prairies singled out as region set to suffer droughts," exclaimed the Vancouver Sun about the same study.

Well, no. --Stephen Strauss --Global warming rains contradictions (CBC News)

Welcome to the Rhetoric and Composition Wiki Book. This wikitext is designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs. We are writing this free wikitext because we believe that while commercial textbook publishers offer excellent products, many of our students are unable to afford them. We would also like to make our knowledge available to anyone with the desire and ambition to learn rather than those few privileged enough to attend a university. Finally, we hope that readers like you will not only benefit from our work, but also contribute to its ongoing development. --Rhetoric and Composition (Wikibooks)

A wiki is a collection of user-editable web document. If you think you can explain something better, you can change it.

Several of my freshmen seemed surprised when they learned that Wikipedia -- the most famous of all wikis -- is user-editable, and that anyone in the world can work on it. Wikipedia has a devoted community of amateur fact-checkers, so that any deliberate vandalism is quickly spotted and reversed. I tell my students that Wikipedia is an acceptable resource for an informal in-class oral presentation, or if they want to consult it to inform their written responses to assigned readings.

For cutting-edge topics that involve online culture, or that require the sorting out of huge amounts of information (such as ongoing coverage of natural disasters), Wikipedia is an excellent source. If the article has been edited recently, and has been edited numerous times, its probably a fairly good representation of the common understanding of a topic. From time to time I find inaccuracies and omissions, but I try to fix them.

Since this will be my last drama wildcard, I wanted to say goodbye & good luck to everyone in our class. It has been a fantastic semester and I had a great time. I came into this class thinking I had nothing more to learn (damn senioritis), but I was wrong. I not only developed a more keen sense of myself, but also of those around me. Everyone one of you has touched me & I thank you all. --Katherine Lambert --Goodbye & Goodluck (Katherine Lambert)

A student in my "Drama as Literature" course uses her "wildcard" blog entry (part of the blogging portfolio assignment) to say goodbye to all her classmates.

Classes don't always bond this tightly, but when they do, it's a rewarding thing to witness. And we still have all next week to discuss Death of a Salesman.