January 2006 Archive Page

Meaning

Usually refers to one's family. Sometimes used (as in Shakespeare's original) to denote all living creatures.

Origin

From Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Clown: I have been, madam, a wicked creature, as you and all flesh and blood are; and, indeed, I do marry that I may repent. --Flesh and Blood (The Prhase Finder)

Er, no, that's not from Hamlet. It's from All's Well That Ends Well (I.iii).

I love quirky online databases, too, but here's one example of why failing to confirm what you find online can lead to trouble. The consequences in this case are negligible, but imagine somebody going online to make health-related decisions!

I panicked and tried to pat out the fire with my hands but the brittle, dry macramé cord was fully ablaze within a few seconds. All I could do was stand there and scream for help. The owl was now a fireball which was scorching my wall and dropping cinders onto the carpet.
--Macramé Disaster (Catenema)

Also worth reading -- Cub Scout Confidential. Found via an amusing MetaFilter thread on macramé.

Media studies students - sometimes stereotyped as studying "Mickey Mouse" degrees - are among the most employable of any graduates, says a major survey. --Media students 'most employable' (BBC)

An interesting detail to keep in mind as I put together my plan for a "Disney Worldview" course for next January.

Via Color in a Lurid World.

For crying out loud, I'm middle class. I went to a school most people would call posh. But if I came home and said to my wife that I wanted a beverage, or asked her to pass the condiments, she?d punch me.

When I travel, I don't need to be treated like Hyacinth Bucket. I want you to understand I speak like you do and that I'll understand perfectly if you say there'sa kettle in my room. You don't have to say there are ?tea and coffee making facilities?. --Jeremy Clarkson --The worst word in the language (TimesOnline)

I'm introducing my Intro to Literary Study students to the joy of grammar today, so I thought I'd better get my grammatical freak on, so to speak.

If there is any general lesson about Bayosphere, it's that citizen journalism at the community level needs less high-flown rhetoric and more street-smart testing. The model for what works in content remains to be finished. Citizen journalism is not a failure. But there needs to be a more engaged relationship between the proprietors and impresarios of community sites and their contributors, some of whom are news-gathering novices. --Tom Grbisich --What are the lessons from Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere? (Online Journalism Review)

A good analysis of Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere mea culpa.

--Galleries -- Bridge Drawings (Ex Astris Scientia)

A very cool collection of cut-away schmatics of the various designs of the bridges for Star Trek. Starts with the bridge as it appeared in the Star Trek pilot episodes, the original series, the movies, and various refits of the same set for the various Federation starships encountered throughout the later series.

Very geeky. Very good.

We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God." --We will never forget them... (MetaFilter)

A thread devoted to the 20th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

So The Movies -- set in an unnamed city where they make movies, decorate with palm trees and assign sycophants to celebrities -- is a fictionalized simulation of a real place that simulates fiction while fictionalizing the real world.

[...]

Activision and its partner Lionhead Films encourages the uploading and sharing of your creations, so this could be your big chance to show the real-life movie studios what you could do for them, given half a chance!

Heh, not really. Big movie studios don't care. But you could amuse a few college students.--Lore Sjöberg --Thumbs Up for Movie-Making Game (Wired)

Like any red-blooded hacker, Mozart adored mathematics as a child (and gambling as an adult), found word-play irresistible (email would have been perfect for him) and loved setting himself puzzles. His Musical dice game uses dice throws and pre-composed short fragments of music to form compositions created by random numbers; the challenge was writing fragments that would fit together whatever the throws. At one point in his opera Don Giovanni, in addition to the main orchestra accompanying the singers, there are three more orchestras on stage, each playing completely different music. It all fits together so perfectly that most opera lovers are unaware of the compositional tour-de-force they are witnessing. --Glyn Moody --Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hacker (Open...)

If you think of a "hacker" as someone who compulsively tweaks a system, I think the author is onto something.

Ultimately, the argument is weakened by simplistic one-to=-one comparisons (such as The Magic Flute to a MMORPG) and the observation that lots of computer hackers like blasting music, but I still enjoyed reading this piece.

The first thing that occurred to me was the similarity between the bridge on the Enterprise and a small theater. The view screen made an obvious film screen and the seating centered around the command chairs and behind would fit well in the small space I had. I therefore decided to make my theater into a loose replica of the bridge sets from the various Start Trek TV shows and movies. The front wall would hold a large "view" screen. In the back, a two level seating area with access ramps down each side. A small railing would separate the two. Other details (computer displays, lighting effects, etc.) could be included to give it that spaceship bridge feel. --Gary Reighn
--The Bridge Home Theater (Reighn.com)

Words fail me. I bow in awe to the magnificence of Gary Reighn, the alpha-nerd. Via BoingBoing.

"I love awakening the passion for drama and storytelling in the children," Komarek said. "Nothing's been finalized, but I'm eyeing Aristophanes' Frogs. I love the dislocation of verse in the play's stichic passages, and the kids love animals." --Second-Graders Wow Audience With School Production Of Equus (The Onion (Satire))

Weird. Weird, weird, weird.

"Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news," said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN's NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show's ratings closer to front-runner Fox News.

Brown said he tried to give viewers a balanced diet of light and serious news with NewsNight. "But I always knew when I got to the Brussels sprouts, I was on thin ice," he said.

When NewsNight spent four hours covering the arrest of actor Robert Blake for the murder of his wife, Brown received thousands of e-mails criticizing the amount of time the show spent on the story. Nevertheless, that show, which aired in April 2002, received the highest ratings of any program since NewsNight's coverage of the November 2001 crash of American Airlines flight 587. --Jan Sjostrom --Broadcaster says serious news at risk (PalmBeachDailyNews.com)

Forgive me for pointing out it takes a TV journalist to say, "It's not enough to say you want serious news. You have to watch it."

Reading is good, too.

Though there is a rich history of pseudonymity in American journalism, there is none of anonymity. It has long been understood that if the publisher of a reputable periodical grants a writer use of a pseudonym, then that publisher knows the writer's true identity and takes responsibility -- legal and otherwise -- for that writer's words.

Printed periodicals grant pseudonymity but never anonymity. Imagine the cacophony that would result if printed periodicals published unvetted, unreviewed, anonymous Letters to the Editor or Op-Ed essays.

Yet we're now discussing how some of those periodicals are doing the equivalent of that online. Should there really be any surprise that many of those comments are scatological, obscene, or libelous?

Publishing anonymous, unvetted, and unreviewed commentary online is hugely divergent from the policies of those publications' print editions. It's a different kettle of fish, one that can stink for the publishers. Indeed, those publishers and their new-media managers are being reckless. And if you think I've used too strong a word, poll newspaper libel lawyers and libel insurers. --Vin Crosbie --Time to get tough: Managing anonymous reader comments (Online Journalism Review)

In 1985, Buckles wrote "Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame 'Adventure,' " a scholarly look at the early text-based game Adventure and the people who played it.

Buckles was hardly a devotee of the game herself, and the topic didn't have a lot to do with her main area of study at UCSD, which was German literature, particularly poetry.

But something about players' passionate attraction to Adventure piqued her interest.

Like other text-based games (also known as interactive fiction), Adventure is essentially a mini-novel that enlists the player as a character. Through myriad choices about where to go or what action to take next, the player determines the course of the story. --James Hebert --Mary Ann Buckles bucked academia, and found the poetry in computer games (SignOnSanDiego.com)

This story broke on Ludology.org about two years ago, and the full story appeared in the NY Times just afterwards. (Hebert duly notes this, but calls the story "brief.")

Scientists recently have found a few rocky planets, including one last year just seven times the size of Earth, but all are very close to their stars and so extremely hot. The planetary discovery announced Wednesday and reported in today's edition of the journal Nature is the smallest and coldest yet. --Ian Hoffman --'Earth-like' planets are plentiful (Tri-Valley Herald)

I'm not saying that textbook companies don't serve a valuable purpose in the composition community; there'sa lot of textbooks that I have used in the past that I like a great deal, and I also know, that when I started teaching first year composition many moons ago, I learned a lot from the textbook that was assigned to both my students and to me. I do and I will continue to use textbooks in my teaching, though nowadays, I also tend to find out how much students are going to have to pay students before I make the adoption decision.

But I also think that textbook companies don't do enough to make materials available at a more reasonable cost, mainly because many of these folks still seem to not ?get it? when it comes to electronic publishing, and also because they are terrified about doing anything that might cut into profits. --Steven D. Krause --When textbooks cost too much (which is often) (Steven D. Krause's Official Blog)

The largest course I teach is News Writing, which had about 33 students last term. The previous time I taught it, I used a hefty textbook that we didn't get all the way through. This time around, I assigned several shorter books, and I think the results were encouraging. I would carefully align the readings in multiple books in such a way that I thought the connections between them would be pretty obvious, and this helped build confidence among students, who then started making connections that I hadn't foreseen. And because I wasn't kneecapped by my urge to go through every chapter of a huge textbook, we were able to spend more time on two mainstream books (that is, books not marketed as college texts).

I confess that I sometimes feel guilty letting the textbook do the teaching. Isn't that my job? I used to spend a lot of time creating online handouts. Now I'm much more likely to go online looking for some one else's handout, rather than blocking out time to create my own. But in the late 90s, many of the writing center handouts were simply word documents slapped into an HTML template -- complete with print-specific cues like "over" and URLs implemented as text rather than links.

In a conversation on Pedablogue, my colleague Josh Sasmor notes that one of the values of having a textbook is that it offers a perspective that differs from the instructor (at least, it does when the instructor isn't teaching from his or her own book).

--Literature Quizzes and Crosswords (WSU)

Just a collection of quizzes and crosswords on literary terms, grammar and usage, and figures from American literature. Hamlet's in there too.

Understanding the Abramoff pictures requires investigating the absurd Washington phenomenon known as the "glory wall." Also called the "wall of fame," "me wall," and "ego wall," the glory wall is where members of the establishment flaunt their connections by displaying photos of themselves with more famous people. --John Dickerson --''As I Was Saying to the President ?'': Washington and the art of the ''glory wall.'' (Slate)

I started reading this because of the Battlestar Galactica reference. I kept reading because something suddenly clicked, and it helped me understand the "egocasting" phenomenon that has been puzzling me about Facebook.

I'm still not ready to tie all these observations together, but maybe my subconscious brain can tackle it, if it wants to.

Rule 7 seems both funny and serious: a Zen-like joke, abolishing all the rules that precede and follow it, and a statement that'sabsolutely true, for makers of art and for anyone engaged in learning. Note that Rule 7 doesn't say that the only thing to do is work. Rather, the only necessary thing is work. The only way to catch on to things (or to make them happen, to change metaphors) is to put in the necessary time doing the work, whether that work is sketching, practicing scales, memorizing a declension, mapping out an argument, studying a timeline, making notes on an article, or looking up words in a poem. --Michael Leddy --Rule 7 - Do the work (Lifehack.org)

The truth is often so simple.

Via Pedablogue.

"We often hear the assertion that rising faculty salaries drive the cost of tuition," he says, but data over 25 years show that is not the case. "One of the several sources behind rising tuition rates is investment in technology."

Facebook is not the sole source for those woes. However, it is a Janus-faced symbol of the online habits of students and the traditional objectives of higher education, one of which is to inspire critical thinking in learners rather than multitasking. The situation will only get worse as freshmen enter our institutions weaned on high-school versions of the Facebook and equipped with gaming devices, cell phones, iPods, and other portable technologies. --Michael J. Bugeja --Facing the Facebook (Chronicle)

Here's an interesting anecdote from the article:

Michael Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado, recounts a class discussion during which he asked how many people had seen the previous night's NewsHour on PBS or read that day's New York Times. "A couple of hands went up out of about 140 students who were present," he recalls. "One student chirped: 'Ask them how many use Facebook.' I did. Every hand in the room went up. She then said: 'Ask them how many used it today.' I did. Every hand in the room went up. I was amazed."

Technology gives young people tremendous power to present themselves to other people, and to view the images those other people carefully construct via lists of alliances. The term "egocasting," which Bugeja credits to Christine Rosen, is new to me, but it really fits. As a textual person myself, I can understand the desire to downgrade the value of social networking and image-sharing sites, since my own critical training has emphasized the analysis of words.

Websites that are made up mostly of lists of links to other lists of links define a kind of information structure that seems shallow when looked at next to, say, a finely honed Elizabethan sonnet. But that network contains cultural information and value that the users themselves feel intuitively. This article points out quite astutely that advertisers are vividly aware of the potential value of such huge networks of demographic data.

I don't mind letting Amazon.com know what books I buy, because I feel I gain something of value in return. If I rate books according to what I do and don't like, Amazon will show me a list of personalized books. I don't often buy books from those lists myself, but I have used such lists in order to stock up the school library on new media and games studies texts, or to figure out what books to order through interlibrary loan.

In a similar way, the users of Facebook are publishing a tremendous amount of personal data about themselves. They become part of the data, which is disturbing when you think just how much control marketers have over popular culture, and just how little the young people who are targets of the marketing campaigns really think about how advertisements condition them to want the things that material goods can provide.

My favorite example is the invention of the tradition of the diamond engagement ring, which De Beers launched by giving diamonds to the stars of early Hollywood, and the more recent "right hand ring," which women are supposed to buy themselves, as a sign of independence and power, but which has no particular cultural history outside of the De Beers company's marketing boardroom.

When I was a kid, and "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" or "The Wizard of Oz" made its annual TV appearance, in school the next day, everyone would be talking about it. Now, my kids can ask for either of those shows, or a host of others that we've picked up inexpensively, or that we can borrow (yet again) from the library. That's good, because they watch less crap (while waiting for something better to come along, which I remember doing frequently as a kid).

As a new media journalism kind of guy, I don't mourn the loss of the old model of media production, in which a few elite power brokers broadcast their values to the silent masses, both in the topics they chose to investigate and the words they used to communicate their own particular truths.

I'd like to think that the critical thinking skills that students gain in college will help them make intelligent choices about how they use mass media, about how they choose to inform themselves about events going on in the world, and about how they choose to engage with each other on issues that matter to citizens living in a democracy.

Does the Facebook habit of joining groups condition people to follow, rather than lead? If you spend time seeking out people who are like you, how does that prepare you to engage productively and intellectually with people who disagree with you? How much social skill and maturity is required to carry on a conversation about topic X in a room where everyone has joined because they have already decided they share the same opinion on topic X? Does Facebook create a circle of safety, where the presence of other like-minded people reduces the chance that you might get into a flamewar with an interloper who holds a different perspective?

Usenet had a tradition of being freewheeling and occasionally brutal. Is Facebook the opposite -- controlled, predictable, full of circles of friends who wear elaborate nametags designed to eliminate uncertainty?

I've sat here for a while, unsuccessfully trying to pull all these observations together. Something to think about for another day, perhaps.

Substantially fewer films will be produced over the next year or two. And a significant portion of the production costs of the reduced slate will be borne by hedge funds and other investment groups.

Talk to the corporate hierarchs and you quickly elicit the thinking behind this pullback: Too many movies have been crammed into a market whose appetite for new product has obviously leveled off. --Peter Bart --Hedge your bets (Variety)

Whether you consider IF to be retro, minimalist, or a throwback, you introduce the genre to a general audience as a historical lesson - one which answers the anticipated first question ?why does IF looks so old?? But history is only a stone-throw away from nostalgia, and so it is easy for even staunch advocates of the contemporary IF scene to come off sounding wistful... Jeremy Douglass --IF is history! Interactive Fiction in the news (WRT: Writer Response Theory)

Another great resource is Interactive Fiction news resources.

Academic articles on interactive fiction often follow their own pattern, with a significant chunk devoted to a transcript-based introduction to the command line. It's not at all hard to find good reviews, but academic scholarship on IF doesn't offer very many close readings or deep analyses of individual works beyond Zork or Adventure. (Espen Aarseth's treatment of Deadline in Cybertext is a notable exception.)

Without deliberately planned, consciously modeled classroom use, it is understandable that students might fall back on their understanding of the blogs as an electronic version of the print-journal, a genre without interactive or collaborative potential. However, we contend blogs can impact the writing classroom effectively, if their integration and function are clearly structured and articulated. We argue they can be interactive and agonistic, but only if instructors work to facilitate these qualities by carefully structuring their prompts for assignments and the purposes and goals they are meant to accomplish. --Janice Wendi Fernheimer and Thomas J. Nelson --Bridging the Composition Divide: Blog Pedagogy and the Potential for Agonistic Classrooms (Currents in Electronic Literacy)

A good overview of the issues composition instructors face when they introduce blogging. Most of the writing in a composition classroom is "forced" -- that is, the students may or may not think of themselves as writers, and they are likely only writing because they want credit for homework. Thus, the kind of writing that composition students produce is only rarely going to approach the possibilities that one finds when people who want to write end up with blogs.

This fall, I'll be teaching a freshman composition class. It'll be the first time I've ever taught such a class without a research paper component. I haven't yet decided what role (if any) blogging will play in that class. Why am I thinking of that class when a completely different set of classes starts tomorrow?

The board of Pixar Animation Studios, the digital animations company, is set to meet tomorrow to approve the company's $7bn (£3.9bn) takeover by Disney.

The all-share deal will make Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, around $3.5bn and the single largest shareholder in Disney. Jobs created Pixar in 1986 when he paid $10m for the computer animations division of Lucasfilm, owned by Stars Wars creator George Lucas. --Andrew Murray-Watson --Jobs to scoop $3.5bn as Pixar board approves Disney takeover (Telegraph)

Dear fellow resident of my Pittsburgh area neighborhood,

I rejoice in the knowledge that you are apparently pleased with the performance of the football team that serves our geographical area. By all means, feel free to celebrate. Have another beer or something.

But please take your black-and-gold-mitten-clad hand off your car horn so I can get some work done before my preschooler wakes up.

You can have your "19 years-old," or whatever you are. I love being 33, because I can look back on everything that I've done, and smile. I've done it all, baby, while you were in diapers, literally.

[...]

You can have your crappy music, stupid scenes, cliques, fashions or whatever.. I've sooo outgrown that, like a decade ago, when you were in elementary school. I'm a child of the 1980s. The "ME" Generation. I don't really care about you. I am GENERATION X. I've been skateboarding since 1986, mosh-pitting since 1988, and wearing the same clothing style since 1990. Hell, I still have a buncha clothes from '90 that still get worn regularly.. t-shirts, boots, jeans and belts... my trench coat is from '88, my painted up leather from '91. I have CD's that I bought NEW in 1987. I STILL make "mix-tapes." --Michael Sichok --I like being old, and would not change it for the world. (Michaek Sichock)

Mike has blogged for me in classes on literature and journalism. Recently he has written expressive and thought-provoking posts on his alienation from today's youth scene, his comparison of the intellectual atmosphere at Seton Hill with that of two other colleges where he's taking classes, and some citizen journalist coverage of an accident that happened outside his apartment. Some time ago he wrote a hauntingly beautiful tribute to his ancestral homeland, "Snow Falls on Mother Russia."

I'm a few years older than he is -- but just a few. In an alternate universe, where I might have been cool during the 80s and 90s, I might have written this entry myself.

Actually, during the 80s I thought most of pop culture was pretty stupid, and that's not because I was pining for the 70s or anything. Star Trek, Star Wars, WarGames, Indiana Jones, Aliens, Little Shop of Horrors -- these were the movies I saw in the theatres, with friends, rented on BetaMax, and bought the soundtracks on LP. I never was much into popular music (preferring to listen to news/talk radio or 50s/60s oldies). I vaguely recall being momentarily excited when I heard a rumor that Debbie Gibson was going to attend the University of Virginia, but just now, while Googling to refresh my memory of my favorite Debbie Gibson song, I learned that it wasn't Debbie Gibson who sang "Eternal Flame," but a group called The Bangles. I see from Wikipedia that they also did "Manic Monday," and "Walk Like an Egyptian," so I guess I knew some of their music, but the group's name meant nothing to me.

When I went to college, I bought a few cassette tapes of classical music, simply to have something to listen to with headphones when I wanted to drown out competing noise that threatened my ability to study.

By the way -- when Mike writes "I'll always be in awe of a beautiful professor that had the chance to see Ginsberg perform a LIVE reading," he's not talking about me.

Just in case anyone was wondering.

It has been twenty years since Christa McAuliffe reached for the stars. Her launch into the sky on the space shuttle, Challenger, literally became what she had previously anticipated as being, "The Ultimate Field Trip." What truly prophetic words they were. --A Heavenly Legacy (Reeves Library)

A good overview of the legacy of Christa McAuliffe.

Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose, California for an order to hand over the requested records. --Google Won't Hand Over Files (Wired | AP)

But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we've decided not to allow comments for the time being. It's a shame that it's come to this. Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about. --Jim Brady, Executive Editor, washingtonpost.com --Comments Turned Off (post.blog [Washington Post])

It was becoming a burden for the editors to remove the personal attacks and name-calling.

Slashdot has an interesting multi-tier reputation-management system, in which randomly-selected members who fit a general profile are given moderation points that they can use to rank certain posts higher or lower. Visitors to the site can set their filtering level to the lowest (to view everything, even the pointless junk) or the highest (to view only those entries considered by the group to be the most important). If an individual poster's comments are regularly moderated up, that poster accumulates karma, which can be "spent" by moderating your own post up, if you feel you have something truly important to say. The system has been working for years, and my description of it doesn't really do it justice. Whoops, I'm being called away. So I'll just refer you to Slashdot Moderation.

The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light rather than transmit light from behind. There's no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be "refreshed" 60 times per second or more).

The E Ink technology also conserves batteries because current is used only when pixels need to change their color -- between virtual page turns, the Reader consumes no current at all. Its batteries will last for about 7,500 pages, according to Sony. --Dylan Tweney --Screening the Latest Bestseller (Wired)

It is a small firm, which employs 16 people. But there is something that distinguishes Nutzwerk from other companies.

Employees can be fired if they are caught complaining in the office.

It may sound absurd, but employees have a clause in their contracts which states: "moaning and whinging at Nutzwerk is forbidden... except when accompanied with a constructive suggestion as to how to improve the situation". --Tristana Moore --German firm bans office whingers (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

There's some not-so-subtle editorializing in this story, particularly in the selection of the photo of the CEO, Ramona Wonneberger, who looks a little sour. Over her shoulder, the photographer has framed an image of black-clad men standing with their arms folded.

--Randomized Garfield

Garfield strips, chopped up and re-assembled randomly. Funnier than the originals. Via memepool.

Participants should bring a sketchbook, journal or artist's book created or in progress, to share online with a larger audience. Participants will learn a range of techniques for creating online books and walk through the process of setting up a free, online illustrated journal, using a digital camera, scanner and free online software. Participants will complete a personal art blog and learn to upload images and text. If possible, participants should bring a laptop. Workshop also includes a guided, behind-the-scenes tour and discussion of Messages & Communications. --From Book to Blog: Creating An Online Journal (Mattress Factory)

Found via the Seton Hill Admissions weblog.

Life in South Korea revolves around education. Graduating from one of the country's top three universities is a ticket to a good job and marriage. Thirteen of the 18 cabinet members attended Seoul National, the most prestigious.

Students as young as 10 attend hagwon - cramming schools - until 11pm on weekdays and 8pm on Saturdays. The average family spends a tenth of its income on private education, worth a total Dollars 8bn last year.

High school students live by the mantra "four in, five out", a Korean saying reflecting the belief that those who sleep for only four hours a night will get into a top university but those who languish in bed for five hours will not.

So critical is the university entrance examination that government offices and the Korea Stock Exchange open an hour late to keep roads clear and airplanes are grounded during the listening test. --Anna Fifield --Korea's divided families count the cost of a good education... (First News | FT.com)

Now that's dedication.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

We [the class] have been talking a lot about Lara Croft on my blog the past couple of days and this is due largely in part to the fact that she is the topic of my term paper. I posted two very distinct pictures of Croft on my blog in order to get a general response from my classmates. The first was a promotional photo that someone added a caption [Babe In Toy Land] to and made into fan art (note the use of the word Babe). The photo featured a model dressed as Croft with a gun barrel pointed at her lips, and she was looking rather seductively at the camera [almost as if she was looking at you]. The issue that this photo raised was whether or not Croft was aware of her own sexual presence. In the end we concluded that the game designers control what we think about Croft. --Leslie Rodriquez --Who wears the pants in Lara Croft's house? (Roamer's Zone)

A good collection of links to a range of opinions about Lara Croft, the virtual heroine of the Tomb Raider series. The comparison to Barbie and the analysis of trans-medial representations of pop femininity takes this blog entry beyond the usual "is Lara Croft good or bad" essay.

It's not hard to find moralists who disapprove of both Lara Croft and Barbie, or pro-power activists who welcome both icons of positive imagery. It's even more interesting to study the nuanced positions of those who are pro-Barbie but anti-Croft, or vice versa.

Having suffered a heart attack back in September, Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor.

"At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life," said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. "We would resuscitate him," then execute him. -- Death row elder needed 2 injections (CNN)

Reporting 101: How a journalist can ride the fine line between objective reporting and editorializing.

Revision 88 / Serial number 54892

Oval Office
You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you.

There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of the room and there is a full-length mirror upon the wall.

What do you want to do now?

> INVADE IRAQ
You are not able to do that, yet.

> LOOK MIRROR
Self-reflection is not your strong suit.

> PET SEAL
It's not that kind of seal. --Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure (Defective Yeti)

Not exactly biting social commentary, since it's designed to amuse people who already disagree with Bush. But I hope everybody, regardless of political leanings, can appreciate the form.

Some of the comments are even funnier than the post.

"You can make fun all you want, but according to your re-creation, Bush survived in Zork for, what, going on 6 years now. I consistently survived 6 minutes."

"He's only survived so long because he types so slowly."

"If Bush is so in the dark, why hasn't he been eaten by a Grue?"

Am I mad? Possibly. But, at one level these are just a bunch of "high-flown" questions that really only matter to artists and cynical bastards like me :D. At another level, these issues are critical to advancing the art (that's right, art) of game design and making a game that Strongbad said were for "intellectual types" accessible to everyone. --Evan Reynolds --Presentation on Visualization and IF Part 1 (Color in a Lurid World)

A Nightmare in Paris, with its lean white text on a black background, evokes the interface of a command-line interface text-adventure game, though it is really a multiple-choice branched narrative, akin to the Choose Your Own Adventure series. I'm something of an IF purist, in that I don't see hypertext literature as requiring the same level of intellectual effort that a command-line IF game requires, so I don't personally feel the same sense of accomplishment when clicking through a hypertext story that I would feel if I suddenly got the idea to put the satchel in front of the panel to block the cleaning robot that's running away with the fish I want to put in my ear.

Still, A Nightmare in Paris does a good job spoofing the sudden, unexplained death that lurks around so many corners in text-adventure games. I learned quickly that my fate intimately tied to my choices of such details as whether I order wine or rum, or whether I walk to the blackjack table or the roulette wheel. Still, the twists and turns kept me playing (and using the "go back" button) for some time. Can someone tell me the French translation of "meat for the tires"? I think that would have added a little verisimilitude. I particularly liked the time stamps at the top of each page. That's very helpful, given the tempting presence of the "go back" button (which can lead to disorientation if overused).

I'm usually more disoriented in the space of an IF game, rather than in time. Maps can help the spatial disorientation, but the plot can also change in an IF game, depending on player actions. Still, the production of high-quality plot is labor intensive, so IF designers are motivated to show the player all they've got. Some of the more recent works of interactive fiction, by authors such as Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, and Adam Cadre, are far more successful at integrating the rules of the genre with the fiction that motivates the PC, but they take different approaches in terms of creating optional or alternate branches that don't simply end with PC death or the bland "You can't do that" or the slightly friendlier but still frustrating, "You decide you don't want to do that after all."

Still, IF has always been a niche medium. Reynolds points out that in 1985, top IF titles sold about 100,000 titles a month, while the most recent Harry Potter book has sold 2M copies. When you consider that the home computer market was much smaller in 1985 than it is now, that 100,000 titles a month represented a pretty healthy chunk. A few years ago a student project at MIT looked closely at the economic history of Infocom (which marketed Zork and its sequels, as well as other games in different genres such as SF and detective.) And the Harry Potter books didn't start selling big until the Time-Warner conglomerate bought the movie rights and began hyping the franchise. According to Jyotsna Kapur, "The conglomerate’s magazines including Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People carried articles on the movie and on Rowling. Rowling’s personal story, a single mom struggling on welfare when she wrote the book, is exactly the kind of rags to riches stories so favored by capitalism. Time magazine, including its children’s section, carried articles on Harry Potter, including a cover story titled “Wild about Harry” way back in September 20, 1999, shortly after the book was optioned."

While Strongbad does poke fun at old skool games, including text adventures, it's true that IF was marketed as an intellectual alternative to moving bleepy blocky blobs around on your TV set. (The term "interactive fiction" was, I believe, coined by Infocom's marketing division.)

I've got to post this now and run some errands, but there's a part 2 that I'll respond to later...

Franklin believed men were equal, in a certain way, but he was consistently reluctant to endorse Thomas Jefferson's notion of human equality, informed by John Locke, that all men are equal in a state of nature, and he rejected the idea that all men are equally loved in the eyes of God. It was manifestly false, Franklin claimed, that all men are equal in intelligence, ability, natural goodness, or innate dignity.

However, Franklin, in a roundabout way, did endorse the idea that men are equal on the grounds of their mutual ignorance, vanity, foolish opinions, and pretensions to truth: The fact that human folly and imperfection is universal is the true root of equality. In this manner he cuts down our moral pretentiousness but, as Weinberger points out, he does so for the sake of a truly common human morality.

Such conclusions are unlikely to flatter anyone, but the truth, as Socrates pointed out, is often unpleasant. --Jerry Weinberger reviews Timothy Lehmann's B. Franklin, Moralist: Printer, patriot, scientist, inventor -- and Philosopher --Benjamin Franklin Unmasked  (Weekly Standard)

Franklin was born 300 years ago today.

-- The Carnival of Homeschooling: week 3 (Why Homeschool)

Parents' reasons for home schooling are as varied as their children. A post I wrote about video games is part of this carnival.

In the blogosphere, a "carnival" is a collection of links, usually contributed by participants, and then publicized on the blogs of those participants. Usually the role of organizing the carnival rotates, so that everybody benefits from the editor's work, but nobody is burdened with that task repeatedly. While carnivals typically aren't very selective -- that is, anyone who wants to be part of it is usually included -- since participants typically select their best recent post related to the subject, the links one finds in a carnival are usually pretty good.

I've been having my students posts weblog portfolios of their own work, but for future classes I'm going to think about how I might incorporate a blogging carnival.

Besides the most obvious danger -- adult stalkers enticing teenagers into face-to-face meetings -- Cole warned that personal information posted online can also be read by college admissions officers and future employers.

"We are trying to figure out how do our school rules relate to this type of behavior," Cole said.

Some colleges have expelled teenagers for violating codes of conduct after discovering photos of underage students posing in front of kegs or writing about drinking binges, and employers often look up job candidates on the sites, said Parry Aftab, an Internet lawyer and the executive director of Wiredsafety.org. --Tara Bahrampour and Lori Aratani --Teens' Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools (Washington Post (will expire))

Instead of the more common focusing on how blogs can cost people jobs, the focus is on community response to teenagers reporting (or inventing) shenanigans via their blogs.

He had a nervous breakdown, spent time in hospitals and had to submit to shock therapy. And in 1947, as if he were being punished for having invented television, his house in Maine burned to the ground.

One wishes it could be said that this was the final indignity Farnsworth had to suffer, but it was not. Ten years later, he appeared as a mystery guest on the television program What's My Line? Farnsworth was referred to as Dr. X and the panel had the task of discovering what he had done to merit his appearance on the show. One of the panelists asked Dr. X if he had invented some kind of a machine that might be painful when used. Farnsworth answered, "Yes. Sometimes it's most painful."

He was just being characteristically polite. His attitude toward the uses that had been made of his invention was more ferocious. His son Kent was once asked what that attitude was. He said, "I suppose you could say that he felt he had created kind of a monster, a way for people to waste a lot of their lives."

He added, "Throughout my childhood his reaction to television was 'There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet.' " --Neil Postman --Philo Farnsworth (Time)

From an old article. Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a cutting look at TV's role in popular culture.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has dismissed entertainment reporter Tim Ryan following an investigation into stories he wrote during the past several years.

The stories contained phrases or sentences that appeared elsewhere before being included, un-attributed, in stories that ran in the Star-Bulletin. The stories did not include inaccurate information or any fabrications. --Frank Bridgewater --Inquiry prompts reporter's dismissal (Honolulu Star Bulletin)

NASA’s Stardust sample return capsule has returned to Earth today, floating to the ground under billowing parachute. A helicopter team has successfully located the capsule under desert dark conditions. --Leonard David --Mission Completed: Stardust Capsule Lands in Utah (Space)

The Missouri native fought briefly for the Confederacy but idolized U.S. Grant for preserving the Union (he eventually published the statesman'sbest-selling memoirs); wrote in favor of rights for African Americans but was fond of telling racist jokes (and co-authored with Bret Harte the grotesquely anti-Chinese play Ah Sin); assailed the Gilded Age yet formed a close personal and professional relationship with the robber baron Henry Rogers; lampooned con men and scam artists yet went broke by investing in crackpot inventions and get-rich-quick schemes; and so on. --Nick Gillespie reviews Ron Powers' Mark Twain: A Life --Mark Twain vs. Tom Sawyer (Reason)

At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse. --John Sossel --Stupid in America: Why your kids are probably dumber than Belgians (Reason)

Stupidity and low marks earned in a standardized test are not identical terms. The headline and the report are designed to cause immediate shock and vague outrage.

What is the international average? Just how far off from the international average is a 25th-place finish?

Every year I encounter first-semester freshmen who have been trained to expect that being bright is enough to earn them As. And since the national teachers' union has gone on record as holding the position that home-schooled children should not be permitted to use the school facilities their families tax dollars have paid for, I'm not emotionally motivated to defend the union.

While the tabloid-style presentation annoys me (there's even a reference to a teacher sending sexual notes to "Cutie 101"), the idea behind the report is worth considering.

Once again, however, The Onion does it better.

• Report: Our High Schools May Not Adequately Prepare Dropouts For Unemployment
• Principal Hates Underachievers, Overachievers
• Something Weird Going On In That Montessori School, Neighbor Reports

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we?re going, but we will know we want to be there.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

14. Don't be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven't had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you?ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world. --An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth  (Bruce Mau Design, Inc.)

Okay, some of these are kind of corny. But I still found the whole package thought-provoking.

There are 43 items on the other end of the link, along with translations to Polish and Spanish.

Found via Weblogg-ed.

Looking at the show from a political standpoint, it'shard to press it to one side or the other. While the show is far from ?centrist? or ?moderate? it instead stands to the far left and right virtually at the same time. On some issues, it stands firmly in the realm of the new Democratic ideals, and in other areas it proudly flaunts Republican values. I will break down the show point by point based on the topic of political discussion. --Mike Rubino

See also Part 2 --MacGyver: Political Analysis (Tranquility Lost)

Maybe someone who doesn't look closely will think I'm some how associated with this thoughtful media analysis, posted by an SHU student during break.

I've never actually had Mike Rubino as a student, though I wish I had, so I could try to take credit for his accomplishments. Good work, Mike!

We never talked about his impending death, Dad and I. For all the time I spent with him these last five months, we never had a single conversation about it. We talked about the present. We spoke carefully, avoiding verbs such as "will be" and mention of 2006. When the future insisted upon conversation, it would be about the upcoming holiday or December 17, the day I was to compelte my MS in leadership and business ethics, something he was so proud of. Short-term seemed safest. Less cruel.

On Thursday evening, the day he quit responding to us and slipped into that comatose state, we thought that the end was near. Not two days away. That evening, though, Dad opened his eyes and looked at me and my brother. Just stared. --The new year (Simple sentences sprinkled with hopes of complexity)

Powerful, very personal writing. The author actually contacted me to draw attention to her new year's resolutions, so perhaps she's ready to move on. I won't be ready to move on from this blog entry, not for a while, anyway.

During this freak January warm spell, I took a half hour out of the day and went for a walk, exploring parts of campus I've never seen before. I took a look at the new athletic fields, and walked up the hill to the graveyard where the Sisters of Charity keep their dead.

My own father started ballroom dancing in his 60s, and is now past 70, still dancing. My older brother turned 40 the other day, so I'm not far behind.

It's now a fairly routine task for me to prune the grey hairs that stick up like wires from my thinning head.

But life is good, and I am content.

I won't receive a grade, but otherwise I'll be a full participant in English 439. (The other students haven't been told of my secret identity, and because so many studies show that the under-30 demographic never reads newspapers, they'll surely remain in the dark all quarter long, even as the stories appear.)

Such folly -- an adult going back to re-immerse herself in classic literature -- isn't new. --Julia Keller --English 439: Class in session (Chicago Tribune (registration))

Thanks for the link, Anne.

The under-30 crowd may not read newspapers, but they read blogs. They'll find out pretty quickly.

On the handheld front, Sony and Nintendo continue their fight for the minds and backpacks of the nation's gamers by releasing ever-larger portable consoles. The Nintendo XL features six screens, a folding seat and a selection of overpriced candy bars, while the PlayStation Still Ostensibly Portable can now play all known forms of media, including 2-ton cuneiform tablets.

[...]

The year 2010 saw the release of Darth Maul's Star Wars Tennis, Mario MMORPG, Clone Trooper Golf, Mario's Dating Sim, Jar-Jar's Dating Sim and Mario Storms the Beach at Normandy. Plus, handheld versions of all those. --Lore Sjöberg --Game Year in Review: 2010 (Wired)

Consumerist Pac-Man and Socialist Tetris (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Pac-Man" is a game about gathering resources while fleeing from predators. It gives pleasure to those areas of our brain that remember what it was like being a tiny but clever mammal, surrounded by threats that are deadly but not too bright. Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde pass over the Power Pills without triggering them; Power Pills are resources, like sticks or chips of flint, whose secrets were beyond the grasp of the beasts that preyed on our ancestors. The Power Pills are tools. But the dots Pac Man eats are just stand-ins for the quarters consumed by the arcade game. It's the ultimate consumerist game, coming out of Japan and becoming popular in America -- two centers of capitalism.

Compare it with a different sort of game, one that emphasizes sorting and organizing resources, where having too much without distributing it efficiently leads to a loss. Is it any wonder that Tetris emerged from communist Russia?

Here we are, faced with all sorts of new challenges, stuck in a system that seem unable or unwilling to change. We've mastered this assembly line method of teaching, programming all of our students in basically the same way throughout their time in school because that was the easiest way to do it. We didn't have unlimited information or content or ideas, so we created a curriculum that suited the needs of the day. Problem is, life outside the classroom has become drastically different. Life inside hasn't very much.--Will Richardson --Change or Die (Weblogg-ed)

Challenged to retrieve the powerful Amulet of Yendor from a fathomless, monster-plagued dungeon, you'll discover that the dungeon is actually a randomly-generated configuration of brackets, asterisks and periods; the villainous pit beasts are an assortment of letters ("O" for Orcs, "D" for dragons and so on); and your heroic avatar is nothing more than a cheerfully blinking "@" sign.

But beneath these primitive graphics is a game of such richness and endless variation it usually takes years to master, if at all. --Wagner James Au --The Best Game Ever (Salon)

An old article, from 2000. Today a poster on Slashdot asked for help breaking his girlfriend's NetHack habit.

You stroll outside and are delighted to see the sun just clearing the eastern horizon. It is a beautiful autumn morning and the air feels brisk as you take a deep breath. Across the way, you spot a jogger just before they disappear into a grove of tall ash trees. --Mike Tolar --Clink: A Clickable Link Text Adventure (clickadventure.com)

I spent a few minutes enjoying this hyperlink-based story. Some clever text-based puzzles, which in one place made the chore of getting out of a maze of trees actually enjoyable.

One problem I have with the implementation is that the description of scenes includes actions. Thus, every time we return to the opening screen (which is often), I am told "You stroll outside and are delighted to see the sun...". This is a common formal error committed by many newbie authors of command-line interactive fiction (see my essay on exposition in interactive fiction), and I find it irksome enough to hamper my ability to enjoy the rest of the experience. Further, Tolar's text often announces the motivations of my avatar, or sometimes the lack thereof, rather than simply presenting an intriguing textual world and letting me develop my own emotional responses to it.

For instance, when I read, "You are delighted with the prospect of what lies ahead," my first response is "I am? No, I'm not."

Why not show me something deligthful, rather than tell me that I am supposed to be delighted? See "Show, Don't (Just) Tell."

Don't just tell me something is delightful. Make the thing delight me.

Retrogaming: 10 Links about Centipede (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

1. Wikipedia's Centipede (video game)
   I had no idea the PC in Centipede is a garden gnome. I always assumed I was playing an insect of some sort, squirting out venom to fight off attackers. (Elsewhere I've seen references to the PC having a magic wand.) The page is a good basic introduction to Atari's garden-variety shooter, which first started feeding on quarters in 1980. Beware the spider!
   
   
2. Killer List of Video Games: Coin-Op Museum: Centipede
   When coin-operated arcade games are stacked shoulder-to-shoulder, you can't get a full view of the artwork along the sides. This site gives you full views of the cabinet design, as well as close-ups of game screens and the sparse but elegant instructions card. The control panel featured not a joystick, but a trackball.
   
   
3. Retrogaming Times offers "The Many Faces of... Centipede" (scroll down to the middle of the page) which compares numerous different classic home versions of the game, on systems ranging from the Apple II to the TI 99/4a.
   
   
4. In "Everything Old is New Again: Remaking Computer Games," Richard Rouse III compares his role as lead designer in a remake of Centipede to the task of having to remake the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho: "[T]his classic recreation will never exactly replicate the original Centipede. As a result, I think, this replica has a deleterious effect on the entire enterprise."
   
   
5. I came across several scattered references to co-designer Donna Bailey as the first female game designer, but so far haven't found more than a paragraph on her at a time. Her Wikipedia article, under the spelling "Dona Bailey," remains a stub.
   
   
6. Centipede screen captures from Retrogames.com.
   
   
7. MobyGames has collected quaint advertising copy for Centipede.
   
   
8. The Great Games Database entry for Centipede offers very technical information for serious retrogaming hardware collectors.
   
   
9. Few online versions of classic arcade games are faithful to the originals, so playing them is like reading Cliffs Notes. Still, here's a Shockwave version of Centipede. This Flash version doesn't come close to emulating the whimsy and delicacy of the original.
   
   
10. The novelty album Pac-Man Fever includes "Ode to a Centipede." The musicians' official website is buggy, but you can hear snippets of the songs for free, via the page where you can sample ringtones.
    

Instead of beginning their day with coffee and the newspaper, there to read what editors have selected for their enlightenment, people, and young people in particular, wait for a free moment to go online. No longer need they wade through thickets of stories and features of no interest to them, and least of all need they do so on the websites of newspapers, where the owners are hoping to regain the readers lost to print. Instead, they go to more specialized purveyors of information, including instant-messaging providers, targeted news sites, blogs, and online ?zines.? --Joseph Epstein --Are Newspapers Doomed? (Commentary)

I have a very hard time getting my son to go shopping, look for a new car, see a movie, travel.I told him what kind of life style could these people have. I told him the only thing he will end up in life having is a six pack of beer, a trailer, and a broken down car. Oh yes he will have his computer and games. Hope he can pay his monthly computer bills. I could kick myself for every starting this.But everyday I am working on less hours spent sitting in his chair talking with some real winners, It makes me sick to my stomach. --Diana (mother of a teen gamer, in a comment posted to the blog of a former student who has since graduated) --I blame myself for allowing my son to play computer games!

I wish I had more time to play video games. For Christmas, I asked my wife for 12 uninterrupted hours to play games, followed by a light-duty day where I could catch up on my sleep. I didn't get it. And tonight, after I put the kids to bed, instead of playing games, I wrote this blog entry.

About 10 years ago, I had to delete Civilization II off my laptop because I was spending too much time playing it and not enough time finishing my dissertation. Still, I have managed to find a job where I study and teach about new media artifacts -- including video games.

But video games are not the only distraction facing young people. I have known student-athletes who spend too much time at practice, and theater majors who spend too much time rehearsing. There are few jobs for professional athletes or actors, but that doesn't mean that the time spent on these activities is wasted.

As a parent myself I know that when it comes to your kids, you have to trust your gut feeling because usually it's right.

Still, the world today's kids live in is very different from that of their parents. Diana might want to take a look at this article by Henry Jenkins, "Complete Freedom of Movement." Jenkins is a scholar of popular culture and also a father.

Stephen Johnson's recent book, Everything Bad is Good For You, may also be helpful. (I've picked up a copy based on good reviews, but haven't read it yet.)

Having said all that, I'd say that if Diana pays the bills, she's the boss. I don't think Diana can force her son to be outdoorsy or athletic, but you can insist that a teen get a job to pay for the food and electricity and internet service and the rest. She can insist that a teen do chores around the house and keep up a certain grade level in order to earn privileges. But are video games luxuries in the information age?

My wife was furious once when my son (who was 5 or 6 at the time) was having difficulty concentrating on his schoolwork, and I sat down across the kitchen table from him with a stack of his beloved Godzilla DVDs. Every time my son sassed or got up from the table without finishing his work, I would ask him to pick which DVD I would remove from his stack and hide in my room. As the pile got smaller and smaller, his ability to concentrate improved greatly.

My wife - a movie buff -- said she didn't like that disciplinary technique one bit. Yet she regularly denies my son access to video games -- usually certain specific video games -- when he misbehaves.

My son knows which games we consider to be educational, he knows which games we consider to be fun-but-brain-stretching (such as chess, Civilization, Zoo Tycoon), and which we consider to be primarily recreational (such as X Wing vs Tie Fighter, which nevertheless taught my son to listen carefully to instructions delivered in-game, taught him that many tasks that seem impossible at first can be solved through diligence and persistence, and that other tasks will become more and more difficult until they defeat you, no matter how good you are). Sometimes when he doesn't have permission to play, he studies the instruction manuals for the games. He can recite whole paragraphs from memory, and even ad-lib descriptions of objects and procedures I invent for him.

Sometimes after bedtime stories I will sit in the floor of his room with my laptop and blog while he describes what kind of environment each animal in Zoo Tycoon needs in order to survive (imitating whale calls, leopard growls, and dinosaur growls as appropriate), or he will make up stories set in the world of Starship Titanic.

As a disciplinary action, would I take away his basketball, his roller skates, and his scooter? Maybe, if he misused them. Would I deny him access to his own backyard? Hmm...

If my preschooler draws on the wall, she loses her crayons for the day. If she throws a block at me, the blocks go back in the box.

If my son read for hours and hours a day, would I take away his books? Never. My wife and I agree completely on that.

In the 21st century, is playing a computer game a privilege, like the TV or a spending-money allowance?

Again, while I think as a parent you have to trust your instincts, it may be the case that Diana's son isn't quite as isolated as she fears. Diana laments that she can't get her son to be social, to go shopping, go to a movie, or travel. But he may already be socializing with friends online. He may be shopping online, watching movies online, and exchanging e-mails with people from around the world.

If he knows how to negotiate alliances and trade resources in a virtual environment, he may be developing vital skills that will help him in the global information economy. Diana's son may be developing leadership skills, mentoring newbies and rejoicing in their accomplishments. He may have published his own game strategy guide, written fan fiction, or created his own user mods (new content that can be played by owners of existing games).

Obviously a teenager has obligations and responsibilities to the household, and any good parent will insist that a child meet certain standards.

But I bet if Diana asked her son why games are so important to him, and she listened with an open mind, she might learn something.

Update: Nancy McKeand suggests that the present mainstream fear of video games is like a previous generation's fear of rock 'n' roll. O tempores, o mores!

Despite the billions of dollars spent every year in this country on over-the-counter cough syrups, most such medicines do little if anything to relieve coughs, the nation'schest physicians say.

Over-the-counter cough syrups generally contain drugs in too low a dose to be effective, or contain combinations of drugs that have never been proven to treat coughs, said Dr. Richard Irwin, chairman of a cough guidelines committee for the American College of Chest Physicians. --Doctors discourage use of cough medicine (AP|MSNBC)

I wonder how cough-syrup marketers will respond to this.

Quotations from the Jerz Household (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

“I don’t want you to go back to work. I want you to be a real daddy, who takes care of me.” (Carolyn, age 3, contemplating the end of the Christmas break.)

“Mommy, what does ‘neat and tidy’ mean?” (Peter, age 7, who studies the periodic table for pleasure.)

“How do I start it?” (My wife, standing in kitchen. Yes, I’m such an awesome houseman that my wife has never learned how to use the dishwasher.)

“I’m not just happy… I’m stupid happy. (Me, describing my reaction to the digital camera I bought myself for Christmas.)

When shown images of real-life violence, people who played violent video games were found to have a diminished response.

However, when the same group were shown other disturbing images such as dead animals or ill children they had a much more natural response.

When the game players were given the opportunity to punish a pretend opponent those with the greatest reduction in P300 meted out the severest punishments.

Psychologist Bruce Bartholow, the lead researcher of the study which will be published in full in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology later this year, said: "As far as I'm aware, this is the first study to show that exposure to violent games has effects on the brain that predict aggressive behaviour. --Violent games 'affect behaviour' (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Introduction: Gateway to the World

On Friday January 6, I went to NY for my first self-planned and self-financed trip. I did the planning, the research, and I didn't rely on my parents or older relatives for transportation (to get around Manhattan). I was pretty much on my own (of course I was accompanied by my cousin/friend because I'm not that insane to go by myself).

Part I: Getting to NY (I want to be a part of it, New York, New York...)
Ch 1: Planning and the Budget
Ch 2: Putting together the Itinerary
Ch 3: Guidebook and Mastering the MTA New York City Subway
Ch 4: Asking Around/Talking to Friendly Strangers

Part 2: the NY Adventure (it's not possible to see everything ... in one trip)
Ch 5: Chinatown
Ch 6: The Empire State Building
Ch 7: The Metropolitan Art Museum
Ch 8: Lounging in Times Square and Pictures

Conclusion: Microcosm of the World --Mike Diezmos --Fun in New York for under $100 (Eye-Opener: Memo)

A Seton Hill journalism minor and committed blogger posted this great student-oriented resource to New York City.

Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess. --Declan McCullagh

Update, 10 Jan, via Dan Gillmor: Concurring Opinions writes:

The change in law affects only the intent analysis. Dan [S.]'s comment seems to indicate (correct me if I'm wrong) that the statute will still affect only those who send a "communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent." (However, assuming you're engaged in such activity, the "intent to annoy" will be enough to satisfy the intent requirement of the statute).

--Perspective: Create an e-annoyance, go to jail (C|Net)

The 1979'sMilton-Bradley Microvision was the first globally hand-held cartridge-based system. The first hand-held was soon forgotten during the fall video game crash in early 1980s until the concept was reanimated ten years later, Nintendo GameBoy, became the one of still standing and successfully brand-name video game in history of portable video game.

Since Gameboy erupted, several companies across the globe follow the same formula: media storage (cartridges, flash or CD) to insert into the portable system to play the game, but uses different processor, physical, shape, resolution and function.

--Daveynin's Thing Game Portable Family Tree (DFulmer.com)

See also a similar, but less comprehensive, chart describing the development of game controllers.

Just as other people don't necessarily understand my work, I don't understand how hard it is to drive a truck for 12 hours a day, to pick lettuce year in and year out, to raise a child with autism, to struggle with an anxiety disorder, to not understand math no matter how hard you try, or to do any number of things I never will have to do or have never had to struggle with. --Being misunderstood (some prewriting for the day) (The Paper Chase)

This blog entry starts out like the old Brady Bunch episode, you know, where Mike and Carol switch jobs for a day in order to see how the other side lives. But after the venting, it moves on to this thoughtful observation. We're not the only ones who are misunderstood.

I didn't blog this because of any particular personal incident, just found it via Inside Higher Ed's "Around the Web" feature.

Note: Carol had a full-time live-in housekeeper, so her life couldn't have been as bad as many other women.

We rail against sequels, we talk about how we want original titles, but--according to the indisputable sales data--continue to lap up unimaginative, derivative sequel after unimaginative, derivative sequel.

Is it any wonder, then, that companies continue to crank out sequel after roster update after sequel? They're financially rewarded for doing so! --Vladimir Cole --The folly of rewarding A while wishing for B (Joystiq)

As I grow older, new years don't feel so new any more. Take this year for instance, it is totally packed with teaching and other tasks until the 10th of February. In the first 7 weeks of the semester I will be doing all my teaching this semester and next (until 1st of October). I have known this since August, nothing new about it.

That's why I have decided to make a few adjustments to 2006, so it fits my life better.

New Year will be celebrated properly 11th of February, without a stack of papers to grade hovering in the corner.

My birthday, which is normally at the end of a looong line of other birthday celebrations, is moved to give the family a chance to recover before celebration. I have moved it a month, but this year March 6th disappears, so I have to move my birthday a month and a day to make it fit.
--Torill Mortensen -- 2006 version 1.1 (Thinking with my fingers)

Torill, responding to a packed work schedule that affects the rest of her life inconveniently, works up a user mod of the year 2006. Good idea!

The tragic miscommunication began when rescue workers deep in the mine called the rescue command center at the surface at 11:45 p.m. to report that the other 12 miners had been found alive.

Gene Kitts, senior vice president at International Coal, said the call came into the command center over an open speaker and was heard by about 30 people. As soon as the words "12 are alive" were heard, he said, the room erupted in joy -- so much that many of those in the room were asked to leave. They went into the parking lot, where they continued to celebrate.

Within eight minutes, word reached family members, who began to celebrate. The bells of the Sago church pealed, and the throng sang How Great Thou Art.

But by 12:30 a.m., Hatfield and Kitts said, they got another call from the rescue teams in the mine that said only one miner was alive.

The underground rescue team members, all of whom were wearing bulky oxygen gear that could make speech difficult to understand, relayed information to a separate team stationed at a "fresh air" base at a higher elevation. Workers at the fresh air base then relayed word to the command center. --Tom Vanden Brook and Bill Nichols --Tragic turn stuns families (USA Today)

The details surrounding exactly how the miscommunication happened are now emerging. It was, quite literally, a "telephone game," in which one person passes information on to the next, and as the message becomes separated from the source, our own hopes and fears can mutate the message into the very thing we have been imagining ourselves hearing.

An Associated Press dispatch first carried the news at 11:52 pm: "Twelve miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive Tuesday night, more than 41 hours after the blast, family members said. Bells at a church where relatives had been gathering rang out as family members ran out screaming in jubilation." But many newspapers, and all of cable TV news, reported the rescue as fact, not merely based on family claims.

A later AP account by Allen Breed grew more, not less, certain: "Twelve miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive Tuesday night, sending family members streaming from the church where they had gathered during the nearly two-day ordeal. Joyous shouts rose of 'Praise the Lord!'"

Anderson Cooper, the CNN host, ripped the coal company at 3 a.m. for not correcting the wrong reports for so long, but did not explain why CNN went with the good news without strong confirmation.

The Chicago Tribune, which had reported the rescue, later carried a new story on its site opening with, "Jubilation turned to anger early Wednesday when relatives of 12 coal miners believed alive in a West Virginia coal mine blast were told that 11 of their loved ones were dead. One survivor was in critical condition at an area hospital."

It took three hours for the coal company to correct the reports. It is unclear why the media carried the news without proper sourcing. Some reports claim the early reports spread via cell phones and when loved ones started celebrating most in the media simply joined in. --Greg Mitchell --Media Report Miracle Mine Rescue -- Then Carry the Tragic Truth  (Editor & Publisher)

Basic Journalism 101.

Google News snapshot preserves good, but inaccurate, news (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Google can't tell the difference between all the different West Virginia mining stories that are popping up online. It may take a while for Google to adjust its focus, as the human editors post updates and Google gets around to re-indexing news sites.

While I am not shy about my preference for the depth of written journalism over the flash and immediacy of TV news, this screen cap, taken at 4am -- an hour after the bad news was confirmed -- demonstrates one of the strengths of live media.

Yes, the online stories can be corrected quickly. Woe unto all the editors of morning print editions who stopped the presses after the good news came out, only to find out a few hours later that the good news wasn't accurate.

Update: The AP published this photo of stacks of papers with inaccurate headlines.

Family members learned early Wednesday that 11 of the 12 coal miners who were initially thought to have survived an explosion in a coal mine have died. --Allen G. Breed --Families Say 11 of 12 W.Va. Miners Dead (AP|MyWay)

This is horrible.

The lead of Breed's original story says the miners "were found," but does not say by whom, nor does the lead source the claim. A quote from the governor says "They told us" the news, but doesn't specify who "they" are. The headline does say "Families Say," so it looks like an alert editor was doing a good job.

In a bit of careful reporting that I noticed the first time around, but didn't comment on because I didn't want to sound cynical, Breed wrote, "Neither the company nor the governor's office immediately confirmed that the men were alive."

The key detail is this, the fourth paragraph from the end: "A relative at the church said a mine foreman called relatives there, saying the miners had been found."

If I were Breed or his editor, I'd probably wish that the sourcing information came earlier, but in a breaking news situation, in an environment filled with reporters competing for the big story, in a town where families who had withdrawn from the press when they were contemplating bad news... Well, it's only human to go along with the story.

Hindsight is 20/20, but a better lead would have been the one I just found for the Philadelphia Enquirer:

Twelve coal miners were found alive here last night, 41 hours after an explosion killed a fellow miner and trapped them underground, family members said.

As bells pealed at the New Life Tabernacle Church in nearby Buckhannon, where family members had gathered, relatives ran out screaming in jubilation, "They're alive!"

Since the families had been carefully shielded from the media, and since the authorities were briefing the family members on a regular basis, I can understand why reporters went ahead with the assumption that the family members had been given reliable information.

It looks like the 12 miners did survive the blast that caused the collapse, and that they left their vehicle and moved to another location.

I'm speculating here, but it's possible that somebody with part of the story -- the knowledge that the miners weren't killed by the explosion -- overheard somebody else relaying a message that the miners had been located, and without waiting to check on their status, whipped out a cell phone and called someone at the vigil site.

There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: "God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought." His editor cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God." --Roger Ebert --Herbie Fully Loaded (Sun Times)

Yes, I admit I was reading what Roger Ebert had to say about the recent Herbie move.

But that journalism anecdote was news to me.

I have the most difficult time interviewing people affected by tragedy. I find it hard to keep my composure. You've probably seen Nick Helms on CNN. He's 25 and his father, Terry, is one of the men trapped. He's one of the mine's fire bosses and based on the scant information we have right now, I feel he may be the one we know was killed.

Nick told me he just wanted to see his father again to tell him how much he loved him. He almost started crying and I thought I was going to, too. All I could say was, I'm sure he knows how much you love him. I desperately want his dad to be alive. --West Virginia mine explosion, my time there (Fifteen Minutes)

A very personal account by a reporter covering the W.Va. mine story.

In an extraordinary twist of fate, 12 miners caught in an explosion in a coal mine were found alive late Tuesday, more than 41 hours after the blast. --12 Trapped W.Va. Miners Found Alive (AP|MyWay)

Wow.

One miner was found dead earlier, so a family is still in mourning.

Update: A few hours later, a new report says this was incorrect. 11 of 12 are dead.

I've just finished making a video about the similarities between the ancient Hindu art of spiritual discipline and the rather more modern art of online gaming. Watch the higher self rack up high scores getting to the next level of consciousness in the transcendentally physical world of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch! --Jim Munroe --Yoga Deathmatch (No Media Kings)

Another machinima art piece, in the tradition of >Interactive.

More than men, women are enthusiastic online communicators, and they use email in a more robust way. Women are more likely than men to use email to write to friends and family about a variety of topics: sharing news and worries, planning events, forwarding jokes and funny stories. Women are more likely to feel satisfied with the role email plays in their lives, especially when it comes to nurturing their relationships. And women include a wider range of topics and activities in their personal emails. Men use email more than women to communicate with various kinds of organizations. --How Women and Men Use the Internet (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

From the press release announcing the full study (available as a PDF).

The magic of movies, for so many in our increasingly visual society, is a far more stimulating and efficient storytelling experience than the labor intensity of reading. --Thane Rosenbaum --Yeah, but the Book Is Better (Forward)

Not an elitist rant, but a thoughtful essay by an author who has written the screenplay of his own novel.

Your objectives for this course are to

• explore definitions of important concepts such as game and funlearn about the origins and historical development of video games,
• expose yourself to a broad range of games,
• gain experience recognizing and interpreting basic game elements (goal, risk, fiction, emotional engagement, rules, outcome, values, consequences, close playing, etc.),
• develop an awareness of the complex cultural context within which games exist (children's culture, geek culture, women's issues, political issues, economic issues, aesthetic issues, etc.),
• and ultimately, to discern the core cultural values represented in a particular game.

To that end, you will:

• play several games on the syllabus, read three books and additional shorter articles as assigned,
• complete quizzes and exercises to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings and to evaluate your progress,
• participate regularly in classroom and web-based discussions, and
• write a formal research paper (minimum 10 pages).

Neither ability to "win" a game nor programming/design talents are germane to the subject of this course.

At the end of this course, you should be able to

1. Demonstrate competence in the critical reading of complex cultural texts (including games, cultural responses to games, and the academic study of games)
   
2. Engage intellectually with your peers (in person and online)
   
3. Write a college-level paper that appropriately uses primary and secondary sources to defend a non-obvious claim (without minimizing or neglecting opposing or alternative views)

--Dennis G. Jerz --Video Gaming (EL 250; January 2006) (Seton Hill University)

From the syllabus for the course I'll be teaching starting Monday. It's a three-credit online course, compressed into three weeks.

For the first time, I'm going to be making extensive use of our course-management system (for multiple-choice questions and to handle the details about whether a student has submitted an assignment on time).

An even number of men and women have enrolled in the course. Tomorrow I'll create blogs for those students who haven't had me before.

I've never taught an all-online course before. I'm used to a teaching style that depends heavily on open discussion, but I'm offering a lot of discussion prompts and multipart written exercises. Naturally I hope the student blogs are a vital part of the course, but I think it's also important to have a backchannel, so that neither I nor the students feel like we have to perform in public all the time.