February 2006 Archive Page

According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males. --Roger Dobson and Abul Taher --Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun (Times Online)

The authors conclude by stating, "A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202."

Indeed, in 2002, plenty of media sites carried the story, "Blondes 'to die out in 200 years'." But a few days later, the World Health Organization published the following statement: "WHO wishes to clarify that it has never conducted research on this subject. Nor, to the best of its knowledge, has WHO issued a report predicting that ‘natural blondes are likely to be extinct by 2202’. WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated but would like to stress that we have no opinion on the future existence of blondes."

I like the quote from the researcher who said that as a young blonde touring Majorca her bum was sore from all the pinching, but Dobson and Taher, your Journalism 101 instructors are probably pulling out fistfuls of their hair (whatever color it may be). Check your sources!

Judith Moran, director of the Math Center at Trinity College in Connecticut, "started life," she said, as an art major. Now, like several of the faculty members questioned, Moran said she wants all students to be able to assess numbers in The New York Times. Trinity students also get their quantitative feet held to the fire on day one, with quantitative literacy assessment. Students who fail any part of the exam, ?logical relationships,? for example, have to take a course that will help them ?wake up and smell the quantitative roses around them,? Moran said. --David Epstein --Numbers to Live By (Inside Higher Ed)

In my "News Writing" course, I have my students read It Ain't Necessarily So, a book about how the media report (and mis-report) scientific information that we use as a the basis of the economic, healthcare, and political decisions we make. Is the company that doubled its income in each of the past three years in better shape than the company that's holding steady? If there are more prostate cancer patients each year, how can that be good news? (Because prostate cancer is being detected earlier and thus those with prostate cancer are being counted year after year, instead of dying off.)

One of the touchier issues a journalist faces is what to do when a source repeats a loosely-cited and often-misunderstood figures such as "one in four" (in sexual assault) and "one in ten" (in sexual orientation).

The freeform world of both the Jazz Age and the DotCom explosion create surreal intoxicated hilarity, and both The Great Gatsby and The Sims allow the participants to immerse themselves in the experience. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, affords us some distance from this world and critical insight into the excesses of this culture. In contrast, The Sims reinforces what Peter Plagens has called the ?ecology of evil? and promotes a certain libertine democracy. The very players who buy and play The Sims are the suburban dwellers themselves. This self-referential experience does not allow for critical distance but reaffirms a certain wasteful organization of resources and encourages a self-satisfied materialism.

[...]

The flappers, performers, and merrymakers of Gatsby'sparty seemingly come out of a character generator similar to that at work in The Sims. They are given short bios and quirky personalities. Gatsby'sparty frees the characters from their traditional roles and identities. They try on and act out in a new skin. --Shawn Thomson --Making Happiness in West Egg and Simburbia: An Inquiry into Consumption in The Great Gatsby and The Sims (Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006))

Thanks for the link to the collection, Mike.

I like how Thompson equates the happiness-creating objects in the world of the Sims (a bed if the Sim is tired, pizza if the Sim is hungry) with the alcohol and other amusements Gatsby provides. In a way, Jake Gatz creates Jay Gatsby as his in-game avatar. This connection is really quite clever.

Thomson does make an obvious mistake about the novel, however. "Tom and Daisy's two-year old baby, the only child of the novel, remains unnamed and unseen," he writes (par. 9), although the child appears and has a few lines near the beginning of Chapter 7, where she is introduced to both Nick and Gatsby, the latter of whom "kept looking at child in surprise." Nick observes, "I don't think he had ever really believed in its existence before." In that scene, her nurse calls the girl "Pammy."

I also think that Thomson's initial positing of Tom as rejecting the riotous West Egg culture is somewhat misleading, since Tom is not only a prig but also a libertine. And Thomson mentions Tom's reaction to the sight of black men driving a fancy car, without noting that Nick reports that event in a manner that turns the black motorists into caricatures. Thus, Nick shares at least part of Tom's bias. So I don't think Tom is meant to stand out quite that much.

Student Reaction to Google Placement (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

While preparing for my Intro to Literary Study class, I thought that, since I introduced the "Claim, Data, Warrant" concept last week when I was very sick, I'd better revisit the topic to make sure the presentation was effective. I Googled claim data warrant (without quotation marks) and looked for handouts. To my surprise, a blog entry that I wrote last week was fifth out of some 7 million hits for that topic.

Since I was planning to introduce an upcoming assignment that asks students to find peer-reviewed sources, I thought I'd introduce that quirky Google result as an example of why you should rely on library databases instead of Google when doing literature research. (When you include quotation marks, my site is 10th out of 200, which is still pretty good.)

But the students surprised me when I showed them the result. They applauded.

That sort of knocked the wind out of the sails of my intended argument -- "Don't trust Google for something the library database does better!" But I did emphasize that the blog entry that attracted Google wasn't actually teaching the claim, data, warrant format. Google doesn't know that I was looking for an instructional resource, and that instead it returned a personal reflection ("Lecturing is So Much Easier than Leading a Discussion"). That blog entry was not actually about CDW, but rather how sick I was.

Anyway, I'm sure that Google likes that page so much right now simply because it's new.

My Half-Life 2 Mod Begins (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've finally knuckled down and started making a serious effort to teach myself how to create a Half-Life 2 mod.

A "mod" is a user-created expansion to a commercial game. Perhaps the most famous of these is Day of Defeat, a total-conversion mod that turned Half-Life (a sci-fi horror FPS) into a WWII military simulation. To get some sense of what it's possible to do in Half-Life 2, take a look at A Few Good G-Men, which re-creates the famous "You can't handle the truth!" confrontation between Jack Nicholson and Couch-Jumping Boy. (The example is not realy a game mod, but rather an example of machinima, but it really sold me on modding with HL2.)

I've got several ideas kicking around for what I might do, and my dean didn't actually laugh in my face when I asked her whether it might be possible to get some release time to invest in this project. But for now I'm just trying to teach myself the basics, so that I'll be able to introduce modding in this fall's "New Media Projects" course.

Valve is the name of the company, and Steam is the delivery system. If you buy a copy of a Valve game such as Half-Life 2, it comes with a Software Developer's Toolkit (SDK) that includes an editor for creating and coding 3D environments, and FacePoser -- a tool for manipulating the facial expressions (and gestures) of the 3D characters that make up the Half-Life 2 world.

Last year, I put some time into learning the SDK for a competing product, Deus Ex. When I learned that the Deus Ex 2 game would not ship with an SDK, and that none was going to be available, I jumped ship. I did so reluctantly, because the Deus Ex mod tools included the Conversation Editor, a drag-and-drop tool that permitted the modder to assemble complex conversation trees. Since I'm a big fan of old school text adventure games (better known as interactive fiction) , most of the uses I can think of for mods involve at least some level of NPC interaction.

But Morgan Gordon (duh!) Freeman, the protagonist of Half-Life 2, is a man of action. He doesn't speak at all during the game, and there are no dialogue-related branches (where the player is given the chance to say either "Yes, I'd love to clear the spiders from your basement for a paltry few coins," or "Hand over all your gold and I'll consider letting you live").

I'm actually a little nervous about this choice. Since the Half-Life 2 SDK includes all the source code, I'm confident that it's possible to insert some kind of interaction via a pop-up window, but I think I'd really need an experienced programmer to do that. At this state, I may just have to create translucent slabs with buttons on them, that float down from the ceiling and hover in front of NPCs whenever you need to make a choice. Maybe I could create my own custom weapons, named "A, B, C, D and E," and the player could cycle through them and shoot at a floating icon of some sort.

I accomplished quite a few things on my "to do" list this weekend. I've created a simple room, lit it, applied some of the pre-fab textures (such as a stone floor and a brick wall), surrounded it with a skybox (a wraparound background image representing the sky and other distant scenery, on which all the 3D objects are placed), and put in a few props and NPCs (all of them used somewhere in Half-Life 2).

Since the educational mods I'm thinking about won't feature any combat, I'll need to modify the default behavior of the various NPCs. Eventually I'll want to modify the appearance of the NPCs, but for the time being I'll work with what I have.

I've carved a hole through a solid wall, though I haven't yet figured out how to insert the pre-fab window frame into that hole. Pretty soon I'll probably try to make a door that opens and closes when touched.

The set of textures that ship with Half-Life 2 are pretty grungy. Chipped cement, rusty pipes, dingy plaster. Deus Ex had a mixture of grungy and classy settings, so I felt like I was able to do a better job working on some of the corporate and civic interiors where I want to set parts of my mod.

I'm lusting after the courtroom set that's featured in the "Few Good Men" experiment. I didn't finish Half-Life 2 (I've been stuck in a damn pipe since June), so I don't know whether that set's part of the package, but I doubt it -- I don't see any of those nice woodgrain textures in my copy of the game.

So far, I've determined that FacePoser crashes my home computer, so I'll have to try installing Steam at work and seeing whether I've got more luck there.

In addition to Valve's SDK, I already had The Gimp (a free alternative to Photoshop).

I've got Audacity, a free sound-editing tool that I'll try to use when I get to the stage where I'm recording my own original dialog.

While I've been pretty pleased with my g33k rating this weekend, I'm drawing a blank when it comes to how I got the SDK files to compile. I needed a C++ compiler of some sort (I think that's this MinGW thing that's on my desktop now... I didn't want to use Microsoft's .NET system if I could help it.) I followed some tutorial somewhere, and sadly forgot what I had to do in order to get it to work. I don't remember struggling with it, though. I'll pay more attention when I try to get it to work on my office computer.

I haven't had much time to work with the 3D model tool Milkshape. I downloaded it last week and started fiddling with it, but got sick right away, so I can hardly remember what I did with it. It's a 30-day trial product. I probably shouldn't have downloaded it until I was really ready to create my own 3D shapes, but it was one of many things I tried in order to figure out what I can and can't do on my home computer. I can place and manipulate simple geometric shapes like cubes and slabs, and I can arrange pre-fab items like trees or chairs, but if I want to create an object that I can't find somewhere online, such as, I don't know, a linotype machine or a memex, I'll need to use this tool. Right now, I'll happily work with whatever I can find (though part of me is just dying to create my own Enterprise bridge).

Along the way, I've installed a bunch of free utilities of various sorts, for file conversion and the like, but I don't remember what they all were. I'm beginning to think that, rather than have my students compile this stuff up all by themselves, I'll ask them to deliver things in chunks (a bitmap, a decorated room, some recorded lines of dialogue, etc.) and then we'll do classroom workshops where I do the digital alchemy that gets the components to work together. Perhaps in an earlier class, we could together decorate the common areas. Then, I might let everyone decorate a virtual dorm room, and then I'll stitch all those separate rooms together into a multi-player game map, and we can have a showcase day where the students show off their rooms. Next, I could let students create a portal from their virtual dorm room to a world of their own creation. Perhaps they should work in small teams, and we could have a design competition of some sort.

Resources that I've found very helpful include Valve's Getting Started tutorial, as well as tutorials at The Snark Pit. I'd love to see more of the textures at Wadfather, but I can't seem to navigate the site very well.

I’m a bit annoyed with myself, since I want to focus on substance over style, but because the textures of Half-Life 2 depict a grungy, dingy world, I’m probably going to have to find a cleaner set before I feel comfortable with the design possibilities.

--Ex 1-4c: A Clever Blank-Verse Entry on Your Blog (Intro to Literary Study (EL150))

I know they're only doing it because
I've made them; still, it thrills me every time
My students write in blank verse on their blogs.

With a few clicks of a mouse, Pleasants can navigate the Web site for Goochland County's Byrd Elementary School and access the Web log kept by her daughter's third-grade teacher, Ellen Robinson.

As all Goochland teachers have been required to do this year, Robinson keeps a school district-sponsored Web log, or blog -- a kind of diary of her class's activities. --Lea Setegn --Reading, writing and blogging: Goochland teachers show off students' work, share learning tools on Web logs (Times Dispatch)

Part of a bouquet of blogging-related news items on Steven D. Krause's site.

Dr. Jerz,

Hello, this is Jenna O'Brocto. I am currently student teaching at Southmoreland High School, and I am responsible for teaching two journalism classes. I was very apprehensive about this assignment, since I have only taken one journalism course, but I wanted to commend you on the amount of information I was able to take from your class. I absolutely love teaching the Journalism classes, and I have been able to use many of your lessons and strategies. I never realized how much I learned last semester until I started teaching it to others, and I have you to thank for making this possible.
-Jenna O'Brocto, "Student Teaching" (E-Mail)

Finding this in my in box was a real picker-upper on a day when I'm still struggling with whatever infection is having its wicked way with my sinuses.

I introduced Jenna to blogging in the News Writing class, and right away she started putting those skills to use as the SHU Admissions student blogger. She was one of many bright spots in a class that I really enjoyed teaching.

When I asked Jenna if I could post her message on my blog, she asked me to proofread it for her, first. (Don't worry, Jenna, I didn't need to change a thing.)

In the 15 plays classified as tragedies, there are 13 definite and 8 possible suicides, ie, a total of 21 incidents for evaluation. Among the 13 overt suicides, at least 7 are depicted as being admirable under the circumstances at the time. Also, in various ways, 4 of these 13 were assisted, and at least 3 others contain an imitative element. Overall, the action of taking one's life is presented in a neutral or even favorable light, and the audience is left with a mingling of pity and admiration for the victim, not reproach. --Larry R. Kirkland ("To End Itself By Death: Suicide in Shakespeare's Tragedies," Southern Medical Journal)

Just ploughing through a list of articles on Antony and Cleopatra. This one caught my eye.

Kirkland, Larry R., Southern Medical Journal, 00384348, Jul99, Vol. 92, Issue 7

Lecturing is So Much Easier than Leading a Discussion (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm still shuffling along with a virus (or whatever it is that's laying me low). I trudged into the classroom and plopped into a chair in the front of the room, which felt very unnatural to me, since I like moving around during class.

Today we were scheduled to talk about chapters 4-6 of The Great Gatsby, which is when all the pieces are in place and Fitzgerald starts deepening our understanding of their relationship. Enough students had finished the book that sometimes the discussion was a little strained because those students who had finished the book didn’t want to spoil the ending for their peers. But that's a good thing, and we had a brief discussion about the value of taking a novel section by section, rather than all at once.

At any rate, when I saw an appropriate opportunity to introduce the Claim, Data, Warrant (CDW) structure, I forced myself to my feet and started typing in notes and examples in MS-Word at the front of the room, taking questions, and doing the usual teacherly thing.

While not all the students "got it" right away, I don't think they'd have gotten it any faster if I hadn't been sick. My goal was to introduce the concept, so that they could have some time practicing it and perhaps internalizing it before their first big paper is due a few weeks from now. After the students had a few minutes to try writing out a sample claim, supporting it with textual data, and explaining the warrant (that is, why the data proves the claim), it was time to return to The Great Gatsby.

And suddenly I felt what little energy I had managed to muster just slip away.

No, it wasn't quite like that... I didn't suddenly get more tired, I just realized that the mental capacity that had been sufficient to get me through a lecture on CDW just wasn't sufficient to sustain a classroom discussion on a complex literary text, and I became aware once again of just how depleted my mental processes are.

Because part of me feels guilty that I don't have the time to produce the masterful 45-minute lectures that were a big part of my own undergraduate education, I have to remind myself each year that running a class discussion is exhausting work. You're constantly figuring out polite ways to say "No, that's not where I was going with this," if you want to stay on topic, or making a mental note of what topic you're leaving behind if you want to follow the class into a new area... You're observing who hasn't yet contributed, whose facial expression suggests she has a point to make, and figuring out whether I already covered "point of view" in this class last week or whether it was a different class.

I've developed the ability to resist jumping in when I see the student is teetering on the edge of making a connection, and instead of announcing the connection myself, prodding them gently to see it for themselves (though sometimes I fall into the old patterns and gleefully make the connections myself). All this while also trying to remember whether Gatsby asks Daisy whether she ever loved Tom in chapter six (which I did assign this week) or was that in chapter seven (which the students aren't supposed to have read yet), whether the owl-eyed gentleman in Gatsby's library is later given the name Klipspringer or whether the two characters are completely separate, and who the character Catherine is.

Lecturing is much safer -- especially if you have the luxury of sticking to topics that you already know very well.

Although Curious George and Brokeback Mountain share many similarities, they also share many differences. Both involve men in hats, but the meaning of the hat changes. --Men in Hats, or, I'm Glad I Don't Teach Composition Anymore ( Confessions of a Community College Dean)

Were I duplicitous and talented enough I could convince you I'm anything: a ninth grader with body image issues . . . a divorcee with nothing left to live for . . . or a graduate student about to hit the job market. This entire blog could be an elaborate scam designed to evoke undeserved sympathy from you. To wit:

How do you know I'm a cancer survivor? I've mentioned it a couple of times. But am I to be trusted? --Scott Eric Kaufman --A Post in Two Parts: The First Will Bore You; The Second, Infuriate (Acephalous)

"I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that this kind of behavior is naturally rewarded," cautions Paul Argenti, professor of corporate communication at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "But it does lead to success in some realms." And those realms can include the legal profession, sales teams, trading floors, entrepreneurial endeavors -- in other words, the corners of the business world where unmitigated gall can be more marketable than galling. "This could be great for [Ms. Abdala's] career if you think about it," he says.

That's because in the rough and tumble of business, bad behavior is sometimes admired, and good behavior isn't necessarily rewarded. Take, for example, corporate whistleblowers, who don't exactly get promoted for their efforts and often have to turn to the law to protect themselves, Prof. Argenti says. --Infamous Email Writers Aren't Always Killing Their Careers After All (Wall Street Journal Online)

I've been part of the "beware what you write" contingent, and I'll continue to deliver that message, because it's usually true.

Sometimes, it does make sense to take a strong stand and defend it, come hell or high water, but one has to pick one's battles.

Found Poetry Exercise: So Rich with Lines I Could Post (Seton Hill University -- Home Page)

I can't remember when I first noticed it, but that's a "Blog!" link on the SHU home page. I'm delighted to see the value of SHU blogging reflected in such a visible way.

While the context suggests that the link will point to a place where prospective students can blog, the link points to the always useful SHU Admissions weblog. Of course, there is a wealth of other blogging going on at SHU, and which might also be of interest to prospective students.

I'm not feeling well enough to do this subject justice, but I can still copy and paste. So, in honor of all the great blogging at Seton Hill University, I present this "found poetry" exercise. Blog on, my friends!

So Rich with Lines I Could Post

First let me say that I am more than excited to finally be reading this story again.
The Bush Administration walks a fine line when it comes to finding out
the wolverine is the big pimp daddy of the animal kingdom.
he seems to be waiting for Ceasar to act and then he will counter-act

"separated" was the box I checked off
In the final pane, Snoopy asks, "Sick doesn't count?"
I have enough boxes for the first fifteen craftsters
our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share

She would rathter be ignorant of the affair
the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool
Upon arriving to campus Tuesday evening, you will meet other sleepover guests
This process continues until all the pieces in the room have been judged five times.

I love the way Cleopatra is described. She is the one who really rules
she is somehow better than he is, as a member of the "secret society"
Last semester, it was OK to uses APA Citation. Now we have to use MLA
do you think that love can work in something like politics?

When Students Count with Fingers in My Class (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The infection that's been toying with me for the last week has finally pounced. I've been idly surfing, looking for a lost CD, rearranging my bedcovers, and just sort of waiting to get tired so that I'll fall alseep asleep.

But what's going through my head is the delightful sight of my students counting off iambic pentameter syllables on their fingers during a brief blank-verse writing exercise in this morning's "Intro to Literary Study" class. A colleague presented on kinesthetic learning in a "Teaching and Learning Forum" today, and seeing students moving their mouths to pronounce words, bobbing their heads to the rhythm of the language they are thinking to themselves, and keeping track of how many syllables they've stressed was such an unusal unusual and delightful sight I won't soon forget it. I do invite my lit survey students to use their bodies when they recite poetry aloud, but I've never seen just how physical the act of creating poetry can be. If I weren't so sick right now, I might try to write a sonnet about the experience.

I'm having my students analyze and spoof a sonnet, so that they can become familiar enough with the form to write their own sonnet for an upcoming "Sonnet Slam." In class, I suggested that we work on a few quatrains on the subject of cold weather, but when one student mentioned blogs, the others thought that was better. I saved the six or seven lines we managed to get through during the 15-minute workshop, but I don't have them with me. They took the occasion to poke fun at me, my love of blogs, and the fanny pack I always wear.

At any rate, students reported that writing the spoof sonnet was harder than they expeted expected. Most seem to have forgotten that sonnets follow a rhyme scheme, perhaps beause because I didn't do a good enough job distinguishing the sonnet from blank verse. (Another reason we're working on iambic pentameter is because we're about to start reading Antony and Cleopatra.)

Since this isn't a course in sonnet-writing, I'll be generous when I eavaluate evaluate their spoofs, but I do plan to ask them to peer-review and revise the sonnets they create on their own, so they'll have two more chances to get that complex rhyme sceme scheme right.

Update, 21 Feb: Yipes, that was a lot of typos. I knew I wasn’t feeling my best when I wrote that, but I had no idea. In class today I came up with a metaphor about the nested stories of Nick and Gatsby as being the same theme in different keys, and I had to interrupt myself to ask the class if that was a good metaphor, because I really had no idea. Whatever part of my brain that I use for evaluating is not functioning very well right now. I usually correct my blog typos quietly, but this time I've just marked them like this in order to remind myself to be very careful the next time I try to blog while sick.

[E]ach time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. -- Nick Carroway, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

That's from chapter 2. Re-reading this book in preparation to teach it tomorrow morning, I noticed for some reason Nick's function as an editor. Not only does he select and organize the events of the story for us, sometimes telling them out of chronological order, but he actively edits his surroundings, such as when he wipes the shaving lather from the unconscious Mr. McKee's face (even though that lather would have certainly dried after so many hours).

"Absolutely real," muses the drunken guest marveling at the books in Gatsby's library. "[H]ave pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard" (52).

Gatsby shares with a Nick a desire to observe people, as wee see when Nick describes Gatsby watching approvingly as his party guests react to an announcement about a Jazz performance. Nick describes himself as an unusually good listener, but it's the description of Gatsby's smile that makes me think of Gatsby not just as a striking subject for Nick's narrative, but the perfect audience for that small part of Nick that insists on telling this story: "It faced -- or seemed to face -- the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor" (53). What author wouldn't want a reader to respond with that kind of acceptance and attention? Gatsby is, among other things, an incarnation of the model reader.

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave ?new economy? a few years ago?

Shouldn't we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one - especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn't the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers? --Trevor Butterworth --Time for the last post (FT.com)

The point of blogging isn't that you can easily read what other people write. It's that they can easily read what you write. It's not the reading that's a new component of the blogosphere, it's the writing.

One might imagine what would have happened to the future of the essay if Rousseau had contemplated and feared negative public response to his love of self-pleasure and resisted exploring his emotions in such a way (i.e., if he doubted whether self love would be a ?serious? topic). Or what if Cervantes took the ?novel? form of the novel so serious that he could not mock his own novel'sorigins and purpose, as Don Quixote does in its beginning pages? Would this medium be the same as it is today?

To break this sense of seriousness, academic bloggers would benefit by engaging with the potentials this medium offers writers and by allowing themselves the opportunity to experiment. In a professional environment like ours, where experimentation is typically admired elsewhere (poetry, fiction) and downplayed in our own practices (exams, dissertation writing, outcomes statements, academic publishing), finally academia has the opportunity to play with digital form, content, and genre in ways previously denied because of the difficulty of learning hypertext or setting up webspace on university servers. --Jeff Rice --Serious Bloggers (Inside Higher Ed)

SHU bloginator Karissa Kilgore, who's been thinking quite a lot about a similar issue relating to facebook, pointed this article out to me. Thanks, Karissa!

--Pick Up That Can (Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman)

A comic strip using visuals created with the Half-Life 2 engine.

--So *this* is what we're doing for Valentine's Day? (CTRL+ALT_DEL)

Okay, it's a few days late, but it's very sweet, in a geeky, retro way.

The very nature of e-mail (which, along with first cousins IM and text messaging, is an undeniably handy means of chatting) encourages sloppy "penmanship," as it were. Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.

But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers. It's important to say what you mean clearly, correctly and well. It's important to maintain high standards. It's important to think before you write. --Tony Long --Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone (Wired)

--What's On Your Office Door? (Pedablogue)

Left to right:

• Pittsburgh goes blog wild! I'm not featured in this article, but my blog is one of the many that's aggregated on this site.
• Rules Grammar Change and School 'Fine' U.S. Teens Report
• Grad Student Deconstructs Take-out Menu
• On the door itself -- just the institutional nameplate, a buisness card (for visitors to take, if they wish -- I should put some more up there) and a big empty space where my office hours for this term should be (I'm printing it up now).
• Freedom of Speech Redefined by Blogs
• An "Over the Hedge" comic strip about blogs.
• Until recently, I had some political cartoons about the death of John Paul II, including one in which microphones and TV cameras aim towards a cross-shaped empty space, in tribute to the late pontiff's masterful use of the media.

In the past year, newsrooms have begun to treat convergence differently, to see it as a solar system of loosely connected functions, rather than a hard-wired fusion of media. As bloggers and independent niche online publishers attract fast-growing audiences, media executives feel pressed to invest in experimentation. They seem more aware that prizes go to the swift, the nimble and the daring. --Larry Pryor --Teaching the future of journalism (Online Journalism Review)

Tell your professors face to face every time you will be gone, I urged the baseball team, and express your eagerness to make up any missed work. Even more important, when you?re in class, show the professor that you are there to learn. Just as you know how to position yourselves on the diamond, learn how to position yourself in the classroom -- front and center, preferably, and definitely not in the back corner of the room with a bunch of other athletes. Just as you use your eyes and set your body to get ready before every pitch, use your eyes and your posture in the classroom to let the professor know that you?re fully engaged with what'sgoing on there.

[...]

Coach Cleanthes and I both wondered whether, after a full day of baseball and with a Sunday game looming, the team would want to spend more than a few minutes touring the library'smuseum. As it turned out, after two hours the museum guards had to round up the players -- students -- and tell them, sorry, but they had to leave, it was closing time. The baseball team'strip to the Clinton library may have been the first occasion in the history of the college when an academic event was woven into an athletics road trip. It won't be the last.--Michael Nelson --A Win-Win-Win Situation (Inside Higher Ed)

A thought-provoking, eye-opening article. I can't argue with the good intentions and potential benefits of such an approach. But the first comment appended to it took the words right out of my mouth:

[D]o athletes really need more attention — more than students in other groups on campus?

What about students in the drama department getting ready for the spring musical? Do single parents who also work part-time need special understanding from faculty, especially during cold and flu season? How about students who are the first in their families to go to a four-year college?

What wonders the newspaper staff or lit mag staff could accomplish with this kind of support network! Ah, well. I'm fortunate enough to have work-study hours to pay some of the most dedicated members of the newspaper staff, and some staff members take a course that earns them credit for their work.

Why is Cheney snowcloning 'The House That Jack Built'? --Benjamin Zimmer --The nesting of clauses that lay in the sentence that Cheney said (Lanugage Log)

Andreas Katsulas, the character actor known to SF fans as G'Kar on Babylon 5 and a familiar face from Star Trek and other SF&F TV shows, died Feb. 13 of lung cancer in Los Angeles, his agent, Donna Massetti, confirmed to SCI FI Wire. He was 59. --Babylon 5's Katsulas Dies (SciFi.com)

This man brought an almost Shakespearian depth to his role as a sort of turtle-like ambassador.

"Along with the Sphinx, the DaVinci code and Easter Island, college admissions is one of the world's great mysteries," said Mary Beth Kurilko, associate director of undergraduate admissions at Temple University.

"I see it in the faces of the parents who hover around their children during our information sessions. They're listening for it, leaning forward in their chairs so as not to miss it -- that one thing that will throw open the door to their child's dream college." --Eleanor Chute --Who Gets In? The key to admission remains a mystery (Post-Gazette)

--Dick Cheney Quail Hunt Game

File this under "What took you so long?"

The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren't that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person's perspective. --Stephen Leahy --The Secret Cause of Flame Wars (Wired)

THOUSANDS FEAR FOR THEIR HEARING, FLEE FOR THEIR LIVES!

The infamous Ballet mécanique is coming to Washington, DC, but not in any way it's been heard before. And it's not going to be for just one performance...it's going to be played over 30 times.

George Antheil's 1925 masterwork, which was never heard in its original version (for 10 percussionists, two pianists, three airplane propellers, electric bells, siren, and 16 player pianos) until 75 years after its composition, will be presented on the mezzanine of the National Gallery of Art's East Wing every day for over two weeks, starting on March 12. Performing it will be 16 computer-controlled player grand pianos and an orchestra played entirely by robots. This means it will be the fastest, most maniacal, and--thanks to the cavernous acoustics of the giant building--the loudest Ballet mécanique ever performed.

In conjunction with a huge exhibit on Dadaist art, which runs from now through May, the Music department of the National Gallery has commissioned a Ballet mécanique installation, which will be on display and performing from March 12 through March 29. The all-mechanical orchestra will be located on the mezzanine, next to the entrance to the Dada exhibit hall. At 1:00 pm (every day) and 4:00 pm (weekdays only), the orchestra will roar into action and play a 10-minute version of the piece.

The player piano parts will be handled by 16 Gulbransen grand pianos equipped with Pianomation controls. The xylophone, bass drum, tam-tam, siren, propeller, and bell parts will be performed on real instruments by custom robots created by the League of Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) especially for this installation. The entire orchestra is under the control of a Macintosh G5 computer using Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer software.

A gala premiere event will be held at 1:00 pm on Sunday, March 12 (if you got an email from me earlier, please note this is a new date). I and Eric Singer, the director of LEMUR, will be present, no doubt frantically taking care of last-minute technical problems.

In addition, the film Ballet mécanique by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy will be shown (without sound) continuously as part of the Dada exhibit.

Please come and experience the latest 21st-century incarnation of this long-forgotten 20-century masterpiece. For more information on the Ballet mécanique, visit http://antheil.org. To see the work of LEMUR, visit http://lemurbots.org. And for the National Gallery, visit http://www.nga.gov.

In related news, my documentary film on George Antheil and the Ballet mécanique, Bad Boy Made Good, is now "on the schedule" at two northeastern PBS stations for the month of April. Details when they are available!

Hope to see you there,
Paul LehrmanBallet Mechanique to Land in Washington, D.C. (The Ballet Mechanique Page)

Via e-mail. I didn't see it archived on the website.

The few pages on Ballet Mechanique in my dissertation were among the most enjoyable that I remember writing.

I'm not sure a 10-minute excerpt from the piece is worth the trip to D.C., but I'm thinking about it.

If you're in the D.C. area and you get the chance to attend, I'd love to hear from you.

The Swing
Robert Louis Stevenson

HOW do you like to go up in a swing,
  Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
  Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
  Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
  Over the countryside?

Till I look down on the garden green,
  Down on the roof so brown?
Up in the air I go flying again,
  Up in the air and down! --Happy, Happy Poetry (Introduction to Literary Study (Seton Hill University))

This is one of several happy poems I've assigned for tomorrow's Intro to Literary Study class.

I've had students who expect all poetry to be like this -- light and snappy and short, with only a single point to make. But happy people who live stable lives just aren't very interesting, artistically. It's the threatened, terrified, and dying people do things worth writing about (and reading about).

On the other hand, art covers the full range of human emotions -- including cheerfulness. While cleverness in poetry will only get you so far, I think that angst-ridden poets who pour their heart, soul, blood, phlegm, and bile into their verses could learn a thing or two from these examples, which demonstrate the potential of poetry to delight.

Why? Well, in part, I want to make up for the depressing selection of poems I asked you to read last time. But budding poets can also learn from this example. If you know really well how poems can delight, then you can focus on creating delight in the reader, rather than simply expressing the feelings inside you.

If you create poems out of a need to express the innermost, deepest feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed, then you'll end up with poems that mean quite a bit to you (because you mention a song that was important to you, the name of a person who invokes strong feelings, or a place that holds emotional significance for you), but leaves your readers scratching their heads.

In addition, once you've mastered delight, you can subvert your newfound talent to make poetry that totally creeps people out. (See Dr. Arnzen's Gorelets.)

The York team recently compared 94 bilinguals and monolinguals between the ages of 30 and 80. It found that while both groups started showing cognitive decline by age 60, the rate of slowing for bilinguals was much slower.

Now young people who play video games are showing this similar pattern of high performance in resisting irrelevant impulses. The current report compared 50 avid players against 50 non-players and then subdivided each group between bilinguals and monolinguals.

When asked to describe the colour of the word "blue," for example, when it is written in green ink, non-players were far more likely to choose the dominant impulse and say "blue," though the colour is green. "The [video game players] are much harder to mislead, to trick," Prof. Bialystok said. --Carolyn Abraham --Better living through video games? (The Globe and Mail)

The International Society of Cubists officially launched its Web site today, a brilliant rejection of natural form and perspective that metaphysically establishes the implication of movement, analytically redefines spatial relationships, and is an absolute bitch to navigate.

"What the hell is this? I can't tell how to get anywhere," one of the site's first visitors told the Cubist Society's Webmaster-Curator, Paulo Cassat. "Is this art, or is this a Web site?"

"Thank you," Cassat responded.
--Cubists Launch Unnavigable Web Site (SatireWire)

Superman will help teach British children about Jesus in state-mandated religious education classes, The Telegraph reports. --Superman to the rescue of Jesus (JoanneJacobs.com)

I'm blogging this one not just because it's odd enough to be interesting, but because of Joanne Jacobs' final suggestion, just before "Posted by joannej".

I regularly use computers in my classroom, and have long been a fan of the educational potential of online discussion groups. So I was completely taken aback a few months ago when a colleague informed me of something she had recently learned from her students: Teenagers no longer check their e-mail.

I confirmed that in a subsequent conversation with a 16-year-old. "Yep," he said. "It's way too slow. I never check it." --The Professor as Instant Messenger (Chronicle)

Via New Media Journalism. I encourage you to post your comments there.

Blogging Slowdown (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm going to slow down my blogging here for a while, because I'm in the process of moving to a new server. I've got a backup of the site as of sometime yesterday, and I'm not sure whether I'll be able to get another backup before the new site goes online.

The problem is that my ISP, supplehost.com, has stopped responding to my e-mails. The blog is still working normally, but I haven't been able to make changes to my website for about 2 weeks now.

It shouldn't be any real trouble moving the website so that it operates in house, but the blog is a bit trickier.

The blogs on blogs.setonhill.edu aren't affected. They're hosted by another ISP, and for the moment I rather like the idea of having content on two different hosts, so that if one server goes down I can still get work done through the other. If it's all hosted on-site, and something goes wrong, I'll be where Moses was when the lights went out.

Update. 11 Feb

As is usually the case with these sorts of things, it's taking longer than usual, so I'll go back to blogging as usual and I'll have to see whether I can get a more recent update of the site to use when I'm finally ready to make the switch.

--Ten Things About Ten Things About Writing (Paperback Writer)

A top ten list of top-ten lists about writing. (A former student of mine, Kathy Kennedy, wrote "Short Stories: 10 Tips for Novice Creative Writers" as part of a technical writing class.)

More fossil fuels are used in packaging the water. Most water bottles are made with polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic derived from crude oil. ''Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year,'' Arnold said.

Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

Once it has been emptied, the bottle must be dumped. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals tied to a host of human and animal health problems. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. --Bottled Water: Nectar of the Frauds? (Yahoo!)

We spend $100 billion per year on bottled water? That sounds like a scare statistic. The source for that figure is given as "E[arth] P[olicy] I[institute] researcher Emily Arnold."

Arnold has published a piece on the EPI website, but that piece doesn't cite a source for the $100 billion/year figure. That article does offer a link to a thinly-sourced data page, that shows three charts from the same source -- "Beverage Marketing Corporation."

The bottled water page of the Beverage Marketing Corporation website promises that it "discusses all elements of the vibrant bottled water market, including the rapidly growing retail PET segment as well as bulk water, delivered water and imports." Note the inclusion of the word "vibrant" -- as one would expect from a website with "marketing" in its title, the author is hyping a product -- in this case, reports on the marketing of bottled water, at about $5000 per copy.

Because Arnold does not specify exactly which report she's citing, my research trail ends here. I've got better things to do than buying every one of Beverage Marketing Corporation's reports just to check her facts. The reference to the "Container Recycling Institute" in the passage I've excerpted is also unhelpful, since there's no URL pointing to a particular page.

I'm not trying to defend the practice of selling water at inflated prices. In fact, I was shocked by the claim that developed nations spend more on bottled water than it would cost to bring sanitary water to the rest of the world. But this article is designed precisely to shock, and I'm always annoyed when well-intentioned journalists uncritically repeat statistics given by activist groups, since activist groups are motivated to expose reporters only to statistics that advance their particular take on the issue.

And simply phoning up a bottling company representative to give an "opposing view" leads to a war of the sound bites, which does exactly nothing to advance the public's understanding of the truth.

I'm much more impressed by this very accessible statistic: "At up to $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline in the United States." I've never spent close to that much on water, but I've seen it for sale at similarly inflated prices.

"It says here under your 'Date Needed" column that you need these on February 7th. I have them scheduled to arrive on February 8th." He then continued, "But your document is unclear because you did not fill out the "Date Used" column as well. If you had put February 7th in the "Date Used" colum, they would be here." --A Good Choice (The Thoughts of a Frumpy Professor )

One doesn't often read a blog entry extolling the virtue of self control. Bravo, Frumpy Prof.

They come with cameras dangling on their wrists and dressed, respectfully, as if they were about to issue an insurance policy or anchor the news. An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of "To Kill a Mockingbird," the occasion attracts no actor, politician or music figure. Instead, it draws someone to whom Alabamians collectively attach far more obsession: the author of the book itself, Harper Lee, who lives in the small town of Monroeville, Ala., one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters. --Ginia Bellafante --Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day (NY Times (will expire))

This is Harper Lee's first interview in about 40 years.

This quote caught my eye: "Her one stipulation for the contest was that children who were home-schooled be eligible to compete."

Good for her.

As recently as a few years ago, Aftab said the profile of an online victim was a young woman who felt alone, didn't have many friends and craved attention.

Then, in 2002, 13-year-old Christina Long of Danbury was strangled in a Danbury mall parking lot by a 26-year-old man she met on the internet. Long was a popular cheerleader, a good student and an altar girl. The profile went out the window.

Now, Aftab said, it's no surprise that a wealthy state such as Connecticut is seeing a spate of problems. "This is a rich and upper-middle-class problem," Aftab said. "They have too much time, too much technology and their parents aren't around to keep an eye on them." --Teens Reveal Too Much Online (Wired | AP)

I've had a fair share of student bloggers who aren't thinking clearly about the consequences of writing something unintentionally revealing or deliberately offensive, but the real reason I'm blogging this is that very weird sentence, "The profile went out the window."

Huh?

I gather that the author was trying to say that particular profile was unusual or extreme, but I'm not sure how to relate the details ("a popular cheerleader, a good student and an altar girl") with the description "out the window." Perhaps the author intended that to be part of an extended metaphor that was introduced in an earlier paragraph that got edited or cut.

I've blogged before about the cultural value of shallow but deeply-linked social networks.

When I say "shallow" I don't mean the people using it are shallow, but rather the value is in the links themselves. A blog requires writing and responding, and while a social network site can involve writing, part of the reason the system grows so quickly is that using the site means adding yourself to existing lists or creating lists for other people to sign on to. And, for all teenagers like telling the rest of the world that they all want to be independent and do their own thing, most teenagers spend a lot of time and money on the difficult task of conforming to the social expectations of their peer groups.

Another good place to start for people new to the text adventure format would be Galatea, Emily Short'sfree-form piece based around conversation rather than puzzle-solving. It'snot as no-nonsense as 9:05, but it'spotentially more rewarding, and there are plenty of conversational paths and trees to explore, which lends itself to multiple replays.

The online version of Galatea, available at http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/galatea/index.html, is attractively presented: the game itself, in a Java interpreter called ZPlet, takes up one frame, with the other frame devoted to supplemental information such as an explanation of the concept, suggested alternate conversation scripts to try once you?ve run out of ideas, and annotations and essays on the making of the game.

Once you?ve had your fill of Galatea, there are a few other online games hosted on the same server, all linked from http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/index.html. The other text adventures in the gallery are Fine-Tuned: An Auto-Mated Romance, Metamorphoses, and of special interest to anyone curious about the format'shistory, Colossal Cave Adventure, the very first piece of interactive fiction ever written. --Retrogaming Hacks: Tips & Tools for Playing the Classics (O'Reilley)

After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams. --Era Ends: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams (Live Science)

During an appearance on Good Morning America Wednesday, Sweetin, who played middle sister Stephanie Tanner on the hit sitcom, revealed that she is a recovering meth addict and once battled a daily drug habit. --''Full House'' Star Admits Meth Problem (Yahoo!)

I always thought that Jodie Sweetin was a much more talented child performer than either of the Olsen moppets, so reading this story made me go "Awww!" in a completely unironic and geuniune manner.

Yes, I admit it, I used to watch Full House when I was in grad school. My wife collected box tops and got me an autographed cast picture, which I have in a mouse pad at home.

Michael Kinsley made me laugh a decade ago when he argued against Web populists replacing professional writers, saying that when he goes to a restaurant, he wants the chef to cook his entree, not the guy sitting at the next table. I'm not laughing anymore: When there are millions of aspiring chefs in the room willing to make your dinner for free, a least a hundred of them are likely to deal a good meal. --Jack Shafer --Not Just Another Column About Blogging: What newspaper history says about newspaper future. (Slate)

Expiry Date for Courses (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my in box today, a question to ponder. What courses from your program should not be accepted for transfer credit after 10 years have passed?

If you started a science major 10 years ago, and took some foundational courses, and then dropped the major, how much of what was then considered cutting-edge knowledge would be obsolete if you went back to school a decade later? At least some of it.

An English student who learned literary theory 10 years ago may not be up on the latest trends, but should ideally have been exposed to research methods that would make it fairly easy to catch up on a level sufficient for undergraduate work. (Besides, plenty of English academics do their job just fine without paying much attention to the developments of the past decade.)

While the culture of journalism and the methods of delivery have changed, the bedrock principles of journalism (the difference between edtitorializing and reporting; the relationship between expected depth and time until deadline; the importance of checking your sources) are pretty stable.

What about writing for the internet? In 1996, when the World Wide Web was young, and graphical browsers were just starting to introduce the internet to large numbers of people who were not computer specialists, Jakob Nielsen wrote Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace and In Defense of Print. Both of these contain dated information (one so dated that Nielsen added an update), but once again, the principles are still solid. A set of handouts I wrote for the Engineering Writing Centre in 1998 are still pretty accurate. A page I wrote called "Annotate Your Lists of Links" covers most of the basic concepts that I now teach in the context of writing for weblogs.

Since new media genres are constantly emerging and changing, it's likely that the content of the "New Media Projects" course that I'll teach for the first time this fall will look very different from what it will be in 2016, but I suppose I'll still be teaching interactive fiction, and I hope I'm still teaching it in 2026 and beyond.

In all my classes, I'm most interested in teaching process, which changes more slowly than the content.

Yes, the actual steps you take in order to get text onto the internet has changed in the last 10 years, but the process of prototyping, beta-testing, and quality control is still the same.

While it is important to understand how the culture that led to the creation of a particular work differs from the culture in which you are reading that work, you should understand that a work is a particular author's personal, creative, artistic representation of reality. Even when basing a story on a fictional event, authors leave out certain details, change the timeline, combine characters into composites, invent scenes, etc. All this is in the service of artistic truth, but it may stray far from the verifiable facts. Nobody wants to read stories about boring, ordinary people, so all literature is a distortion of some sort. Few farm women are married to husbands who are so cold that they strangle songbirds and send their otherwise meek and quiet wives into homicidal rages. It is therefore dangerous to use a fictional account of one incident to support an argument about what life was "really" like. --Representations of Reality (American Lit II (EL 267))

I'm introducing my lit students to the concept of the close reading. While they have several low-risk tries to get it right, I do recognize that students often have difficulty moving beyond plot summary and character analysis, which was good enough to get them through high school.

What else is there to write about?

It's not so much "what" but "how". We spent some time in my Video Gaming course discussing the concept of the "close playing," and the principle is really the same. Look carefully at the specific choices that the artist made while creating the artifact. Consider the artifact not as a window on reality, and not as a mirror to examine your own emotional responses, but rather as a thing to look at.

With upswept roofs and, often, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon, it decorated many a motel, coffee house and bowling alley in the 1950s and 1960s. It epitomises the spirit a generation demanded, looking excitedly towards a bright, technological and futuristic age. As it became clear that the future would not look like The Jetsons, the style came to be timeless rather than futuristic. As with the art deco style of the 1930s it has remained undervalued until many of its finest examples have been destroyed.
--Googie space age (Jahsonic.com)

I've always loved the look. Never knew it had a name.

Modern American celebrity culture has certainly magnified the latest incident: Woodruff is recognizable, relatable, respectable. He was selected for his job as co-anchor not just for his undoubted journalistic credentials but also because ABC decided he was the kind of person Americans would want to welcome into their homes every night. His injury, therefore, feels personal to many viewers.

"He's the kind of celebrity we feel we know. That's the mature of these anchors. But we feel we know these people and we care what happens to them," Montgomery said.

That leaves the uncomfortable question about how much the media, or the American public, cares about the injured who are less well known, but in just as dire straits. --Pamela Hess --Some US troops question Woodruff coverage (United Press International)

It has been one year since the "Great Video Game Experiment" was started at the public library where I work. And in those twelve months I'd have to say it has gone as good as anyone could have hoped. In the end, the numbers don't lie, and a success is all this experiment can be called. --John Scalzo
--The Video Game Librarian: It's The End of the Year As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) (Gaming Target)