Media: February 2006 Archive Page

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?s party seemingly come out of a character generator similar to that at work in The Sims. They are given short bios and quirky personalities. Gatsby?s party 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.

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?

[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 GatsbyWithin and Without (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

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?s origins 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.

--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)

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 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.

Another good place to start for people new to the text adventure format would be Galatea, Emily Short?s free-form piece based around conversation rather than puzzle-solving. It?s not as no-nonsense as 9:05, but it?s potentially 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?s history, 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)

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.

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)