Current_Events: April 2006 Archive Page

Alloy's team craft the proposal, shape the plot and create characters. Even the writing of the book is often farmed out to a team of authors. The process is more similar to television writing than most readers' idea of the creation of a novel and the packaging closer to creating a boy band than promoting a new literary star.

Among Alloy's hit series are The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recently made into a film, and the Sweet Valley High books, which became a TV series. This weekend Alloy had three books in the New York Times children's paperback bestseller list. It did not return calls for comment.

After Alloy's input, Opal was picked up by Little Brown, a division of media giant Time Warner. Little Brown, too, was unavailable for comment. --'Lit chick' debacle that damns the publishers (Times Online)

If this is true, then it may be true that Kaavya Viswanathan really didn't intend to plagiarize from Megan McCafferty's novels, since it's theoretically possible that a ghostwriter did the plagiarizing for her.

In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son's arrest last August in a drunken driving accident that left his best friend dead.

The information was accurate and had been in the news. --Shannon McCaffrey --Wikipedia Ripe for Political Dirty Tricks (Breitbart | AP)

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Student Mike Rubino and I have been talking via e-mail with the director of our writing center, about how to get students thinking about the relative value of Wikipedia as a source.

I tell students that it's fine to refer to Wikipedia when preparing for an informal oral presentation, or as part of a blogged response to a reading assignment. In a research paper, however, it's not a credible source -- except if the research paper is on a very geeky, very rapidly changing topic related to the internet, or a meme that's currently spreading through youth culture, in which case the Wikipedia article is likely to have more up-to-date content than what you find in the mainstream media.

Congressman John P. Murtha will be the keynote speaker at this year's commencement, Saturday, May 13 at 11 in the Katherine Mabis McKenna Center on Seton Hill's Greensburg campus. --Alexandra Nseir --Murtha to speak at May commencement (Setonian)

I have heard both faculty and student grumblings about Murtha, who is, depending on who's talking, either pro-labor or anti-business, pro-life or anti-woman, pro-Iraq withdrawal or anti-American, and pro-2nd-Amendment or a gun nut.

I just hope he's a more inspiring speaker than the one who described getting high on marijuana on the day he graduated from college and basically told all the graduates that what they had just spent 4 years doing was crap, or the one that spent most of the time reading a sappy urban legend that's been going around the internet for years.

--Dad shoots at computer, saying son spends too much time playing games (Tampa Bays 10 News)

Guns don't kill video games. Angry parents with guns kill video games.

This week I am going to ask you to participate in a media fast for TV Turn-Off Week, as part of the Media Fasting Reflection due on May 3.

If you give up TV, but watch DVDs on your computer, are you really making any progress? If you turn off the TV, but turn up your iPod, are you really taking control of the technology that defines our lives?

Confession time:

While we don't have cable TV, we do have a fairly big library of kid videos. Sometimes I'll put on a video for them and sit on the couch with my laptop, answering e-mail, despamming my blog, marking a paper, or fiddling with my digital camera. If the movie ends and I'm not finished, I'll get them interested in the bloopers or deleted scenes. So my desire to spend time on the internet leads directly to their exposure to more TV.

I've tried to address that by creating "the book game," which involves Peter (8) picking out a book, Carolyn (4) picking out a book, and me picking out a book. Peter and Carolyn will sit on the couch, and Peter will read all the books to Carolyn. Yes, on one level this is very good, but I'm conscious that I use "the book game" when I want to see what's happening on the blogosphere.

I also sometimes use "the book game" to avoid playing with my daughter's Barbie. So while naturally as an English teacher and a parent I'm going to say that books are good, here I'm turning to media -- books -- when my daughter is asking me for one-on-one attention. (It's not the idea of playing dolls with my daughter that bothers me. Why, the other day I was playing with my daughter's pony castle, and I made an army of insect peasants rise up in rebellion against their pony overlords. They fought an epic battle, and our leaders -- a horned beetle and Pinky Pie (tm) agreed to settle this dispute in single combat, then had a tea party, had a bath together, and took a nap. But Barbie just kind of lies there staring up at me.) --Dennis G. Jerz --Introduction to Media Fasting (Introduction to Literary Study)

Project, to be penned by Abrams and "MI3" scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto OrciRoberto Orci, will center on the early days of seminal "Trek" characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission. --Trekkies have a new leader: 'Star' treatment for J.J. (Variety)

The fans, captain! They canna take much more o' this!

"We cannot determine whether the addition to the letter was made by someone within the office or by someone with access to the office, but it is on my letterhead and the responsibility for it lies with me. A valuable lesson has been learned and new procedures will be adopted as a result." --Lawmaker Puzzled by Obscenity in Letter (AP|Yahoo!)

Passive verbs are loved by people who are found (by someone) to have been involved in actions that are considered (by some) undesirable.

Emphasis was added (by me).

Don't think you're addicted to TV? Then why not prove it by going cold turkey for a week? You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to disconnect -- and what a profound week of self discovery it can be. --TV Turnoff Week April 24-30, 2006 (Adbusters.org)

I'm planning to ask my Intro to Literary Study students to participate in a media fast. (If they can't go cold turkey, they can at least exercise their self-control by being more selective about how they spend their time.)

Five, the television channel, denied it was disappointed that Diamond, a radio and TV presenter and outspoken Daily Star columnist, had decided against being crucified. No date has been set for the broadcast of the programme. If shown, it may have to change its original working title, Crucify Me. --Nico Hines --'God made me cancel my own crucifixion' (Times Online)

In my Intro to Literary Study class, I'm teaching Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues -- a play about a TV commercial director hired to film the crucifixion of a rebel leader in a Central American country.

The Times article adds, from the CIRP survey, that the proportion of students who applied to 12 or more colleges increased by 50 percent from 2001 to 2005. The article does not go on to note that the 50 percent increase brought the percentage from 1.4 to 2.1. Most of the students who are using such strategies, and who turn up in such articles, are from a relatively elite background, educationally and financially.
Kevin Carey, research and policy manager at the think tank Education Sector, pointed out that the statistic would have been far less intimidating had it been presented instead as a 0.7 percent decline in the number of students who didn't apply to at least 12 colleges.

"To me that's a pretty good example of how you see all these stories that really only apply to a small percent," Carey said. "For the majority, this whole phenomenon means nothing."

Carey said that acceptance rate at the most elite institutions are down about one percentage point, but that even at those colleges it's hard to tell if it's truly more difficult to get in. Because more applicants in that pool are applying to more places, it could just be that there are just more applications, not more applicants. If that is the case, "it's not harder to get in, it just seems harder," Carey said. "It's not that there are many more students going to college. It's going up a bit." --David Epstein --Out of Control Admissions Hype (Inside Higher Ed)

A good article that analyzes some of the statistics cited by media reports.

Shouldn't that be "out-of-control" (with hyphens)?