September 2006 Archive Page

After years of skepticism, even mistrust, many college officials now realize it's in their best interest to seek out home-schoolers, said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

"There was a tendency to kind of dismiss home schooling as inherently less rigorous," he said. "The attitude of the admissions profession could have at best been described as skeptical."

Home-schooled students -- whose numbers in this country range from an estimated 1.1 million to as high as 2 million -- often come to college equipped with the skills necessary to succeed in higher education, said Regina Morin, admissions director of Columbia College.

Such assets include intellectual curiosity, independent study habits and critical thinking skills, she said.

"It's one of the fastest-growing college pools in the nation," she said. "And they tend to be some of the best prepared." --Alan Schier Zagier --Colleges coveting home-schooled students (Yahoo! News (will expire))

Last week the freshmen at SHU were tired and stressed, since most of them are facing their first major papers and projects now, and the deadlines are starting to pile up. For classes with a lot of freshmen, I generally schedule workshop days this time of year, and spend time moving around the room and talking to each student individually. Some don't appear to have attempted to do any work at all since the last in-class workshop we've had. Others have 50 questions about the most minor details. Still others stop showing up in class.

So in the last minute before letting the students go, I gave them a little pep talk, telling them that SHU wouldn't have let them in if they didn't have what it took to succeed, and telling them that this is the time of year when they have to [insert motivation-oriented sports cliché] and [insert achievement-oriented sports cliché]. Some of them still wouldn't make eye contact with me on the way out, but I thought I could sense the atmosphere lightening up and I saw some heads nodding and even a few smiles.

I had my basic comp students write their first major essay on "Independence and Responsibility." I've marked almost all of them, and I'm pleased with the results. But I'm actually more interested in looking at the Independent Learning Plans (ILP) that are due next week. That document (which I didn't design -- it came from the committee that designed the Basic Comp course) has the student make a list of the areas where they feel they need to improve in order to write at the college level. I've never used an ILP in a class before, but it's very similar in concept to the annual report that I write at SHU, so I have some personal experiences to draw on while teaching the ILP.

I'm going to talk with my wife about whether we can get our own 8-year-old home-school son involved a little more in his own assessment.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.

The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. --Vannevar Bush --As We May Think (The Atlantic)

In a "Writing for the Internet" class, I assigned this classic essay, in which the author spun a series of fantastic ideas that imagined an information distribution network that would use the technology that was available during his day.

I have the students blog what they think about the readings before class, so I can get some sense of what to expect. For some of the students, the thing they most wanted to write about was how hard the essay was to read!

Since the class includes freshmen who may be encoutering a full-length essay for the first time, I'm sure part of their reaction simply stems from their unfamiliarity with the genre. But we've also just gone through some practical material on why online writing should be shorter and punchier than print, so they're noticing the difference now when we move to the print-based genre.

Having used the device for many hours, I found it to be a comfortable, pleasing way to read, after initial hesitance. And it's a sharp-looking, techno-wow device with a durable feel. Its size, its screen, its general "thingness" were all appealing. But I love the feel, heft and smell of books, the tangible touch of the page, seeing their spines on the shelves. --Tom Bentley --Sony Reader Is a Work in Progress (Wired)

One further use, according to the Chicago Manual of Style: in philosophical discourse, key concepts may be set apart with single-quote marks. When such concepts are set off in this way, periods and commas go outside the single-quote marks:

* Sartre's treatment of 'being', as opposed to his treatment of 'non-being', has been thoroughly described in Kaufmann's book. --Quotation Marks (Capital Community College)

This is the only source I've found that supports the common convention of using single-quote marks for short quotations.

In basic comp, it's conventional to use double-quote marks

• when using exact words that belong to someone else
• for the title of a short literary work (a poem or article)
• for any other reasons, rarely if ever

Americans use single-quote marks only within quoted material within a quotation.

"I don't think your little 'joke' was funny," said the principal, his face smeared with whipped cream.

Towards the end of the semester, if they're dying to use "scare quotes" or they're going for an "ironic" effect, I hope my students do so in moderation.

I didn't know that the single-quote use is accepted in philosophy. Okay, then, if you're taking a philosophy class, and you notice your professor uses the single-quote mark to emphasize 'important' concepts, then you should, too.

Yet I've often wondered why so many of my freshman comp students have a 'love affair' with single-quote marks. I can easily tell them there's no need to put any quotation marks around 'old chestnuts' and cliches that are 'as old as the hills,' yet they often use single-quote marks. They're very consistent about it, which suggests they have internalized some 'rule' that they have picked up somewhere.

This isn't just 'empty rhetoric' that I'm writing to keep myself sane in between marking sessions. I'm not just 'ranting'. I recognize that 'my job' is to help students learn the 'conventions' of college writing, so I'm 'really' interested in what might be causing this particular non-standard punctuation, and I'm writing 'this' blog entry to show how an 'overuse' of quotaton can whittle away at the reader's 'confidence' in the 'voice' the 'author' is trying to 'project'.

I can let them know there's no need to label so-called 'ironic' words as 'so-called,' (since the quotation marks already show the author is trying to keep a 'safe distance' from these words).

But why the single ' instead of the double " so often? They can't all have made the same 'mistake' randomly. What 'model' are they following, that causes them to create the 'rule' that one should always use single quotation marks when quoting short phrases?

If it were always a 'single' word, I might be tempted to explain it as an overliteral interpretation of the name 'single-quote mark.' But I often see the 'single-quote mark' setting off 'short phrases,' so that can't be it.

Is it just that high school students are not used to quoting a few words at a time? Their practice has been in quoting whole sentences or longer passages, so they're not sure what to do when they quote shorter passages?

I don't gather that most students would bother using quotation marks at all when text-messaging each other, but is it perhaps that the 'single' quotation mark is easier to type? On a US computer keyboard, the ' is right between the semicolon (an underused home-row key) and the enter key. You have to hit shift-' in order to get a ". Does that somehow make the " less prominent to the developing writer?

--Asskicking Device (YouTube)

Amazing. A...ma...zing.

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

Who doesn't wish to keep a record of a beautiful sunset that particularly impressed us in childhood, our first kiss or, for that matter, an important conversation with the boss that took place a few months back? One of our shortcomings is a constant struggle to remember. How difficult it can be sometimes to recall the name of the person you need to meet in an hour, the important phone number your secretary just read you on the phone, or that very important item your wife told you not to forget to bring home this evening. But what if you had a magical device that would allow you to rewind reality and see exactly what happened? --Iddo Gennuth --Saving Your Life on a Hard Drive (The Future of Everything)

One passage reads, "But hardware issues are slight in comparison to the problems on the software end."

Let's talk about problems on the ethical end. Such a device would not only record information about yourself, but information about the people with whom you live, socialize, and work. How will a juror in a mafia murder trial feel, knowing that eleven other jurors are recording everything he says during deliberations? How will a student feel, knowing the professor is recording everything the student says during a conference in which the professor points to a passage and says "This looks like plagairism"?

The author does refer in passing to "socio-psychological and legal problems," but this is a rah-rah article about technology, not a thoughtful essay about the possibility of cultural change. (Actually, Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age does a good job imagining what a society would be like, in a post-privacy future, where manners replace secrecy.)

"It was then decided that a tactical solution needed to be done in an effort to save the two hostages," the sheriff said, his voice breaking. "Entry was made. The suspect shot one of the hostages, then shot himself." --Chase Squires --Colo. Gunman Shoots Hostage, Kills Self (ABC News)

Fascinating example of the usefulness of the passive voice and nominalization. The sheriff is distancing himself from the action.

The suspect is an active, immediate threat, who "shot" a hostage and "shot" himself.

The authorities in charge of the operation are in the background... the "solution needed to be done" and the course of action was "decided on". Rather than saying the "Police officers stormed the building, waving guns and screaming for the suspect to come out," the sherrif simply says "Entry was made."

I don't mean to say the sheriff was doing anything wrong... it just struck me how effectively he was using language. The most powerful verb in his whole speech was "save [the two hostages]" -- the intention that motivated the action.

The detail about the breaking voice shows that this cop was talking his professionally abstract passive rhetoric in an effort to keep his emotions under control.

Good reporting -- painting a compelling picture with a few telling details.

Mike Edwards had himself a pencil.
Weighed about forty pound.
Every time Mike Edwards drew a squiggly edit mark
Drove his pencil two inches in the ground,
Lawd, Lawd,
Drove his pencil two inches in the ground.

Mike Edwards's blog was named Vitia.
The logo looked the same upside down.
He'd sharpen up his pencil on both of its ends.
Called his pencil "Vitia" too, for the sound,
Lawd, Lawd.
Called his pencil "Vitia" too, for the sound.

Mike Edwards's Dean, Captain Tommy
Had a squared-away drive to succeed.
Loved Mike Edwards like his only blessed son.
Said, "I'll get you any funding that you need,"
Lawd, Lawd.
Said "I'll get you any funding that you need."

PDS salesman said to Captain Tommy,
"I think your students might try to plagiarize.
Let me tell you 'bout a tool that'll help enforce the rule,
And catch those cheaters by surprise,
Lawd, lawd.
It'll catch those cheaters by surprise."

Mike Edwards said to Captain Tommy
"TurnItIn.com appropriates the value of student writing for the sake of its own profits, while at the same time criminalizing students for the very same practice.
I'd rather die with my pencil in my hand,
Lawd, Lawd.
Die with my pencil in my hand."

Mike Edwards sharpened up "Vitia."
The salesman logged himself in.
And he set two even stacks of papers on his desk.
Said, "The dean'll grant you tenure if you win,
Lawd, Lawd.
Dean'll grant you tenure if you win."
The Ballad of Mike Edwards and the PDS (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my discussions with opponents of [plagiarism detection services], it's unclear that any methods of plagiarism detection at all are acceptable. Too much zeal to trust students can lead to a tacit "look the other way" practice which is naive, irresponsible, and just as likely to breed resentment among students who do the writing as PDS do. The alternative offered is something along the lines of "start a dialogue with students about authorship and intellectual property." "Require students to submit multiple drafts and monitor the writing process closely." "Talk to students about the importance of speaking for oneself and what a meaningful act that is. Frame it in such a way that shows that copying a paper from the internet is basically letting someone else speak for you."

Fair enough, those are all valid practices. But professors who do those things can end up with plagiarism cases in spite of all of it. What exactly do you do at the moment of encounter with that paper that you're 99.9% sure is plagiarized? --Clancy Ratliff --More on Plagiarism Detection Services (Culturecat)

I started a comment on Clancy's blog, but it grew, so here it is.

Clancy notes that Turnitin.com and similar commercial services are not our only options for detecting plagiarism. She lists several -- using Google, asking students to come in for a conference with a paper trail showing a submission is their own work, requiring multiple drafts, etc.

Faculty members who don't think of themselves as writing teachers, and those who think of the essay as a passive vehicle for conveying information (rather than the laboratory in which ideas are formed) aren't confident in their own ability to discourage plagiarism through non-technological means. Some feel that writing is not their job, and they see Turnitin.com as a tool to free them from the drudgery of having to teach the stuff that is the bread and butter of our discipline -- all that stuff about writing being a sign of intellectual investment in one's education, etc. In a comment on Clancy's blog, Joanna notes that the software takes authority away from both the student and the faculty member. Let's hope that somewhere at a big institution a decision-maker does not decide to cut the writing center budget in order to pay for a PDS, on the idea that it would be more efficient to have 1000 students in a Psych101 course to run their papers through software rather than sit down with a writing tutor.

Yet this year, I'm experimenting with having students submit pretty much everything through Turnitin.com. I experimented with a paperless semester last year, though I mostly used our content management system (neither Blackboard nor Web-CT, but something called Jenzabar, which does not impress me very much).

Since I'm horrible at filing paperwork I like the fact that the system handles that drudgery for me. No more schlepping stacks of ungraded papers home, and schlepping them back (too often ungraded) the next morning.

I also find the peer-review feature very useful. Students can trade anonymous peer reviews within the system. I find I have to ask very specific questions, since the system doesn't permit students to cross out a sentence or draw a wavy line under a confusing passage.. the system doesn't really encourage global revisions, but this limitation does force me to decide, for each peer review, what are the specific things I most want students to be looking for when they review each other's work. And that forces me to focus on whether I'm actually teaching those skills to the students.

I consider what the computer shows me to be one piece of information that I can use in order to assess the situation. It is rare that a student who has shown no signs of struggling in the course will suddenly plagiarize out of the blue. But people in our discipline are trained to diagnose all kinds of intellectual maladies based on a student's paper trail. Most faculty are not trained to do this kind of thing. In a perfect world, everyone would value rhetoric the same way writing teachers do. Well... at least, if the world were ruled by people who were once writing teachers, then we'd be able to enforce our biases. But in the real world, we teach alongside faculty members who see a PDS as an efficient time-saver.

I'm reminded of the two levels of rhetoric that were used in the early 20thC, by Dictaphone salesmen. The bosses (overwhelmingly male) were told that Dictaphones never went on lunch breaks or called in sick, so they'd always be available when the boss wanted to take a letter. The secretaries (overwhelmingly female) were told that if their bosses could turn on the machine whenever they wanted to take dictation, that would free up the secretaries so that they could make more decisions on their own, and they would be like junior executives who could manage their own resources, making their own decisions about which letters had to be transcribed now and whether their transcriptions would have to go back to the boss for clarification.

This is the first time SHU has offered a Basic Comp course (we used to have a two-semester course in Thinking and Writing), so I can't fairly compare my experience this year with what has happened before, but I do get the feeling that more students are choosing to submit no paper at all rather than risk getting caught plagiarizing. I'm not sure, then, that Turnitin.com is really helping me teach, but it may be affecting the way students act out their alienation from the demands of the college workload.

Still, just today a student who re-used too much boilerplate text from a routine assignment was shocked to see that Turnitin.com tagged chunks of her text as non-original. The tagging showed that she inappropriately re-used some material that should have been fresh. I probably would not have caught that, but the student sought me out and eagerly asked for permission to redo the exercise. (I let her.)

Hats off to Clancy and Mike, and everyone else who continues to ask us to doubt the words of the fast-talking salesman who convinces The Man that the new-fangled technology can do the work for which we've been trained.

Today Ibsen's wedding of tragedy to the ethical dilemmas and unadorned rhetoric of middle-class characters seems like the necessary prelude to modern drama, from George Bernard Shaw to Arthur Miller. Within his stuffed Victorian living rooms, the Norwegian playwright championed free-thinking, if flawed, heroes over both the conformist masses and self-aggrandizing authorities. His signature metaphors of corruption and contagion -- along with the violent undertow in his works, informed by the upheavals of 19th-century Europe -- retain their relevance. The fateful door-slamming in A Doll's House, the shattered glass in An Enemy of the People, and the climactic gunshots in Hedda Gabler and The Wild Duck are staples of our theatrical vocabulary. Ibsen has become, as W.H. Auden might say, a whole climate of opinion about the possibilities and the limits of realistic prose drama -- though the dramatist himself, more protean than his legacy, was also a poet and a symbolist. --Julia M. Klein --Ibsen's Relevance and Influence Endure (Chronicle)

Great biographal essay about Ibsen.

Truth is: The flow goes both ways. We don't move invisibly through the links, we leave a fine trail, much more real than pixie dust, but as intangible. Gathering information, we leave a trail of information. The ivory tower does not protect us here, and there are no sets of information gathering ethics protecting the subjects clicking on a link online. There shold be though. Information is power, and the right to gather and display information should definitely be discussed in a wide range of contexts. --Torill Mortensen --Privacy, scrutiny and research ethics (thinking with my fingers)

A concise, powerful insight into the privacy debate that flared up last week in the corner of the blogosphere amorphous, many-tendrilled subnexus of the blogosphere where I hang my virtual hat.

The words "global warming" provoke a sharp retort from Colorado State University meteorology professor emeritus William Gray: "It's a big scam."

And the name of climate researcher Kevin Trenberth elicits a sputtered "opportunist."

At the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where Trenberth works, Gray's name prompts dismay. "Bill Gray is completely unreasonable," Trenberth says. "He has a mind block on this."

Only 55 miles separate NCAR's headquarters, nestled in the Front Range foothills, from CSU in Fort Collins. But when it comes to climate change, the gap is as big as any in the scientific community. --Mark Jaffe --Global warming? (Denver Post)

Dissent and personal attacks make compelling stories, so I'm a bit leery about a science article that makes the issue so personal. Nevertheless, it's rare to see journalism cover a scientific controversy with such depth, so this article is worth adding to my list of related global warming entries.

Nobody ever doubted that Harold von Braunhut was one twisted dude. What else can you say about a man who transformed a dinky, transparent species of crustacean into "Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys," peddling billions of the creatures under fantastically false pretenses? A man whose 194 other patents included those other unforgettable staples of comic-book advertising, Invisible Goldfish and X-Ray Spex? --Bob Moser --Hitler and the Sea-Monkeys (Southern Poverty Law Center)

This story makes my head hurt...

The 40-hour gamers are able to play in a way that I used to when I was a teenager, but can't anymore. They devote full evenings and entire weekends to marathon play-sessions. They get into the zone -- that Csikszentmihalyian state of "flow" where all distractions drop away, and you focus with lizard-brain survival intensity on solving the puzzles, leveling up, methodically remounting and remounting dread fights against the bosses until you spy the chink in their armor.

And hell, anyone can lick a game in 40 hours easily if they play like that. --Clive Thompson --The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer (Wired)

The other day I was imagining what I would do if I get a little extra cash from a consulting gig. What games to buy?

And I realized I have such a backlog of games already, and such a long to-do list for the 2-3 hours I get each night after the kids are in bed, that nothing really appealed to me.

My wife is planning to take the kids to visit her parents for two weeks during Thanksgiving (and we didn't have enough airline points to get me a ticket too). There will be a little time for games. But I'll probably be a good boy and work on my syllabi for next year during that timeslot (so that I'll have a more relaxing Christmas break).

--White and Nerdy -- Weird Al Yancovic (YouTube)

E-mailed to me by a student who knows me well.

P.S. Kirk, definitely.

"(Video games) are a little bit like documentary films were in say the '60s or '70s," says Suzanne Seggerman, co-founder of Games for Change, a support organization in New York for makers of video games dealing with social issues. "Film had been a popular medium for a long, long time, (but) it took quite a while for it to mature enough to sustain real-world content. Games are at the same place now. They're being used for more serious purposes." --Fred Marion --New generation of video games takes on serious subjects (Springfield News-Sun | Cox News Service)

A high school assistant principal is suing two students and their parents, alleging the teens set up a Web page on MySpace.com in her name and posted obscene comments and pictures.

Anna Draker, an assistant principal at Clark High School, is claiming defamation, libel, negligence and negligent supervision over the page on the popular free-access Web site.

Draker claims two 16-year-olds, a junior and a sophomore, created the page using her name and picture and wrote it as through Draker herself had posted the information, according to Draker's attorney, Murphy Klasing. --Official sues students over MySpace page (Yahoo! News (will expire))

Just blogging this for future reference.

Two weeks ago, NBC began airing 30-minute episodes of "VeggieTales" on Saturday mornings. The show was edited to comply with the network's broadcast standards, said NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks.

"Our goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible with these positive messages while being careful not to advocate any one religious point of view," she said.

"VeggieTales" creator Phil Vischer, who was responsible for readying episodes for network broadcast, said he didn't know until just weeks before the shows were to begin airing that non-historical references to God and the Bible would have to be removed. --God references quashed; 'VeggieTales' creator steamed (CNN)

Phil Vischer is the creator of VeggieTales, but not the owner. He filed for bankruptcy a few years ago, so he doesn't call the shots anymore. Back when he owned the company, and was aiming to compete with Disney, I remember him saying that he turned down an offer to distribute VeggieTales through WalMart when the retailer asked him to cut the religous content, so I find it surprising that he says he didn't know this deal would require him to edit out the explicitly Christian references. (Vischer talks about this in detail on his website, where he also quotes from angry fans who accuse him of selling out.)

My kids love LarryBoy -- a cucumber with plungers on his head, spoofing Batman and Spiderman. The Christian messages are simple and affirming, but the production values are slick (no kindly bearded guys with guitars -- the latest LarryBoy featured an evil apple with cybernetic spider legs a la Dr. Octopus, and a head-banging music video spoof of Korn), and there are always jokes and cultural references for the parents.

Vischer is philosophical about the whole affair:

Paul was willing to compromise his cultural values to build relationships with Greeks, Romans, slaves, and anyone else he met along his travels. If they ate meat, he'd eat meat. If they didn't, he wouldn't. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to compromise their beliefs about God. God said "bow to no other god but me" and they intended to follow that directive, no matter the personal cost. So was taking "God made you special and he loves you very much" off the end of these new shows more like Paul's situation? Or Shadrach's? Do the edited shows say anything that I believe is untrue? No. They do, however, stop short of saying things I wanted to say that are very true.

I gather that NBC is not asking them to create new stories with non-Christian messages, but is rather re-editing existing stories in order to remove religious references. We already own every single VeggieTales video produced (except for a few compilation shows). So we'll have no need to watch them in between commercials on TV. The network has the right to air the shows that way if the've paid for the license, and the owners are free to refuse the money if they don't want their work to be altered in that manner.

Several years ago, a student pointed out an academic article that was rather critical of VeggieTales, and I've always had in the back of my mind the idea that I'd like to write my own article about singing anthropomorphic grocery produce. The idea that singing anthropomorphic Christian grocery produce has prompted NBC to order reverse-bowdlerization in order to be culturally sensitive -- well, that sounds like material for an Onion article.

Freelance graphic artist Chrissie Bellisle carefully delineated the ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations of the RecyclaBuddies, a group of talking recyclables created for a public-service leaflet she submitted to the Department of Sanitation Monday. -- Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables

This discovery, if validated, will be one of only 10 remaining pages left in existence today, and according to unnamed sources at Seton Hill University of Internet Sciences, could expose the true reasons behind the almost complete depletion of both public and private schools circa 2300.

Though several prominent scientists at the competing University of Saint Vincent claim that the site is a flagrant forgery, the official declaration thus far seems to be that the relic is genuine, causing quite a stir in the scientific community.

Official reports state the name of the page to be "Black Tears at Midnight," and it contains, among other things, an official log of an apparent 18 year olds decision to drop out of an antique public school. In a private interview, Dr. Dennis Jerz VIII of Seton Hill told The Post that 8 out of the 10 existing pages contained remarkably similar accounts, possibly linking the overuse of sites like Myspace to the decline and eventual demise of almost every type of organized education. --Paul Crossman --New Evidence Points to Myspace as Catalyst in Educational Depression of 2300 (The Stoop)

One of my students submitted this for an assignment that asked them to use digital documents of today to support claims about what researchers from the future might conclude about our society. I encouraged them to be creative.

YouTube, You To Be, To Be You, You Be Too. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Jay Leno and Videos he found on YouTube. About 3 minutes. The first clip looks like a scene from America's Funniest Home Videos -- nothing new there. Two of them are just clever video tricks, and while they're nicely done, they don't show us anything that TV hasn't shown us before. "The Easter Bunny Hates You," is a hilarious spoof of action movies, but once again, it spoofs the kind of thing that TV has been showing us for decades. Is this really what YouTube is about? This is the selection that Jay Leno chose because he thought it would entertain his home viewers. Views: 375,060.

If you've got about 10 minutes, take a look at YOUTUBERS, a video response to the Leno clip. I watched it while gnawing on my PowerBar at my desk. It's poignant, sweet, cringe-worthy, unintelligible, and touching. Views: 2,739.

When displayed on the huge flatscreen TV on Leno's set, the YouTube clips look amateurish, and they only serve to set up Leno's jokes.

But seeing a compilation of YouTubers talking about YouTubing gives a much better sense of YouTube's cultural power. Yes, it's narcissism, poorly lit and sometimes inaudible. But it feels much more like reality than "reality TV" ever will.

Just because you tell your friend a secret doesn't mean you're happy when he tells others. Same with your employer, your bank or any company you do business with.

But as the Facebook example illustrates, privacy is much more complex. It's about who you choose to disclose information to, how, and for what purpose. And the key word there is "choose." People are willing to share all sorts of information, as long as they are in control.

When Facebook unilaterally changed the rules about how personal information was revealed, it reminded people that they weren't in control. --Bruce Schneier --Lessons From the Facebook Riots (Wired)

A great analysis of recent events. Thanks for the suggestion, Karissa.

Knowing that the game would become an underground cult obsession, knowing that someone would eventually ferret out my identity, knowing that I would get death threats and receive requests for autographs, and knowing that one mentally disturbed man would cite my game as one he liked to play before randomly shooting at college students... there's no way to honestly answer that question. I would LIKE to say, "yes, there's no question." But of course that's impossible to gauge.

I didn't know I was making something that became part of a movement to give video games an agenda, a social conscience. I didn't think more than a few dozen of my online friends would play it. I think the game needed to be made. Despite my lack of technical skill with video game design, it turns out the person that made it was me. Maybe that sounds deterministic but the concept of a deep, dedicated game about Columbine was waiting to happen; that shooting happened at a very formative age for an entire generation of gamers and I'm sure it marked us all in one way or another. --Danny LeDonne, creator of Super Columbine Massacre RPG. --Feature: Columbine RPG Creator Talks About Dawson Shooting (Kotaku)

In a later quote, he says "If anything, the Dawson College shooting is proof positive that games like SCMRPG SHOULD be made; until video games are no longer among the "usual suspects" for homicidal rampages, the public needs to more carefully consider why interactive electronic media is somehow the manufacturer of Manchurian Candidates."

Does he go a little bit off the deep end there? Maybe, but I find LeDonne very articulate and insightful.

Who was it who said that the best response to a poem is another poem? Here's LeDonne's take on that issue:

If you have something to say about the world, don't wait around for someone to create that thing for you, DO IT YOURSELF. No matter who you are, you have something to share and there's absolutely no reason media conglomerates should have a monopoly on the creation of culture. In the digital age, we have been empowered to reshape the horizon of understanding ourselves. So set aside your MySpace blog, turn off the TV, and put down the controller for your X-Box. Make something... and don't be afraid that your idea might not be accepted; the truth is there is probably already a world of people waiting for you to create it--whatever "it" might be.

Documents to Go and VersaMail Woes (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I love my Tungsten T3 handheld computer.

I also love Documents to Go, which is bundled software that lets me edit files (mostly word processor, but also spreadsheet and slide show) on my handheld, and then synch my changes with the version of the file on my desktop. It's great for whenever someone is late for a meeting or I have to stand in line. I get a lot of paperwork done, and store a lot of brainstorming.

I'm also happy with VersaMail, which is bundled software that synchronizes my e-mail, batch downloading my in box (with attachments up to a certain size).

But for the past month or so, when I try to open an attachment in VersaMail, I get "You have not saved the changes you made to your last open document. Documents to Go will open this document now."

The only option to click is "OK," and what I see next is just the list of my Docs to Go files -- no file opens for me to save.

This means I cannot open any attachments.

I guess that's not technically true. I can save the attachments to my expansion card, and open them from there, but they won't automatically open, and I'll have multiple copies of the same file that might get out of synch.

This was a minor bother over the summer, but now that the semester is in full swing and I'm getting more e-mails, it's becoming a pain.

A handful of other people have mentioned the same problem in support forums, but nobody has bothered to post answers.

If I find the answer, I'll be sure to post it here. If you're looking for the answer, too, feel free to share your tales of woe.

I am the editor in chief of the Setonian. During production week, I live, breathe and worship all that is QuarkXpress, Adobe Photoshop, copyeditor's marks and the Associated Press Style manual. People don't really see me that much, that is, if you don't count the back of my head, which is turned in the direction of the glowing Mac in front of me. The same is true of the entire staff, as well. We immerse ourselves in interviews and photo ops. --Amanda Cochran --Top ten ways you know it's Setonian production week (Girl Meets World)

A great blog entry, capturing the enthusiasm and zaniness of the wonderful bunch of students whom I advise.

I watched a group of people popularly assumed to be rude, brash, loud and forward carefully negotiate the lack of washing machines, driers and laundry baskets, politely assisting when the time-lags were evident, ignoring the intrusions on personal space with almost Scandinavian stoicism, and happily folding their clothes side by side; Spanish, Irani and Irish. It was beautiful. It made me believe in human cooperation, also in the United States. Outlaw private washing machines, fill the world with laundromates, and see people work those differences out in coordinated folding of intimate apparel. --Torill Mortensen --The Laundromat (Thinking with My Fingers)

A wonderful epiphany, taking place in a New York laundromat. Maybe there's hope for us after all.

Firefox Upgrade 1.5.0.7 Resets Personal Settings (and keeps resetting them) (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My preferred web browser is Firefox, but this morning when I logged in, Firefox had upgraded itself automatically, and it wiped all my bookmarks and personal settings. I was able to reload the bookmarks pretty easily, but the darn thing is resetting to the defaults every time I change the navigation bars to the configuration I want. I can't add my preferred search engines, either.

It's free, and I know you get what you pay for, but I'm booked almost solid from 10:30 to the end of the day today, so the timing was very bad for me.

(The same upgrade happend on my computer at home without any problem, so I don't know what the deal is.)

Zombies, eh? They're us, and we're them. When the worst comes to the worst what we should really fear is ourselves, and each other. I think that's what Jerry Springer was really trying say.

All of which serves as a very lengthy introduction to my latest completed project. A knitted homage to Dawn of the Dead. --han --A knitted homage to Dawn of the Dead. (cakeyvoice)

The quotation that caused all the furor involves a 14th-century dialogue between a Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam. The pope quotes the emperor, who says: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by sword the faith he preached." Fighting words to be sure, but the pope does not quote them favorably. Rather, Benedict uses the quote to illustrate his deeper point. For Christians, it is always wrong to spread the faith through violence, precisely because of what the Christian faith claims about God. The pope says that "violence is incompatible with the nature of God" because acting against reason is contrary to God's nature. God is reasonable, not willful or arbitrary.

This may seem like an abstract theological point, but much of our common life hangs on it. By analogy, what if the people who ruled our country were willful and arbitrary? What if they said they were above reason or even acted contrary to it? If they made no pretension to being reasonable, there would be no reason for them to shirk away from threats and violence. --Thomas W. Smith --Pope's focus: Reason -- Its relationship to the divine was the subject of a recent speech that upset some Muslims. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

In my Media Lab class yesterday, I said that I thought journalism wasn't doing a very good job of covering the reaction in parts of the Islamic world to Pope Benedict's use of a quotation that contained statements highly critical of Muhammad.

This article, which includes a link to the full text of Benedict's speech, offers much-needed context and balance. The content of this article is far less striking than photos of livid Muslims burning effigies, but it's far more important to our understanding of the nature of the issue at hand.

Way Wrong -- Time to Go to Bed (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A new media researcher asked me to provide him with a few paragraphs on a subject I know well, for a proposal he's planning to submit soon.

I was going to dig out a couple of canned paragraphs this weekend, but one thing led to another, and I started tidying up a few loose ends and looking up a few more leads.

It's now 5am, and I've churned out about 7 new pages, with 2 pages revised from other projects.

I hate being sick, because the pills I take to get me through bathtime and bedtime stories perk me up so much I can't get to sleep. Oh well... at least my insomnia was productive tonight.

Last week, the Lonelygirl15 videos were indeed exposed as a hoax. The girl depicted was an aspiring actress named Jessica Rose. She subsequently discussed the videos on CNN, The Tonight Show and MTV -- not bad exposure for a previous unknown. The creators of the video were revealed to be film professionals who describe their efforts as a "new art form".

These filmmakers are misguided though -- this isn't art, it's deception for profit. Misrepresenting commercials as independent user-generated content, actors as members of the public, and fiction as fact is not art, it's advertising. The Lonelygirl15 videos were created for the explicit purpose of promoting a product, in this case the actress Jessica Rose. --Chris Stevens --Truth or illusion: What's real on YouTube? (C|Net.uk)

I don't have much to add, I'm just blogging this because it offers a good overview of the situation.

Update: I guess I do have something to add after all. Hypertext theory describes how literary criticism responds to the democratization of the writing process, whereby the audience and author essentially share the same tools, and the boundaries are blurred. While those theories were developed long before the blogosphere and wikis made any real impact in the democratization of electronic text, they really did a good job predicting the changes on the horizon.

We're seeing more changes in the world of video, now that we're seeing professional using their expertise to mimic the gritty realism of amateur productions (think Blair Witch Project).

I have been thinking lately of the importance of the internet-distributed "footage" that is pretty much the MacGuffin in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I taught that book in a literature survey course a few years ago, but very few students could get into it. I wonder if I should try that book again, with upper-level students, now that the online culture of dissecting and analyzing bits of video is part of mainstream culture instead of part of science fiction.

Is it such a bad thing for a student to feel comfortable enough with a teacher to share their personal problems? --Lori Rupert --When Seeking Comfort is Selfish (Continued) (Kaleidoscope )

This question sparked a good discussion on one of my students' blogs.

I'm not sure I'm striking the right tone in my comments over there. Typically when I comment on a student's blog, I try to pose open-ended questions that are designed to keep the conversation going, rather than designed to convey my own specific personal opinion. But in this particular instance, I'm conscious that I can't just give general philosophical answers, since the question is coming up in the context of my own specific classroom, and naturally the students are curious about what I think.

I am of course interested in my students' welfare, and I want to appear accessible and helpful. The sisters and administrators at Seton Hill regularly speak of service and love, not in a general sense of "I love teaching!" but a specific personal sense, drawn from the school's roots as a Catholic institution.

Last year I had a student who worked on a family farm. When the nuclear holocaust lays our civilization to waste, this student and his family will survive while I scour the radioactive landscape searching for discarded cans of SPAM.

So I'm very conscious of the limitations of my training. I'd like to think that my training in English literature gives me a good insight into the human heart, and prepares me to be a good listener and storyteller. Yes, I'm older than most of my students, and so I'm probably a wiser about some things. Yet they see me mostly in a completely artificial situation, where it only looks like I am smart because the subject matter is so narrow.

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.
--F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content (Useit.com)

Your goal as a web author is to put your best stuff in the hotspots. Obviously you can direct the user's attention somewhat, using whitespace and graphics. But note how little attention readers devote to the boxed content on either side of the main column.

Should Students Send a 'Thank You' Message after Every E-mail Exchange with a Professor? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In Writing for the Internet, I had my students read some articles about e-mail and power relationships in the classroom. They are raising some very good questions in response.

One asked me whether professors expect their students to send thank-you messages after every e-mail exchange.

I just checked with two colleagues, and their reactions confirmed my own gut response. If it's just a routine question (what format do you want me to use, do you want it on paper or online), all three of us agreed that we don't expect a thank-you.

If I answer with a quick two or three word reply, and then a few minutes later I see another message from the student in my in box, I'll assume that the student has a raft of new questions.

If the request required me to look something up, or give an opinion that takes longer than two or three seconds, then yes, a thank you might be appropriate.

Anyone else want to chime in?

A man with a black trench coat whose shooting rampage in a Montreal college killed one person and wounded 19 others before he was slain by police said on a blog in his name that he liked to play a role-playing Internet game about the Columbine shootings. --Montreal gunman liked 'Columbine' game (Yahoo! | AP)

Of course it must have been the video game that caused this horrible tragedy. And to think -- he blogged about it, too!

The mainstream media coverage of Columbine was only reporting and reflecting on something that was there already, right? Only video games and things people write in their online profiles can cause people to snap like that.

Damn those games! Damn those blogs! They're ruining society!

Kimveer Gill's vampirefreaks gallery also includes a shot of his favorite movie poster (The Corpse Bride), and alcohol; his profile (what the mainstream media seem to be calling a blog) includes the following shout-out to Quentin Tarantino: "Keep making those kick ass movies man, you rock."

Why did Godin decide to create a book series based on third-party NES games, and why did he use the name F.X. Nine?

His reasons were both sentimental and practical. Godin was talking to his 10-year-old nephew about his hobbies, and was surprised to discover that the boy had never read a book for fun. Ever. Reading didn't seem to interest him or other children his age. What was popular with children, however, was playing video games on the NES. Godin set out to create books that his nephew would want to read -- and thus the Worlds of Power series was born. --Struck and Sharkey --8-Bit Lit: Inside the NES' World of Power Series (1Up.com)

A full day of radio programming from WJSV (now WTOP), Washington, D.C., for September 21, 1939. This project presents a representative sample of the mix of network and local programming of a major metropolitan network affiliate of the period. It also suggests a good deal about the programming mix of such stations: early morning breakfast variety programs followed by soap operas during the day, news and sports in thelate afernoon, family serials in the early evening followed by drama and orchestral music until sign off. Finally, because it includes the advertising for each program, it tells us a good deal about the power and shape of radio advertising at the time. --A Day in Radio (University of Virginia)

The blurb above is actually from the program guide.

Children are being deprived of the right to grow up at their own pace by a combination of advertising, junk food, pressures at school and TV and video games, experts have warned. --Junk Food, TV and the Internet 'are poisoning childhood' (This Is London)

While video games are mentioned last in the lead, what does the photo show? A kid playing a video game.

When four planes were hijacked on a sunny fall morning, easy-to-use blogging services were still few and far between. Yet many who witnessed the horror of the attacks firsthand took to the keyboard to talk with the world.

Horrified Americans used e-mail, instant messages, any available communication tool. But weblogs meant large audiences, not just friends and family, could read those stories from the scene. --Robert Andrews --9/11: Birth of the Blog (Wired)

Birth? No. Perhaps, when blogs were able to provide information and solace that the traditional media could not, blogs reached the age of reason.

The assassination of JFK was a similar turning point in TV journalism, and the overnight TV coverage of the 1980s hostage crisis in Iran led to the birth of cable news TV.

Once the initial chaos had died down, on 9/11/2001 I sifted through my notes on technology and human culture, and posted World Trade Center: Literary and Cultural Reflections.

At the time, I was still editing my blog more or less by hand, and my system didn't involve posting blog entries on individual pages, nor did it permit readers to post comments.

Thus, I felt the need to post this as a static web page.

The e-mails came at a steady clip, from all around the world.

--live bloopers (YouTube)

CAA spokesman Michael Mand said he "could neither confirm nor deny" that the agency is representing whoever is behind the 27 video posts. (Other talent agencies and production companies contacted by The Times denied any connection.)

As to horror film rumors, calls made to several studios found no such plans -- but plenty of fascination for the way in which a Hollywood-ready cultural phenomenon has been built from a grass-roots Web platform. Lonelygirl15, many say, is the next-generation "Blair Witch Project," using interactive forms of storytelling that, like the 1999 hit, tries to trick an audience into thinking it's true.

Indeed, if a commercial project does result, lonelygirl15 may prove to be a model of how to harness a groundswell created on seemingly populist, user-driven websites such as YouTube and MySpace. --Richard Rushfield --Mystery Fuels Huge Popularity of Web's Lonelygirl15 (LA Times)

The 75-year-old actor said: "I'm interested in man's march into the unknown but to vomit in space is not my idea of a good time. Neither is a fiery crash with the vomit hovering over me."

Onboard the Starship Enterprise, sci-fi fans saw Shatner freely 'explore the final frontier, seeking out new life and strange new worlds' in 79 episodes of the 40-year-old TV series . --Captain Kirk reveals he won't go boldly into space (Daily Mail)

Sounds like a great PR idea that backfired -- though the article also says that Sigourney Weaver (of the Alien movies) has signed up.

It might be cheaper to take along a Yoda puppet, or a thumbdrive running the program that simulates Jar-Jar Binks.

And come on, Daily Mail. That should be "to explore strange, new worlds... to seek out new life, and new civilizations."

The outcry suggests the exhibitionism and voyeurism implied by participation in social networking sites has ill-defined but nonetheless real limits, and expectations of privacy have somehow survived the publishing free-for-all. For many people, apparently, pushing information to everyone on a friends list is not at all the same as publishing the same information on one's own page for those people to find. --Michael Calore --Privacy Fears Shock Facebook (Wired)

Thanks for the suggestion, Karissa.

It doesn't sound as if Facebook is acknowledging that a vocal portion of its users might have legitimate cause to be concerned.

A squirrel scampered into the bicycle wheel of an unlucky Finnish opera singer, causing him to fall, knock himself out and break his nose just ahead of the world premiere of a new opera. --Squirrel in spokes floors cycling opera singer (Yahoo!)

Hm.... I don't think the word "floors" is good for this headline, since "squirrel in spokes" makes so little sense that I had to wonder whether "spokes floors" was some kind of a thing, though I suppose the presence of both "spokes" and "cycling" should have suggested a bicycle.

This item refers to an event that took place "last month," so its only news value is its oddity.

Western civilization did not exactly end last night as Katie took to the anchor chair. But the changing of the guard did represent another kind of cultural change.

As of yesterday, network TV has proven it no longer feels the need to pretend that its nightly news broadcast is sober stuff, populated by earnest men and women with serious reporting backgrounds and working blow-dryers.

It was not just Katie's legs. Or her clothes. Or her unnervingly high-pitched and overmodulated voice, more appropriate for a weather girl in Tampa than a national broadcaster. It was all these things together - and more. --Andrea Peyser --She Looked Like a Little Girl Who Had to Go Potty (New York Post)

Ouch. I'm far too impatient to watch TV news, especially now that I have DSL at home. But blogging this catty critique was irresistable.

In addition to creating massive numbers of phony blogs, sploggers sometimes take over abandoned real blogs. More than 10 million of the 12.9 million profiles on Blogger surveyed by splog researcher Vasa in June were inactive, either because the bloggers had stopped blogging or because they never got started. (The huge mass of dead blogs is one reason to maintain a healthy skepticism toward the frequently heard claims about the vast growth of the blogosphere.) "Nobody is watching or moderating the comments and posts on those abandoned blogs," says Tim Mayer, director of product management for Yahoo search. As a result, he says, scammers are looking for ways to hack the interface of these blogs to post to them and take advantage of their inbound links to increase the ranking of spam sites. For obvious reasons, it is difficult for a Google or a Yahoo to discern when a previously valuable site and its links slip over to the dark side and become part of a spam empire. --Charles C. Mann --Spam + Blogs = Trouble  (Wired)

Amusing orchestral piece that features an unusual solo instrument.

Various clips here (warning -- the last one is the most complete, but it contains explicit Jerry Lewis content).

You've probably heard his Syncopated Clock and the original, wordless Sleigh Ride.

All are a far cry from Anthiel's Ballet Mechnique.Leroy Anderson's ''The Typewriter''

By "library smut" I am in no way referring to the photo books on native peoples, or the illustrated health manuals, or any of the other volumes which, in your childhood, you lurked about the library aisle to find with the sole purpose of sneaking guilty glances at naked bodies. Nor am I referring to the "risqué" novels by Miller, Cleland, Réage, or Lawrence you leafed impatiently through as a teenager. No. What I'm talking about here is the full-frontal objectification of the library itself. Oh yeah. --Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut (The Nonist)

Mmm.... stacks... tables... books...

There are many thing that are true -- the state is a parasite on society, private property would solve most social problems, rock music is tedious and stupid -- but are nonetheless not generally known or applied. The truth that shaving cream is a racket should be added to this. --Jeffrey A. Tucker --The Shaving Cream Racket (LewRockwell.com)

This makes a lot of sense. Is it true?

I used an electric razor as a teen. It died when I was a sophomore in college, so I switched to razors for about a year. After cutting myself pretty badly one day, I switched back to another electric razor. I dont think I've replaced it in 15 years.

I started out by trying to be the easygoing candy civilian instructor -- "No, just write your name anywhere, pen or pencil is fine" -- answering all the questions, and then a couple of the jokers decided to tweak things a bit more: "Sir, cursive or print?" And I couldn't not be the smartass in response, and failing to take into account the fact that they'd just had two months of military training, I sarcastically replied, "Morse code, Cadet."

And I'm sure you know what the mock-dutiful response was, with stifled smirks all around.

"Roger that, sir." And they started to do it.

And seeing those stifled smirks was all it took for me to realize I was about to receive a section's worth of portfolios with names rendered in dots and dashes, so I tried to one-up: "Cancel that, Cadet. I want your names in Braille." --Mike Edwards --Professionalism Lost (Vitia)

Great story.

There was no separating the two Treks, the vacuous and the visionary. It's no coincidence that one of the most legendary episodes -- "The Trouble with Tribbles" -- was essentially a comic take on the show's established themes.

Given some distance from the moment, I realize this is actually an entirely healthy attitude. It's the attitude we should take about everything in life, and ourselves in particular. Aristotle once said, "Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor: For a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit."

In other words, nothing's so serious that we should let it destroy our sense of humor, and nothing so silly that we should blind ourselves to the truths it might be carrying. And if there's anything Kirk taught me, it's that there's always a third way. --Lore Sjöberg --My Love Affair With Star Trek (Wired)

I was going to add a comment something like, "My inner Trek geek is really showing this week," but when has it ever really been inner?

So I won't make any excuses. There's a lot of Trek material out there currently, since the show first appeared 40 years ago, and I'm gonna blog what I like, and like what I blog.

The story's happy ending depends on a signal fact: the Banks children will no longer be brought up by servants. Henceforth, their own mother -- corralled homeward through the beneficent intercessions of Mary Poppins -- will do the job herself.

"Mary Poppins" advocates the kind of family life that Walt Disney had spent his career both chronicling and helping to foster on a national level: father at work, mother at home, children flourishing. --Caitlin Flanagan --Becoming Mary Poppins: P.L. Travers, Walt Disney, and the making of a myth (The New Yorker)

Of course, the family name is "Banks" not "Suffragettes," but I do think there's some layered meaning in the fact that Mrs. Banks uses her "Votes for Women" sash on the kite that Mr. Banks built, and that as a family unit they get the kite in the air. She doesn't throw away her aspirations, she transforms them.

When Mr. Banks upsets the masculine workaday world -- first unintentionally by setting up a situation in which his son causes a run on the bank (the daughter doesn't play any active role in that, as I recall), and then intentionally by invoking the children's word ("supercalifragilistic") and telling their joke (about the man with the wooden leg named Smith) -- he makes a lasting impression, as we first see the elder Mr. Dawes laughing at the joke and the younger (but still grey-haired) Dawes blurting out "Daddy!" Later, all the board members are in the park, flying kites as Mr. Dawes Jr. relates his father's happy death and offers Mr. Banks a promotion. This is, of course, a fantasy, but we can assume that Mr. Banks is entering a transformed working environment, where men are permitted to admit and celebrate their emotional attachments to their families.

Until almost the final moment of the film, Mr. Banks believes his banking career is over. He's been humiliated, de-carnationed, his bowler smashed and his umbrella ruined before the board members of the Dawes, Tomes, Mousely, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank. And instead of contemplating suicide, he's reveling in the newfound joys of fatherhood.

Having said that, I can't argue with this assessment of the plot:

Mr. Banks's journey would provide the narrative arc of the film. The mother would be a matron who had lost sight of her most important calling: raising her children. She, too, would be transformed into a good mother (of the kind recognizable to an American audience in the early nineteen-sixties) through the offices of Mary Poppins, who would leave, never to return, once her work with the parents had been completed.

At any rate, the best part of this article is the chronicle of Walt Disney's personal efforts to get the author of the Mary Poppins books to agree to Disney's vision. (Note also that one of Travers's objections to the movie was "How could dear, demented Mrs. Banks, fussy, feminine and loving, become a suffragette?" That complaint seems to work against Flanagan's main point, that Disney's artistic goal was to celebrate the traditional family that represented only pain for the creator of Mary Poppins, and while Flanagan buries that detail, she's a responsible journalist for including it.)

When I look back through my old journals and photos, I'm struck by how much travel has changed since 1994. These days, I take it for granted that the Internet keeps me in touch with friends and family, even from far-flung places like Mongolia and Patagonia; in 1994, contacting a single person from Montana or Pennsylvania required a phone booth, a pocket full of quarters, and a lot of patience. In 1994, I navigated with paper maps, got my information from a single Let's Go: USA guidebook, and met people at random. These days, folks can navigate via GPS or online driving directions, scour the Internet for a wealth of travel ideas, and use online message boards to make travel friends before they ever leave home. --Rolf Potts --How travel has changed (Yahoo! News (will expire))

In what she described as "the most emotional moment" of her academic life, University of Virginia sophomore communications major Grace Weaver sobbed openly upon concluding Steinbeck's seminal work of American fiction Of Mice And Men's Cliffs Notes early last week. --Girl Moved To Tears By Of Mice And Men Cliffs Notes (The Onion (Satire))

And I love the quote from the professor: "I look forward to skimming her essay on the importance of following your dreams and randomly assigning it a grade."

Battle sequences, ship exteriors, galaxy shots and landscapes (which previously came courtesy of matte paintings) will be given more shading, depth and computer-generated believability. The original Alexander Courage-composed score has been rerecorded in stereo and, perhaps best of all, William Shatner's opening monologue has been remastered, so that "Space, the final frontier..." will sound better than ever. --Extreme Makeover: Star Trek Edition (Yahoo!)

Hmm... I'm not sure I'm too happy with this. I'm not about to get worked up and nostalgic about it, or anything, because I can see the marketing thinking behind it.

Star Trek actually featured very briefly in a dream I had last night. When I woke up this morning, my PDA was within reach, so I wrote it all down with an eye to putting it on my blog, but that will have to wait until I have some free time.

(When I first read the headline, I thought perhaps some Trek nerd would get the chance to overhaul his apartment -- perhaps in his parent's basement -- to look like the bridge of the Enterprise.)

--Wired News: Star Trek Submissions (Flickr)

What a cool idea! Wired News has created a Flikr account, and invited readers to sumit their Star Trek memorabilia photos, in preparation for Star Trek's 40th anniversary.

Adolescence was a long time ago. Grad school taught me to relate to others more as colleagues than friends. If I need reassurance of my students' esteem, I need look no further than my course evaluations (Ha!). So my sparse friend count doesn't normally bother me.

But when I first opened my account, it read "You have no friends" at my institution. Such a bold declarative statement has the power of persuasion. --John Lemuel --Why I Registered on Facebook (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

The primary audience for this publication is college administrators and professors, so most readers would understand the "I" in the title as referring to "a professor".

So far, I've spent much more time and effort researching the internet at large, though I'm following eagerly the work published by grad students and younger professors who are more closely associated with the internet's social aspects as defined and experienced by people of college age and younger. (Even my earliest forays onto the internet were for academic or professional reasons, though of course I enjoyed the virtual company of others who were similarly excited by the possibilities.)

Once when I told a class of students that I don't have any friends to exchange IMs with, I got a sympthetic "Awww!!" What I meant, of course, was that I keep in touch with friends through other media.

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. --End of an Affair (The Washington Post)

I've blogged about the Valerie Plame affair several times, so it's worth blogging this development.