October 2006 Archive Page

--Stephen Colbert on Blogs (Youtube)

My student Gabby Blanchard posted this on her blog. Hilarious.

In the new SDK it is necessary to build the client and server DLLs before running the MOD. Please build them if you see this message when trying to run the MOD.

--Source SDK Known Issues (Valve Sofware)

Chris Sherman from SHU's helpdesk has spent several hours helping me try to get the Half-Life 2 SDK working in a classroom lab for EL 405: New Media Projects. We're making progress. Once we gave the students SuperUser access to individual computers in the lab, we've been able to install Half-Life 2 so that the game plays. We've also been able to install the editor, so that students can create levels. But when we try to compile and run the maps, we get the above error message. When I track down this error message, it looks like we'll need to install Microsoft .net (which is a huge mega-installation that opens up a whole new can of worms). I know I didn't install that on my laptop, and I remember reading somewhere that there's an alternative C++ compiler that works with the HL2 SDK. I also noticed that that particular lab has Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 installed, and there does seem to be a conversion utility that lets you change the HL2 files so that Visual Studio 6.0 can use them. But that's not something I can fiddle with at home -- I have to be at the lab in order to try that. So I'm going to keep looking.

Students have been able to install Inform 7 and Blender 3D on the lab computers without any trouble. We purchased site licenses for The Games Factory 2 and Flash, so those never gave us any problems.

I've still got a couple of weeks before I'm scheduled to teach HL2 modding. At the moment, while it would be awkward and silly, I could have the students e-mail me the maps they make during the classroom exercises, and they could run them on my laptop. But that's hardly an ideal solution. (I really wish Tim Holt's Half-Life 2 modding book were out... sigh.)

Aside from a brief flirtation with Pong, Jenkins never really paid much attention to games until the mid 80's, when he first connected his son's new Nintendo Entertainment System -- and was blown away by what he saw. "Ever since I've been passionate about games," he says. "I want a serious game that engages me the way Super Mario did when I hooked up that computer." --David M. Ewalt --The Serious Business of Serious Games (Forbes.com)

Ewalt is blogging from the Serious Games Summit in Washington D.C.

I attended that conference the last two years, but didn't attend this year, in part because I'm giving a talk at a local conference next week, and in part because I didn't want to miss Halloween (again) with my young children.

Inkshedding was first developed by writing teachers Russ Hunt and Jim Reither in the 1980s. You can find all kinds of information about it online. Of course, as with any popular teaching technique, many different practices now fall under the name of inkshedding, as instructors have personalized it and made it their own.

Dan's version of the technique begins by asking students to spend five minutes writing down their thoughts on the main discussion question for the day. That writing should be what composition teachers call "freewriting" -- i.e., the student writes whatever comes to mind, without anyone making judgments about it or corrections to it. Freewriting's function is to help generate thoughts and ideas, so it's an excellent starting place for discussions of any kind.

In Dan's session, the students finish their five minutes of freewriting and then pass their notebooks to another student. Everyone reads the notebook in front of them and then spends five minutes freewriting in response to the first student's thoughts. That process continues through several iterations, until -- after 20 or 25 minutes -- the students have engaged in an extended dialogue with each other, all on paper, and are ready to start talking about their ideas out loud. --James M. Lang --Shaking Things Up (Chronicle of Higher Education)

I did a little bit of inkshedding myself when I was in Toronto. My variation is to have students do this on their blogs, on their own time before class starts, so that we can jump right into a classroom discussion. Occasionally I will devote class time to blogging, too, which sends an important signal that I find the activity to be important.

Milblogs published by authors with "boots on the ground" received little attention from officials in the early days following the Iraq invasion in 2003, when the phenomenon of blogging was less known. But since then, Pentagon scrutiny has increased.--Xeni Jardin --Under Fire, Soldiers Kill Blogs (Wired)

I'll return to my analysis of Kairos as a project identity later. But first I'd like to consider one other aspect of Jerz's critique--attention to audience. Kairos's design (referring to Issue 5.1), Jerz says tongue-in-cheek, "has drastically improved," making it "no longer an easy target." The only mention of audience in Jerz's critique is when he mentions his technical writing students, whom he asked to critique Kairos's design. While he concedes that they are "not the primary audience" for Kairos, he affords their comments ample room as support for his argument. His instructions to students didn't seem to include analyzing design, let alone content, with Kairos's actual audience in mind--writing studies scholars who teach with technology. Through his application of Jakob Nielsen's laws of web-user experience, Jerz does speak indirectly of an audience, the ubiquitous "users" (see also useit.com). These users, it would seem, include all people with access to the World Wide Web, suggesting that anyone and everyone is a potential audience for the journal just because a page exists in cyberspace. --Tracy Bridgeford --''Kairotically Speaking'': Kairos and the Power of Identity (Kairos)

Bridgeford offers an excellent, thoughtful response to my rather blistering 1999 critique of the journal Kairos, which Kairos was brave enough to publish. My main point was that design choices interfered with the journal's ability to get its content in front of its audience.

Even as I was working on that article, the navigation of Kairos developed and improved, so that my critique was out-of-date before it was even published. And the invention of KairosNews addressed several of the points that I raised in my Kairos review.

My essay did focus on the design and user experience, and I did report what I observed after asking several classes of undergraduates to use the site. While their motivation for reading a Kairos article would differ from the motivation a scholar would have, I don't think that a student's frustration in not being able to find a search engine and not being able to find where to click in order to read the whole article would be substantially much different from the frustration a hypertext theorist would feel while trying to carry out the same operations.

In my defense about the audience issue Bridgeford mentions above, I did acknowledge the academic audience obliquely, in subordinate clauses such as "If the purpose of Kairos is to distribute scholarly information..." And elsewhere I argued that the use of consciously "clever" and obscure navigation techniques perpetuates the mythology that hypertext has to be difficult and challenging in order to be effective. Even in 1999, when I wrote the article, hypertext had been around for long enough that hypertext authors who were not consciously informed by hypertext theorists had discovered a separate set of expectations and methods for communication in hypertext, and that that set of techniques was quickly becoming a standard that Kairos was not reflecting. But none of that really affects the value of Bridgeford's points.

From time to time, I have thought about possibly revising that original review, but Bridgeford's thoughtful essay does an excellent job following up on the issues I raised, and reflecting further on Kairos's accomplishments in the 10 years it has been pushing the boundaries of online scholarship.

Public education in America operates on a manufacturing metaphor. Line up the parts, send 'em down the line, inspect them, then ship them out.

The assembly line idea couldn't be more out of synch with the way a wired (and now wireless) teenager deals with information and with other people. They are social in fundamentally different ways than when we were in high school. Yes, there is still peer pressure and acne. But what'snew is what isn't there: Barriers to communication and sharing of information. Technology has reduced and in some instances eliminated the distances and timeframes that defined the way we learned 20 years ago. This is a destabilizing thought for some people. So was rock ?n roll.

The teenagers walking into my classroom have iPods, cell phones (with movies on them) and twitching fingers from constant IMing and video games they play when they are not in class.

So I jumped at the chance to try Making History when it first came out. To their credit, the company behind the game was extremely honest about how to use the game and how not to use it. --David McDivitt --Do Gamers Score Better in School? (Serious Games Source)

Efthimiou sup­posed that the first vam­pire arose Jan. 1, 1600, around the be­gin­ning of a cen­tu­ry dur­ing which some of the first im­por­tant mod­ern writ­ings on vam­pires ap­peared. The re­search­ers es­ti­mat­ed the glob­al pop­u­la­tion at that time, based on his­tor­i­cal re­c­ords, as 537 mil­lion.

As­sum­ing that the vam­pire fed once a month and the vic­tim turned in­to a vam­pire, there would be two vam­pires on Feb. 1, four the next month, and eight the month af­ter that. All hu­mans would be vam­pires with­in 2½ years. --Math vs. vampires: vampires lose (World Science)

I vant to evaluate your eqvations!

What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way. --Camille Paglia --Salon Interview: Camille Paglia (Salon)

I had to start skimming after I found this quote, but I think most of the world probably gets about 20% of anything Paglia says. Even the headline writer for this interview couldn't come up with anything specific to highlight.

She really lost me when she analyzed President Bush's vocal patterns and concluded that there's something in the tone of Bush's voice that leads her to expect the US is in the process of launching another major military assault.

Still, her comments about the Democratic reaction to the Foley incident are spot on.

Somewhere in the stream of perfectly-formed academic sentences that gush from her mouth, there are always numerous challenging points that are definitely worth considering.

Webb's novels disturbingly and consistently -- indeed, almost uniformly -- portray women as servile, subordinate, inept, incompetent, promiscuous, perverted, or some combination of these. In novel after novel, Webb assigns his female characters base, negative characteristics. In thousands of pages of fiction penned by Webb, there are few if any strong, admirable women or positive female role models. -- Press release issued by Sen. George Allen (R-Va), regarding the writing of his Democratic challenger, Jim Webb. --Allen's Revenge: Exploses Underage Sex Scenes in Opponent's Novels (Drudge Report)

The page on the Drudge Report will probably expire eventually, but by then there will likely be other pages that cover the same content.

Should a candidate's published fiction be used against him in a political debate? Does the artistic accomplishment of an author (or vocalist, or actor, or supermodel, or zucchini-juggler) lend that person's political views any added intellectual weight?

Does your answer depend on whether the author in question falls on your side of the political fence or on the other side?

--Tetris - From Russia With LoveBBC | Google Video)

I didn't have time to watch more than the first few minutes of this documentary on Tetris, but it looks really good.

--Building a Robotic Dalek Pumpkin (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

Via boingboing.

A new, meticulously researched book of quotations attempts to set the record straight on those beloved phrases that have crept into everyday use as signs of wisdom and wit, including Sigmund Freud's sage advice that "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." (He didn't quite say that, although his biographer thinks he would have approved of the idea.)

"The Yale Book of Quotations" has a simple thesis: famous quotes are often misquoted and misattributed. Sometimes they are never said at all but are, instead, little fictions that have forged their way into public consciousness.

Take, for example, "Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead," a rallying cry supposedly uttered by Farragut during the American Civil War battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864.

According to Fred R. Shapiro, a Yale librarian and editor of "The Yale Book of Quotations," it was a comment either never said or at least never heard on the day of battle. The first appearance of a partial version of the phrase came in a book published in 1878 but reports from the day of the battle never mention the phrase. --Arthur Spiegelman reviews The Yale Book of Quotations --New book takes humbug out of quotations (Yahoo! | Reuters (will expire))

At first Nihal and I were slightly wary of each other and then I told him I wondered if an ageing Radio 4 presenter could learn "street". He humoured me and gave me a lesson.

I flatter myself that I have a reasonably good ear for language. I reckoned I could get away with a bit of "Hey, man? how ya doin?" But, no, it doesn't work like that. Street language is inventive and rich. Even a greeting in street is a complex business. "There's a million ways of not saying anything," says Nihal. "Two people could walk up and say: 'What's happenin? Cool, man. What's goin' on with you? Good? All good? Things are running? Peace. Safe'."

Peace means "I'm outa here" (it's a long story) and safe means "We're safe with each other"; there's no animosity. By contrast Nihal told me that if you want to insult someone in street you might call him "chief". No one seems quite sure why. Of course there is a well-known dark side to contemporary street rap. But the point of this intriguing language, according to Nihal, is "to separate me from you". He told me: "It's like Latin in the church. Knowledge is power." In fact, the moment older people do know is the moment the language dies. "Bling is a classic example," says Nihal. "As soon as you hear commissioning editors at Channel 4 using it it's dead."

Meanwhile, our language continues to be taken over by pseudo-management speak that is itself in danger of becoming meaningless. Take the world of charity, previously known as the voluntary sector. It is now, gradually, changing its name to the Third Sector. Older volunteers are "totally exasperated" not just with the alien language but with what it represents: the transformation of their charity from the kitchen table and the rattling tin to the computer terminal and the huge mailshots. They don't believe it helps them provide a better service.

This language is also entering our schools. Instead of simply teaching, teachers are now being invited to make a "personalised learning offer" to children. It's more than just a dreary piece of business-speak. It implies that a child is a client or a customer, the figure to whom the "offer" is made. The children, in turn, are invited to be "co-investors with the state in their own education". --John Humphreys --We will soon be lost for words (Telegraph)

We The Creators of this site, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish Fantasy Congress for the United States of America.

In this game, we give you the power to draft and manage a team of members from the U.S. Congress. --Fantasy Congress

Help! Trapped in a text adventure!
- Marc Laidlaw

Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time
- Alan Moore

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

Cryonics: Disney thawed. Mickey gnawed. Omigawd.
- Eileen Gunn

MUD avatars rebel: virtual Independence Day.
- Paul Di Filippo

Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news?"
- Steven Meretzky --Very Short Stories: 33 writers. 5 designers. 6-word science fiction. (Wired)

Cool idea. Which are your favorites?

Mr. Halavais expected some of his fabrications to languish online for some time. Like many academics, he was skeptical about a mob-edited publication that called itself an authoritative encyclopedia. But less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, thanks to the vigilance of Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries. --Brock Read --Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade? (Chronicle)

I wish this article had come out a few days earlier, since the assigned reading in my Writing for the Internet class was a hodgepodge of articles that attempted to cover pretty much exactly what this article covers.

--Wishes (Despair, inc :( )

"You want feel-good and heartwarming, right?" Scorsese said. "I can do that. Or I can do casual violence with no strings attached. You know I can. What else you want? Kung-fu wire-work? Mentally disabled guy? Boring Robert Redford-style fishing movie? Just tell me what to do, I'll do it. Done. End of story. Give me my Oscar and I'm out of here. Poof." --Martin Scorsese's Next Film To Be Three Hours Of Begging For Oscar (The Onion (Satire))

A month in hyper-space can scatter the brain. Traditional books offer readers respite from hyperactivity. The book's definitive, closed, linear argument lets mind and sensibility enjoy moments of inner harmony. Linear text offers the kind of contemplative thinking that goes beneath the surface. --Heim, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. --Thinking that Goes beneath the Surface (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This quote is almost 20 years old, but it's still valid.

A place to read? How many students come to scholastic grief because they never find one? Last year the daughter of a friend flunked out of a huge state university because, she claimed, she could never actually read anywhere. The dorm room? Her roommates were all fun and games. The library? Far too noisy. In effect, the girl fell victim to the energies of a text-messaged, i-Poded and above all cell-phoned American culture. --Terry Ceasar --A Place to Read (Inside Higher Ed)

The Federation of American Scientists called for major investment in digital educational games that could reshape how students learn and workers are trained for 21st century jobs.... The news may confound some parents, upset about the hours their teenagers "waste" on video-gaming or about the sex and violence portrayed. But scientists have long recognized such entertainment games also cultivate skills demanded by today's employers, and that "serious games" are a different "animal" from Grand Theft Auto-type games. --Video-gaming American schools (Enquirer)

I just left WoW permanently. I was a leader in one of the largest and most respected guilds in the world, a well-equipped and well-versed mage, and considered myself to have many close friends in my guild. Why did I leave? Simple: Blizzard has created an alternate universe where we don't have to be ourselves when we don't want to be. From my vantage point as a guild decision maker, I've seen it destroy more families and friendships and take a huge toll on individuals than any drug on the market today, and that means a lot coming from an ex-club DJ. -- The View From the Top (Soul Kerfluffle)

I have so far resisted multiplayer online games, simply because the demands of a job and family make mowing the lawn, showering, and sleeping challenging enough. I typically save my game-playing time for the summer breaks, and even then only play after the kids are in bed. I am conscious that I am missing a huge part of online culture, but quite frankly there is so much culture out there, all the time, that one has to be selective.

Of course, I speak as someone who has spent hours and hours using Google Sketchup to designing an imaginary monument that I might possibly use in a puzzle in a text-adventure game that I've been working on since 1999. But I digress.

Obsessions are fine, as long as you can turn them off when you have to. The author of this piece couldn't, so it's a good thing he finally stopped.

If I wanted to meet people, I wouldn't be sitting on my ass filling out a MySpace profile. So I skip that and move on to Interests. Exhaustive lists of interests are a major feature of MySpace pages, which is odd because very few of them include "reading other people's exhaustive lists of interests." I put down a few of my passions (cabin fever, eyeglass wipes, people and animals named "Esmerelda"...) and move on to the trial by fire: musical interests.

Frankly, I can't afford to list anything. You know the part in The Hobbit where Smaug the dragon accidentally reveals a vulnerable patch on his chest and subsequently gets shot down like a fire-breathing partridge? Revealing your favorite bands is kind of like that, only not incredibly nerdy. --Lore Sjöberg --MySpace Avoidance Fails Miserably (Wired)

Scholars in all fields continue to gain preferment because they are "productive" (the academic euphemism for obsessive), and students continue to emulate them. Future investment bankers pull all-nighters delving into subjects that they will never need to know about again, and years later, at reunions, they recall the intensity of the experience with something close to disbelief--and, often, passionate nostalgia. The university has never been a sleek, efficient corporation. It's more like the military, an organization at once radically modern and steeped in color and tradition. And it's not at all easy to say how much of the mystique could be stripped away without harming the whole institution. --Anthony Grafton reviews Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark. --The Nutty Professors: The history of academic charisma. (New Yorker)

I was sick in bed with a virus on Saturday and most of Sunday, so I spent Monday and Tuesday of fall break marking papers (he said feverishly).

So I'm in one of those moods when I feel nostalgic for grad school, where my only responsibility was to do the readings, talk about them in class, and write term papers.

In a carefully phrased, 128-bit encoded announcement that has challenged U.S. security agency procedures, top officials of the National Cryptography and Information Security Council warned that "FrpX-K5jE-Oc4n-e5Dn" if "Ha4d-87gH-uiH3-gB5r-g8Bh" late Monday. --U.S. Cryptographers: 'FrpX-K5jE-Oc4n-e5Dn' (The Onion (Satire))

Universal Music, the world'slargest record company, has launched the established media industry'sfirst legal action against user-generated internet sites in the wake of its distribution deal last week with YouTube, the most popular video-sharing website. --Joshua Chaffin --Universal sues video-sharing websites (FT.com)

Note that YouTube isn't the one being sued. YouTube actually cut a deal with Universal.

I wonder whether part of the deal with YouTube sort of hinted with a wink that Universal should sue YouTube's competitors.

Reuters has opened a virtual news agency in the Second Life online world.

The bureau will be staffed by Reuters media correspondent Adam Pasick who will report on the lives and business dealings of Second Life's residents. --Online world to get news bureau (BBC)

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. --Jakob Nielsen --Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (Useit.com)

The rosary that retired quarry worker Bernard "Chub" Clark has created in his rural three acre yard near Nokomis is made of old bowling balls and probably weighs close to 1,000 pounds, give or take. --Tony Reid

--1,000-pound rosary sends heavy message: Pray (Herald & Review)

Now that's style. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

A cartoon version of the life of Pope John Paul II, telling the story of his life and death in animated form, is to be released on DVD by the Vatican.
--Cartoon tribute to Pope John Paul (BBC)

I'm not at all surprised. John Paul II was an expert at reaching out in all media, so this is very fitting. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

As we sat in the admissions office, waiting to meet with a tardy faculty member, my daughter said she liked the place and could see herself enrolling there. But that quickly changed when the brusque and standoffish young professor arrived, coldly staring down at us and simply saying, "So what do you want to know?"

His responses were terse to the point of being defensive. He seemed to know little about his own program, told us some of the advantages of other colleges that we said we were considering, and seemed intimidated when my daughter shared her work experience with a major company in the field. We quickly concluded that he didn't want to be engaged in this conversation -- he obviously had something much better to do, and in less than five minutes, he was gone. My daughter walked to the car saying that she had gone from liking the place to "no way" wanting to attend there after meeting the professor. --Stephen M. Winzenberg --The Professor's Role in Admissions (Chronicle of Higher Education)

I agree completely that in a small liberal-arts college (SLAC), the perceived approachability and availability of the faculty is very important.

There was one day over the summer when I had three meetings with families scheduled. A few days after I accepted these appointments, my wife asked me to change my office day so that we could do something else as a family. She wasn't very happy when I said no.

So I drove to the office during the summer break to meet with potential students. The first appointment didn't show. The second appointment didn't show. Thankfully, the third did show.

That was a particuarly bad day, but I'd say that at least 1/3 of the time, people don't show, or they show up so late that I can only shake hands with them before my next appointment arrives. So let me add my request... if you're planning to do the college tour with your family and your schedule changes, please let the college know, so that professors like me who've fought with their spouses in order to keep their appointments with you won't be left high and dry.

Is this the way we will all be 'enjoying' our television programmes and computer games in the future?
--One giant step for home entertainment? (Daily Mail)

This will exercise your neck muscles, that's for sure.

Wait a minute... someone forgot to put the flat broom head on top of that helmet. Ohh this makes me angry. Very angry indeed!

Reginald Pike's Yael Staav takes us from model to billboard in under 60 seconds in this impressive new spot from Dove.

--Dove - Evolution ('Boards)

A short film that might be very useful for sparking discussion in a class studying the effect of marketing on women's body image. This advertisement is still banking on the power of the beauty myth to sell its product, but it does so in an unusual way.

On Wednesday, Friedman ordered Take-Two to give him a copy of the game, along with providing someone to play the game for him to watch before he made a decision. A Take-Two employee played the game for the judge Thursday afternoon, using a cheat code to go through the game faster.

A game like Bully is designed to take several days to complete. Friedman said he watched the game for two hours. But Thompson, who was present at the viewing, said it was only for one hour.

''You did not see the game,'' Thompson told Friedman at Friday's hearing. ``You don't even know what it was you saw.''

Thompson said he disapproved of a Take-Two employee taking the judge through a game because the employee could have avoided making violent choices. --Bridget Carey --Judge doesn't object to video game `Bully' (Miami Herald)

Thompson has a good point. Watching a game for one or two hours is not the same thing as playing it. No doubt a person who was devoted to getting the game banned could have played the game with the sole purpose of showing the most violent sequences.

Response Options trains students and teachers to "lock onto the attacker's limbs and use their body weight," Browne said. Everyday classroom objects, such as paperbacks and pencils, can become weapons.

"We show them they can win," he said. "The fact that someone walks into a classroom with a gun does not make them a god. Five or six seventh-grade kids and a 95-pound art teacher can basically challenge, bring down and immobilize a 200-pound man with a gun." --Jeff Carlton --Texas school tells classes to fight back (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

Of course, running at an attacker with rounded scissors won't be of much use. Soon parents will be petitioning to let Junior bring a gun to school, for purposes of self-defense.

Anyone over a certain age -- and you know who you are -- will remember those wonderful days of peppermint sticks and electric dog-washers, a magic time when running barefoot through the grass and having your cocker spaniel buffed and pressure-rinsed to a glossy sheen at the flip of a switch was every boy's birthright. Of course Rags is long gone now -- that unfortunate business with the faulty shutoff relay -- but you'll always have those stains on the ceiling to remember him by. --''Junior -- put down that book and turn on the electric dog-washer'' (Plan 59)

I love the retrofuture.

From a collection of what metafilter calls 50s print advertisements.

Why? Why? Why am I spending Friday night clearing out my in box?

There were 1900 e-mails in my in box when I sat down an hour ago. Now there are only 1250 or so. I feel good about that, but pathetic at the same time.

There has to be a German word for "the feeling you get when you are happy to be making a little progress in something, but then you realize how pitiful you really are to be happy about such a dorky thing on a Friday night."

Dr. Sandry loved jazz--he played clarinet and saxophone--and was a big fan of Dave Brubeck and Charlie Parker. --Dr. Martin Sandry: 1937 - 2006 (Chicago Tribune)

Uncle Marty had been married to my father's sister for over 30 years. I remember him for his passion for jazz music, and his kindness towards my aunt.

Thanks for sending me the obituary, Rosemary.

"When I remained 366 days underground, I had the impression of only spending 219 days," he said. --Man to live three years in cave (BBC)

While their children are in class, parents like Hanlon and Leigh Jerz, of Unity Township, sit and chat.

Jerz's 8-year-old son, Peter, is participating for the first time.

"I thought it would be enjoyable for us to see other home-school children and parents more regularly," Jerz said.

Hanlon said the program offers home-schoolers resources they otherwise wouldn't have -- like access to science labs and a stage for drama classes.

"These are things that are hard to replicate when you're teaching at home," Hanlon said.

Jerz hopes the program will help educate future public school teachers about home-schoolers.

"It's an opportunity to come together in a mutually beneficial way," Jerz said. --Jennifer Reeger --Home-schoolers get taste of classroom (Tribune-Review)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Many a Quaint and Curious Volume of Forgotten Flash (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Just a bit of fun with Flash. (My work for chapters 3 & 4 of Flash Journalism.... I'm just barely staying ahead of my students.)

The parser in Adventure is harder to use than most interactive fiction parsers, because this is the first of its type and fairly primitive. This is almost immediately evident when a user makes it to the building. One obvious thing to do would be to input "enter building;" doing so, however, returns the message "That's not something you can enter" (Crowther and Woods). Likewise, one puzzle requires the user to sic a bird they have captured on a snake, but the command "throw bird at snake" does not work. Instead, simply "throw bird" will take care of that problem. Another puzzle requires users to realize that a certain object (a wand) is useful on a certain object (an uncrossable gap) in a certain way (by issuing the command "wave rod," not "use rod"); these are probably not ideas that are immediately thought of by users. Another aporia that exists is the game's geography. As the annotation notes, the game doesn't utilize Euclidian geography: "a north exit from one room to the next doesn't necessarily imply a south exit will return you back to the original room" (Jerz). This makes map-making, a standard interactive fiction tool, somewhat difficult. --The Problem is Choice: Aporia, Epiphany, and Conflict in Interactive Fiction Endings (ENGL 668K: Digital Studies (University of Maryland))

Some good points, but the "enter building" problem is an issue with one particular edition of Adventure -- the Inform port by Nelson (1994), after Ekman and Baggett (1993). It's not accurate to ascribe this particular difficulty to Crowther and Woods. And the original Adventure parser was only built to recognize a noun and a verb (in either order). The Inform environment that enabled the 1994 port permitted the entry of more complex sentences, but the game itself doesn't recognize those complex sentences. since the game was written for a parser that only recognized a noun and a verb. And the practice of mapping an adventure game on an Euclidean plane only became possible after the Adventure genre took hold. Another classic cave-explloration game, Hunt the Wumpus, took place in an icosahedron, if memory serves.

While I'm quibbling with this passage about a digital text I know well, overall I thought this posting did a good job applying Aarseth's concept of ergodic to the chosen examples.

The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better -- a lifelong benefit. Children who don't learn correct technique find it harder to write by hand, so they avoid it. Schools that do teach handwriting often stop after third grade -- right after kids learn cursive. By the time computers are more widely used in classrooms for writing, perhaps in fourth or fifth grade, many children already have decided they don't like to write.

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills. --Margaret Webb Pressler --The Handwriting Is on the Wall (Washington Post (will expire))

The opening statistic that says only 15% of the 2006 SAT exams are written in cursive is fairly alarming. But I'm in no position to complain. My own handwriting is terrible. I remember consciously making changes to the way I wrote when I started taking notes in college -- ways to improve my speed. And I'm willing to carry around a laptop or tap digital keys on my PDA rather than deal with my own awful scrawl.

A mere breath of a breeze disturbs the quiet of autumn in south London and the wind turbine on the gable of Donnachadh McCarthy's home turns lazily.

The morning sun casts shadows from solar panels onto the walls of the house and filters through the windows into his living room.

"I'm in surplus. I am now providing money to the grid," he said with a grin, gesturing at a red light winking on the wall that marks the progress of his domestic power station. --Oliver Bullough --Home wind turbines turn fashionable in Britain

Perhaps just a little overdone, but still much more interesting to read than "Donnachadh McCarthy's home has a windmill and solar panels."

A Florida woman has been awarded $11.3 million in a defamation lawsuit against a Louisiana woman who posted messages on the Internet accusing her of being a "crook," a "con artist" and a "fraud." --Laura Parker --Jury awards $11.3M over defamatory Internet posts (USA Today)

I haven't looked into the details of this case, here is a big difference between saying "I was very disappointed with the results of doing business with Sally Jones of company X, and I'll be taking my business elsewhere," and saying "Sally Jones is incompetent -- nobody should do business with her."

The amount of the award is ridiculously high, but since the defendant doesn't have that kind of money, it's really just symbolic.

Just because you have the power to use the internet to say anything you want does not mean that you should. An American's constitutional right to the freedom of speech does not promise to protect a speaker from the consequences of choosing to exercise that right.

Internet search leader Google is snapping up YouTube for $1.65 billion, brushing aside copyright concerns to seize a starring role in the online video revolution. --Google Snaps Up YouTube for $1.65B (AP|MyWay)

That's cut and paste journalism, taken in large part from Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia to which any member of the public can contribute.

Here's where freelance journalist Tom Winterbourn took the exact same words and sentences from Wikipedia. --Community Papers Anniversary Lift (ABCTV (Australia) MediaWatch)

An interesting article about a print journalist accused of plagiarizing Wikipedia. Since the article I'm linking to is a transcript of a TV item, it's pretty much useless to read on the web. The title "Community Papers Anniversary Lift" is completely meaningless, perhaps because this story was introduced by an anchor who read a script that was not archived with this story, which is why I had to add my own explanation of what you were reading in order for this excerpt to make any sense.

There are highlighted screenshots and excerpts, but they're not connected to links. Wouldn't it make sense to link to the Wikipedia source and link to the journalist's article, and let readers judge for themselves?

A great example of how not to do online journalism. (Link via Metafilter.)

[Y]ou're running around on a big circuit board, powering up at transformers, dodging resistors, your path barred by ROM chips. This probably seems pretty weird to The Youth of Today. In the years since Tron we've been trained to think that a journey to "the inside of the computer" might entail running around on a desktop peering into manila folders and perhaps occasionally hiding in a trash can from a giant grinning paper clip. The kids I see tapping out IM messages during lectures probably have no more familiarity with or interest in the innards of the sealed boxes they're typing on than they do in the what the profs are saying.

But in 1982, juggling circuit boards was part of owning a computer. --Tron (Adam Cadre)

Via Grand Text Auto.

Annoying Blue Bounding Box in Adobe Flash (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm introducing Adobe Flash to my New Media Projects course next week. I've fiddled with Flash before, but I haven't yet worked through the examples in our book. My simian curiosity got the better of me, and I started clicking buttons at random. I suddenly noticed that all the shapes I drew had this dumb blue box, and I couldn't select line segments or cut shapes into smaller sections anymore.

The problem is I had clicked the "Object Draw" button, which forces Flash to treat each shape (in this case a circle) as a single unit. The interface mocks me... the relevant button in the Options section is, of course, a circle with a blue box around it. (Why didn't I think of that sooner? Duh.)

Spent about 10 minutes being frustrated by this, which was frustrating, since I'm counting down the minutes since I've got to get out of the office and head for home.

Update: It took me a little longer than the 50 minutes I alotted for the classroom exercise, but I did finish a simple Flash animation. Getting it to display online will have to wait for another day.

No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he accumulated were really just acquaintances. He's also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos - all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends. --Some Youth Rethink Online Communications (AP (MyWay))

"We are certain that the 16 editors, 417 freelance photographers, and both writers at In Touch will continue to give little Sutton Pierce the attention that a growing child of celebrities requires." --Britney Spears Loses Custody Of Child To In Touch Magazine (The Onion (Satire))

--Timez Attack (BigBrainz)

There are flashcard "games" and is multiplication bingo and multiplication Frogger, and they're all well and good. But this is something else. Watch the video on the home page.

--[E-Mail is for Old People] (User Friendly)

Thanks for the link, Josh.

The question, "what can you say when you step off something?" tells you almost everything you need to know about Armstrong: Everyone else on earth was thinking in terms of stepping on something -- the surface of another world -- while the pilot was thinking, and still thinks today, in terms of stepping off something -- a fragile, thin-skinned, dangerous, badass boat nobody had ever flown before. --I'm a Man, Yes I am (Begging to Differ)

I've been looking for a good reason to blog the news about the Australian hobbyist who found Armstrong's missing "a".

But it turns out that even when I try to live an Apple life, that is a pretty lousy experience too. How could that be, you say? The apparent point of Apple's existence is to create a beautiful and polished user experience. Well, it turns out that what Apple does is beautiful and polished *graphic design*. Actually interacting with the system is something else. --Ben Bederson --Switchback: Horrors of a Windows Power-user Trying to Switch to Apple OS X (HCI User Advocate)

>pick up axe

Taken.



>grind axe

You are now grinding your axe.



Seriously, I'm blogging this because I miss the love I used to feel for my Palm PDA and my Dell laptop. I still have a Palm and a Dell, but I don't love them anymore. I just use them.

I will never love the Windows/PC symbiont. (Is that the right word?)

I wanted Bederson to love the Apple, because I want to believe that it's possible to make complex technology that works beautifully and beautifully works.

Link via MGK.

Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some independence from the manipulations of marketing, which typically divert attention from what a thing is to a back-story intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands. Knowing the production narrative, or at least being able to plausibly imagine it, renders the social narrative of the advertisement less potent. The tradesman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer; he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more autonomous.

This would seem to be significant for any political typology. Political theorists from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson have questioned the republican virtue of the mechanic, finding him too narrow in his concerns to be moved by the public good. Yet this assessment was made before the full flowering of mass communication and mass conformity, which pose a different set of problems for the republican character: enervation of judgment and erosion of the independent spirit. Since the standards of craftsmanship issue from the logic of things rather than the art of persuasion, practiced submission to them perhaps gives the craftsman some psychic ground to stand on against fantastic hopes aroused by demagogues, whether commercial or political. The craftsman'shabitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the distinction between the Right Way and the Wrong Way. --Matthew B. Crawford --Shop Class as Soulcraft (The New Atlantis)

I'm in the middle of a unit that's causing some stress in my Writing for the Internet class. I'm asking my students to code simple HMTL pages by hand.

I love this group of students, and I'm sure they'll do fine. But I find their struggles noteworthy, especially since our initial discussion of Vannevar Bush's brilliant essay "As We May Think" focused mostly on how difficult many of the students found it to read an old-fashioned essay. ("Why did he go on and on like that? Couldn't he have just given us the gist in a few sentences?")

Through their blogs, the students have already had plenty of changes to write for online audiences. Asking them to code their own HTML will demand from them a deeper understanding of how technology affects our writing. When you code something by hand, there are no shortcuts; no resources that you can skim in order to get "the gist." Since they are Humanities majors, they are used to earning grades by being bright, by innovating and improvising, and by having great ideas. They're not used to being flummoxed because they used the word processor program that they were familiar with instead of the text-editing tool that I recommended, so that their code ends up with curly quotes that confuse the web browsers. For some of them, it's a huge mental shift to keep them from habitually clicking on an icon to open the file. (If we want to edit an HTML file, you have to open it in a text editor, but clicking on it will open it with the default application, a web browser.)

It's certainly not their fault that the GUI is such a part of their lives that they find this kind of coding foreign and unsettling. I am giving them lots of time to work on this, since I feel it's very important for them to get under the hood of the web pages that we'll be analyzing.

I did feel the HTML textbook I chose was very straightforward, with step-by-step instructions on what you have to type at each stage, but so far it seems the book lacks context (such as an introduction to the whole concept of icons and filenames and file extensions, which I've internalized because I used the command line interface for years before I ever touched a computer mouse). I've been able to supply that context after the fact, but the end result is still a bit of a disruption.

In grad school, I did computer programming on my own, for fun, because I found it personally rewarding to have a compiler tell me "45 errors" at 10:45am and to see that error list drop to 10, 3, 1, and finally 0 by the time I took a lunch break. There was no such software to detect logical flaws or factual mistakes in my literary analysis papers, which meant I had to develop a different mental model of what it means to "make progress" in my academic work. But I've found the methodical approach to bracketing a problem area and zeroing in on it is useful in any intellectual task.

If you have a 10,000 line computer code, and you work in one section at a time, changing one thing at a time, and trying to run the program after each change, you'll always know what you did to introduce the error. If you work on multiple sections at the same time, making radical changes all the time, and you're not methodical about checking your results, then you'll have no idea what you did to cause the code to generate 467 errors, you'll have no idea where to start looking for solutions, and you'll be tempted to throw it all away and start over.

It's okay to throw away a paragraph or a 1-2 page paper and start over, but it's a huge waste of time to wait until your 5- or 10- or 50-page paper is beyond all hope, and then throw it all away.

Writing for computers (code) and writing for humans (essays) require different processes of drafting and revision, and the feedback loops are different. But in both cases, knowing the process is vital to generating a good final product efficiently. Crawford notes that the craft of wheel-making includes knowledge of what trees to fell, what time of year to cut them, and how to preserve the wood. While I don't expect the students to be able to mine the raw materials to be used to construct the computers they'll be using, I do feel they need to have more than a surface-level understanding of the medium they'll be using.

Fortunately, I've built the "Writing for the Internet" course so that, at this stage, students aren't being evaluated on the quality of the writing that they're doing -- right now, all they have to do is get the example website working, and they are free to work together as much as they wish. So, while the students have blogged about being terrified by HTML, the atmosphere during the workshops has been positive.

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the Teaching Carnival where we discuss all things academic, from teaching to college life, from HigherEd policy to graduate school research. Last time, I separated the Two Cultures in a way. This time I want to keep them mixed - both sides of campus often deal with the same issues anyway. There are tons of links, so let's start right away... --Coturnix --Teaching Carnival #13 (Science Blogs)

A Teaching Carnival is a collection of links related to networks of ongoing discussions. I've been involved in one on Turnitin.com and plagairism, but there are tons of discussions I didn't know about, such as the SAT challenge (in which educational bloggers were given a prompt and 20 minutes to write an essay that will be evaluated by volunteers who have graded for the SAT).

The games are now available for downloading. --IFComp 2006

Mmmm.... interactive fiction.

Bryan Louiselle wrote two new songs, "Cellular Fusion" and "Counting on You," ... --Disney retools its 'School' (Variety)

I don't get cable, so I haven't seen the TV version of High School Musical. But it turns out that the two new songs that are part of the stage version were written by someone I knew in high school. Bryan was a senior when I was a sophomore. He played Harold Hill the year I played Mayor Shinn in The Music Man. He was an all-around nice guy. From what I can tell, "Cellular Fusion" seems to be about cell phones. I'll bet his songs rock.