March 2007 Archive Page

I've been hunkering down in my little home office here more often than ever recently, all because I'm on a quest. No, I'm not crossing swords with evildoers or standing defiant before a salivating dragon while searching for some sacred bauble (well, not unless you count the occasional bouts in Bethesda's Oblivion).

I'm penning my way through forms and applications and standing defiant before an open mailbox about once a week until I gather the courage to thrust my hopes and dreams within. I've walked through a swamp of booths and flyers and pamphlets that taunt me with visions of the future, and I've negotiated terms of trade with numerous officials on unfamiliar territory.

I am meeting new allies. I am venturing beyond old borders. I am searching for an internship. --Chris Ulicne --One good quest deserves another (Below Zero)

A new media journalism major begins contemplating the Real World in earnest.

Grand Theft Auto and its progeny -- nearly a dozen sequels and spinoffs, including this fall's GTA IV -- let players live out their fantasies. But few videogame fantasies match the real-life adventures of Rockstar Games. Almost a decade ago, a gang of young prep-school-educated Brits invaded New York with a then-outrageous dream: to make video-games hip. They would elevate a medium built on Mario and Pokémon into something defiantly grown-up -- games that would earn a place on shelves between Scarface and Licensed to Ill.

The lads at Rockstar Games scored. With more than 50 million units sold, Grand Theft Auto titles have pulled in a billion dollars in revenue. Along the way, the execs achieved the street cred and bad-boy rep of real rock stars. But then, like Tony Montana face-down in a pile of blow, they hit the skids. -- David Kushner

--The Road to Ruin (Wired)

Good article. Firmly on the side of technology, as one expects from a Wired article, but it still raises some good points.

--Maraka (YouTube | Saturday Night Live)

"Pump your hands to make the balloon fill up. Pump them harder. Come on! Harder! What's wrong with you? There! You did it!"

"Can you help me decide if Robert Blake was innocent?"

"Don't question it, just do it!"

Wonderful spoof of "Dora the Explorer."

White House Secret Service Agent Anthony Panucci is being called a hero after intercepting what could have been a critically damaging question aimed directly at President Bush during a press conference in the Rose Garden Tuesday. --Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush (The Onion (Satire))

I love the graphic that indicates the question injured a Fox News reporter who was standing nearby.

Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It's just not quite clear who.

It may not be one of the Internet's grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate, there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy way. --Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache --Blogs turn 10--who's the father? (MSN Tech & Gadgets)

A good article. I didn't know about the .plan prehistory of blogs, though it seems that even a reverse-sorted list of reflections doesn't really count as a blog without some kind of conversation that invites the reader to participate. Unless there are comments on the site, there have to be the equivalent of permalinks so that people elsewhere can point to and respond to what other authors put in their .plans.

Even if all the candidates we know about in this article are male, a headline like "Blogs turn 10 -- who are the parents?" might be more inclusive.

At any rate, thanks for the link, Eric.

Jim Towey is writing a blog to communicate with Saint Vincent students and to share the fruits of his experiences as their leader. These will be posted from time to time as his schedule permits. Click on this link to reach the archive and the latest posting. --President's Blog (Saint Vincent College)

The president of St. Vincent College has a blog.

It's really just a series of essays (no comments or outbound links that I saw), so it's a stretch to call it a blog. Nevertheless, it's some good writing.

His most recent entry is about George W. Bush being the commencement speaker for Saint Vincent. (It's dated March 26, and begins "I want the students of Saint Vincent to be the first to know," but I had heard about it several days earlier.)

Saint Vincent used to be the men's college that was partnered with Seton Hill College when it was a women's school, but now they are both co-educational competitors.

Star Trek / Mission Impossible Prop Mash-up (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

While riding the train back from a conference, I spent some time watching early episodes of Mission Impossible. This screen capture shows the characters prepping for a mission.


Because I recently designed 3D models of Star Trek furniture in order to teach myself Blender 3D, my eye immediately picked out the funky curves of the chairs in this scene. Paint the body of the chairs blue, make the legs black, and add a big back cushion, and you'd have Star Trek bridge chairs.



But my Trek nerdiness doesn't stop there... I also recognized the oval table from the court martial scene in "Menagerie" (a two-part episode built around the original failed Star Trek pilot).



Star Trek and Mission Impossible were both produced by Desilu studios, and I understand they were filmed on neighboring sound-stages. I had heard that Star Trek prop designers sometimes looked in the MI trash bins for materials to scavenge, but this is the first actual evidence I've seen that suggest any sort of cross-over.


The MI image is a photo I took of my laptop screen, which is why it's so crappy. The Star Trek images come from TrekCore screen captures.

We walked out of the dealership, but not before learning that none of my personal data which was copied and recorded would be returned to me or destroyed.

It's going to be kept on file for 7 years. Policy, you see. It goes in the same file where they keep the fingerprints.

So now I've lost copies of my driver's license, credit report (which was also run without my knowledge), and marriage certificate (a copy of which was required in order to process the sale under my new name).

When I looked all this up online, I found? nothing. How is this possible? This is the Internet. Hundreds of people find my website each week from looking for photographs of owl vomit. But somehow this bizarre infraction of personal privacy has gone totally undocumented. --Brave New Car Dealer: fingerprints required to buy a car? (lornamatic)

With presidential campaigns now poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising that will blanket television before November 2008, this seemingly home-produced video -- created with software and a laptop, and likely without the benefit of a team of expensive political consultants -- opens a new window, Rosenberg said. It has dramatized a brave new world in which passionate activists outside the structure of traditional campaigns have the power to shape the message -- even for a presidential candidate.

The ad is proof that "anybody can do powerful emotional ads ... and the campaigns are no longer in control," Rosenberg said. "It will no longer be a top-down candidate message; that's a 20th century broadcast model." --Political video smackdown (SF Gate)

Interesting analysis of the Hillary 1984 video.

The researchers then studied 68 men and found that those who played even one racing game took more risks afterward in traffic situations on a computer simulator than those who played another type of game.

Then the researchers had 83 men play either a racing game or another type of game, and found that those who played the racing game reported more thoughts and feelings associated with taking risks than the others. --Racing video games cause reckless driving: study (c|net | Reuters)

That's a misleading headline. Should be "Racing video games cause reckless driving in driving simulations."

The participants played an aggressive driving game, and then participated in a driving simulation that involved videotaped scenarios, and had the option of sitting passively while the scenario progressed, or pressing a single key in order to abandon a risky move.

Participants sit in front of a computer monitor and learn that they will be confronted with 15 different videotaped risky situations in road traffic (driver's perspective), such as planned overtaking maneuvers and arrival at railroad crossings that have begun to close. First, the specific traffic situation was described verbally. Then participants saw the critical situation two times. The first time, participants were instructed only to watch the situation. The second time, they decided when they would abandon their maneuver by pressing a key. The time that elapsed between the start of the sequence and the decision to abandon it was used as the dependent variable as an indicator of risk taking (the longer the reaction time, the higher the risk taking). The whole test procedure lasted about 10 min.

It's important to note that the headline is not a quote from the research paper.

I limit the time my children play video games. My preschooler doesn't find the games all that engaging. She may play two or three games for 20 minutes each, and then say she's done with games. My son will play a strategy/sim game like Civilization or Zoo Tycoon, or a puzzle game like The Incredible Toon Machine for hours and hours.

The article itself does not unequivocally claim driving games cause driving aggression. The headline has greatly simplified the situation, which is somewhat clearer in the article. (And the author included a link to the full academic paper, which is something that journalists don't always do.) In the "Limitations and Future Research" section, the authors of the study note several possible alternative interpretations. First, the researchers note that the driving simulation is not as good as actually asking people to play and aggressive game and then get behind the wheel of a real car (or at least a more realistic simulation). Further, those who played the driving game encountered stressful situations; any stressful situation may cause those who later used the driving simulator to take more risks. In addition, it may not have been the inherent potential violence in the driving game that caused the players later to be risky in the simulation; rather, the driving game may have simply been stimulating, and people who are stimulated may take more risks.

I'm disappointed by the distortion found in the headline. The article itself makes much more sensible claims.

I can see how my son acts after he has spent time playing a game with fighting (he takes an aggressive stance and grunts, for instance, when I ask him to do something he doesn't want to do... he does this with the understanding that I will get the reference, so it's a form of communication -- a way that he can tell me "I don't want to do that" without being overly disobedient). I don't think that he gets more violent with his sister after he plays games, but if the game has a lot of action, he can have trouble focusing on simple tasks like not getting crumbs in his lap or following instructions on a worksheet. When we first took him to a home-school evaluator, for several days before the event, my wife banished all computer games but chess simulators.

Lately, the kids have gotten interested in Lincoln Logs. Mostly my son wants to build buildings that he can smash (pretending to be Godzilla), but it's something that they both enjoy (though they are about 4 years apart). My wife sent me to the store the other day to buy another bucket.

By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate - the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading - offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always - as I have argued - an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution - which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our mediadisseminated glut of unending stories.

Television gives us, in an extremely debased and un-truthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. ("Time exists in order that it doesn't happen all at once ... space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.") --Susan Sontag --Pay attention to the world (Guardian)

A previously unpublished essay, written shortly before the author's death. A defense of the unique values of the novel, against the advances of television and the computer.

I did enjoy reading Sontag's particular take on the value of novels, but I found myself reading it like an archaeological text.

The printing press changed forever the career prospects path of people with really good handwriting. The printed page did lose the subtleties and personal traces left by the scribe's touch. The path of literature was forever changed when the financial power and aesthetic tastes of the merchant class began to attract the interests of storytellers who wanted to make a living. The rise of the novel meant the disappearance of much of what was good in the media displaced by the novel.

And the rise of a scribal culture threatened the oral culture that flourished before it.

Mars's southern polar ice cap contains enough water to cover the entire planet approximately 36 feet (11 meters) deep if melted, according to a new radar study. --Mars Pole Holds Enough Ice to Flood Planet, Radar Study Shows (National Geographic News)

Awesome news. I had no idea there was that much water -- but apparently the news in the article isn't the volume of frozen water, but the precise measurement.

MYTH: Frankenstein, the most famous work of English Romanticism, was written by an uneducated, teenaged girl, who took part in a ghost-story contest in Geneva, had a nightmare, and was inspired to write a story "which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!"

REALITY: Frankenstein is a work of profound and radical ideas, written by one of the greatest poets and prose stylists in the English language, who for personal reasons chose to conceal his authorship. --The man who wrote FRANKENSTEIN (ASP Wholesale)

From the publisher's website. The only review I've seen so far is from Camille Paglia.

-- Building a MAME console inside a TARDIS (STAR WARS ASCIIMATION)

Awesome. I particularly like the image with the caption "Another famous folding design."

To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit--General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess. --William BlakeBlake on Generalization (The Poetical Works of William Blake)

Jotted in the margins of his copy of another author's work.

Why did Lord Vader decide to break all protocols and personally pilot a lightly armored TIE Fighter? Conveniently, this placed Lord Vader outside of the Death Star when it was destroyed, where he was also conveniently able to escape from a large-sized rebel fleet that had just routed the Imperial forces. Why would Lord Vader, one of the highest ranking members of the Imperial Government, suddenly decide to fly away from the Death Star in the middle of a battle? Did he know something that the rest of the Imperial Navy didn't? --Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job? (Websurdity)

Thanks for the link, Josh.

The fantastically-colored star is our own sun as STEREO sees it in four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. The black disk is the Moon.
-- Stereo Eclipse (NASA)

A movie sequence shows the sun slowly turning from left to right, while the disc of the moon approaches from the left and crosses the face of the sun. Incredible.

''slip of the click'' (Google Search)

Just now, a colleague accidentally hit "reply all" instead of "reply," and immediately sent out an apology: "Got you all by a slip of the click."

I'd never heard that term before, but I like it. A quick search of Google reveals only 5 references on the internet.

A group of Buddhist monks in Malaysia is appealing for help to solve a problem with ants.

Buddhism forbids devotees from harming any living creature.

So the monks are looking for a creative and non-violent solution to deal with the insects, which are biting worshippers. --Malaysian monks face ant dilemma (BBC)

Rosemary, who sent me the link, writes "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink" after calling attention to the the last line in the story.

The music-master of George III said to his royal pupil, "There are three classes of violin players; those who do not play at all, those who play very badly, and those who play well. Your Majesty has already succeeded in reaching the second class." --Constructive Exercises in English (Boogle Books)

Now that's tact.

Then they tried to do a documentary of their own about him -- and ran into the same sort of resistance Moore himself famously faces in his own films.

The result is "Manufacturing Dissent," which turns the camera on the confrontational documentarian and examines some of his methods. Among their revelations in the movie, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the South by Southwest film festival: That Moore actually did speak with then-General Motors chairman Roger Smith, the evasive subject of his 1989 debut "Roger & Me," but chose to withhold that footage from the final cut. --Documentary questions Moore's tactics (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

I haven't seen "Roger & Me," but I know the premise is that it follows Michael Moore's attempts to interview an executive. I had no idea that Moore actually did film an interview with Smith, but cut that scene from the movie. (I have blogged before about Moore.)

Then how the pussy-cats did mew
What else, poor pussies, could they do?
They screamed for help, 'twas all in vain,
I So then, they said, "We'll scream again.
Make haste, make haste! me-ow! me-o!
She'll burn to death,- we told her so."

So she was burnt with all her clothes,
And arms and hands, and eyes and nose;
Till she had nothing more to lose
Except her little scarlet shoes;
And nothing else but these was found
Among her ashes on the ground. --Heinrich Hoffmann
--The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches (Struwwelpeter)

The above is from an anonymous translator. Don't miss "Shock-headed Peter," and the sad tale of Conrad Suck-a-Thumb: "The great tall tailor always comes / To little boys that suck their thumbs. / And ere they dream what he's about / He takes his great sharp scissors / And cuts their thumbs clean off."

Great stuff.

My wife and I jokingly refer to "Shock-headed Peter" because our boy's hair won't stay in place. It's been a while since we read these to our kids. Carolyn is just the right age to be traumatized by them.

The first person to come to his stand is a man from the Mekong Delta. He's got a letter with him, addressed to a businessman from Europe. He's his chauffeur, and he's been driving him to business meals and meetings for a year. He asks in writing if the man can get him health insurance and asks for a $200 advance. Ngo translates the letter into English. "Dear Sir," he writes with his fountain pen, "might I politely request, sincerely yours." Or would it better to say "affectionately"? No, that's too intimate. The man hands him a bill. Ngo slips it between the pages of his dictionary without ever looking at it.

Ngo is a mediator between worlds -- a professional letter writer of the sort that used to exist in the old days. He chooses each word carefully, formulates cautiously, polishes the style of the letter. He knows how important words are and what harm they can do. Ngo doesn't just translate. He bridges the distance between people, advises and comforts them, discreetly and with perfect attention to form. --Fiona Ehlers --A Day with Saigon's Last Public Letter Writer (Spiegel Online)

The new policy, which is currently under discussion by the community of users who regularly write and maintain the site, is being considered after it emerged this month that one of Wikipedia's most respected editors didn't hold the qualifications he claimed.

The user, who went under the pseudonym "essjay," described himself in an online profile as a "tenured professor of theology" and said he taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in the subject. He also said he held a bachelor of arts in religious studies, a master of arts in religion, doctorate in philosophy in theology and a doctorate in canon law.

But it wasn't true. --Martyn Williams --Wikipedia founder speaks on the Essjay controversy (IT World.com | IDG News Service)

I had begun with a flourish, emphasizing the excitement created when a young curator at the British Museum first deciphered the Gilgamesh epic, with its seeming confirmation of the biblical story of the Flood: "When George Smith discovered the Flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh in the fall of 1872, he made one of the most dramatic discoveries in the history of archaeology." Sterling ran his pen along these lines, but instead of praising this bold beginning, he tapped the page and asked, "Couldn't you make this opening just a bit more dramatic?"

He was right. I had told the reader that George Smith had made a dramatic discovery, but I had failed to dramatize the scene at all. Rewriting my opening, I placed Smith at the long trestle tables where he worked amid the watery sunlight coming in through the museum's windows. I went on to detail his awkward social position: Never having gone even to high school, he had been apprenticed as a bank-note engraver. Brilliant and ambitious, he had taught himself Akkadian and begun to haunt the museum's Near Eastern collections during his lunch hours, making his way up from Fleet Street through the press of carriages, pedestrians, and hand-drawn carts full of cabbages and potatoes.

With the scene now set, Smith was on his way, and so was my book. --Trading Up With Gilgamesh (Chronicle of Higher Education)

A great illustration of the message show, don't (just) tell.

During the Stalin era, Soviet officials frequently vanished from official photographs after falling out of favor at the Kremlin.

But the advent of Photoshop and its variety of tools has made it easier for photographers to tinker with images after they're captured. By the same token, the internet has allowed skeptical bloggers around the world to analyze photos in depth, and expose chicanery. --Randy Dotinga --Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries (Wired)

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

See my favorite Photoshop blog entry.

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulation. To begin with it is a play of illusions and phantasms: pirates, the frontier, future world, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to be what makes the operation successful. But, what draws the crowds is undoubtedly much more the social microcosm, the miniaturized and religious revelling in real America, in its delights and drawbacks. You park outside, queue up inside, and are totally abandoned at the exit. In this imaginary world the only phantasmagoria is in the inherent warmth and affection of the crowd, and in that aufficiently excessive number of gadgets used there to specifically maintain the multitudinous affect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or rather: inside, a whole range of gadgets magnetize the crowd into direct flows; outside, solitude is directed onto a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (one that undoubtedly belongs to the peculiar enchantment of this universe), this deep-frozen infantile world happens to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized; Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection at minus 180 degrees centigrade. --Jean Baudrillard --Simulacra and SimulationsJean Baudrillard, Selected Writings,)

He doesn't cite his source for the temperature at which Walt Disney's corpse is cryogenically suspsended, but it's still a great paragraph from an influential essay.

Described in its patent filing as a "hype-generating mechanism with fully integrated Mac compatibility," the iLaunch is powered by Intel dual-core processors optimized to calculate a product's gravitas. Apple claims the iLaunch can garner the same amount of press attention as a major scientific discovery, high court ruling, celebrity meltdown, or natural disaster at 200 times the speed of a traditional media-fostered launch.

[...]

"For too long, hands-on, maverick CEOs have devoted their valuable time to strutting around on stage and breathlessly describing the features of their new products, in the process encouraging cults of personality that could have a detrimental long-term effect on their companies," Jobs said. "Apple's goal within the next 12 months is to make me totally obsolete."

This comment earned the Apple CEO another, slightly longer, standing ovation. --Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product (The Onion)

--Field of Rainbows [Copyeditor's Make Mistake's Sometime's] (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The caption should read "photographer's shadow." The mistake doesn't come close to overshadowing the power of this great photo.

Of Dental X-Rays and Sales Pitches (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I went to the dental office at Sears yesterday, where I noticed that the woman X-raying my teeth didn't entirely disappear behind the lead wall when she pushed the button. Three times I watched, and I could see her elbow and part of her hand.

Before she did it a fourth time, I called it to her attention. She sounded very surprised, and thanked me for pointing it out, saying she hopes she doesn't already have cancer in her elbow.

I explained that as a new media specialist, I am interested in usability and design. She showed me that the button that fires the X-rays is located very near the edge of the wall, where the operator's right elbow and the outer edge of her hand could easily stick around the edge.

She sort of comically twisted her body to demonstrate how she would have to stand if she were to continue to push the button with her right hand but not expose the rightmost part of her body (the button really was that close to the edge). If she had pushed the button with her left hand, crossing her arm over her body, she would be less likely to expose any stray limbs.

Regardless of which hand the operator uses, positioning the button so that it is possible to trigger it from an unsafe position -- by standing on the patient's side of the wall and reaching around -- is simply bad design.

I was feeling pretty good about myself for helping someone avoid needless risk. But later on, after the hygienist had finished cleaning my teeth, she gave me a slick brochure advertising a new oral cancer screening procedure, along with a legalistic form for me to sign, where I could either order the $60 procedure right there, or sign a different line on the form to the effect that I had been offered the procedure and declined it. Obviously the idea was to make me worry that my mouth was about to burst out in cancerous tumors, and make me worry that I would feel guilty forever and rue the day that I didn't jump at the chance to give Sears my $60.

I handed the form back unsigned, saying that I would think about it, but that I felt uncomfortable being given a sales pitch while I was still lying on my back with the little paper napkin still chained around my neck.

She made another half-hearted attempt, saying something about how Sears wanted to "cover their butt" in case I ended up getting oral cancer, but I made it clear I wasn't interested in signing either way.

Only then did she push the button that brought my chair up to the normal angle.

It annoyed me a bit, that obviously the marketers at Sears Dental had put a lot of thought into how best to manipulate the environment so that I would be most vulnerable to a sales pitch, but that the X-ray button seems to have been placed so carelessly.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, a social theorist known for his acerbic commentaries on consumerism and excess, died Tuesday, his publishing house said. He was 77. --Noted French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies (Jerusalem Post)

When I first heard of this, I checked the Wikipedia entry, and was a little surprised to see no information on his death.

I thought I'd blog it here first, and then at least add the death date and a link to the news coverage. When when I went back to Wikipedia and hit "Reload," I saw someone else had added the death date and revised the opening sentence to use past tense.

Maybe tomorrow I'll think this is cute. In the meantime, I trust no one named Vladimir. God help me if I dream about this... --Karissa Kilgore --Nabokov will play you, fool (Sugarpacket)

One of my students vents her frustration at being completely fooled during her first encounter with Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.

Remakes are common these days for several reasons, primarily the fact that Hollywood is short on new ideas. Plus, the original story is actually pretty good, even if the movie failed to live up to its promise. Capricorn One is not exactly a classic, but it does have some great ideas, great scenes, and a great bombastic score by Jerry Goldsmith, best known for his Star Trek theme.

[...]

If there are any great performances in the movie, it's the helicopters. The final chase scene through desert canyons and over mountains is just the capstone. By that point the two dark helicopters have become the film's heavies. We never see the helicopter pilots' faces or hear their voices. Instead, the two insectoid machines seem to communicate with each other via telepathy and the pilots are only appendages. It was probably Hyams' best visual idea in the film. --Little red lies (The Space Review)

I particularly remember a scene where an astronaut, on the run from NASA, breaks into a deserted store and tries to make a phone call. As he gets absorbed in his call, you can see the nasty helicopters approaching from a great distance. Very intense.

And the fantastic sequence of the canyon chase with the hero hanging from the wing of the biplane was re-used for an episode of my favorite TV guilty pleasures, The Fall Guy.

The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in the past century, the number of people alive today is still dwarfed by the number of people who have ever lived. --Ciara Curtin --Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead (Scientific American)

The dire predictions of Malthus and The Population Bomb have deeply woven themselves into the fabric of a paranoid culture, particularly in big cities where people are all around you all the time. But legitimate and understandable concerns about ecology and global infrastructure shouldn't trump what the most recent scientific studies show, which is that there isn't really a population explosion -- at least, not the kind of explosion Malthus and Erlich have warned about.

If better health means that people are living twice as long in some developing nations, then very quickly you're going to see a doubling of the population. But people have most of their children before they are 40, so just because someone lives to age 80 does not mean that person will have twice as many children. Of course, the improvement in infant survival rates does mean that more babies will grow up to have their own babies, but the birth rate in industrialized nations is dropping even as the survival rate in developing nations is rising.

Journalists who swallow and regurgitate the statistics and dire predictions found in activist recruitment brochures or recited at rallies -- no matter what the cause -- are doing a disservice to their audience.

This is a favorite topic of mine.

"To use the Minute Paper," Angelo and Cross write, "an instructor stops class two or three minutes early and asks students to respond briefly to some variation on the following two questions: 'What was the most important thing you learned during this class?' and 'What important question remains unanswered?' Students then write their responses on index cards or half-sheets of scrap paper . . . and hand them in."

That technique, as the authors explain, provides "manageable amounts of timely and useful feedback for a minimal investment of time and energy." If every student mentions some trivial but entertaining point from your lecture as the most important thing they learned, you know you need to revisit the main idea next time. If a significant number of students list as an unanswered question one that you covered during a lecture, it's time to review.

Angelo and Cross describe the Minute Paper as an instrument designed to give feedback on a single course session, but you can use it to gauge student opinion on an entire unit or the course as a whole. In any case, the student responses take just a few minutes to read and will help you see whether the ideas, concepts, and skills you are teaching correspond with what the students are learning. --James M. Lang --Did You Learn Anything? (Chronicle of Higher Education)

I know from experience that students get very tired of filling out end-of-term evaluation forms in the last few weeks of classes. I've had students duck out early rather than fill out the forms.

I'm fortunate at Seton Hill that each year, my dean makes it a point to sit in on at least one classroom period for each tenure-track faculty member, so she has first-hand experience that she can use to help her interpret the impersonal numbers. (She has told me informally that she is not in the least concerned about students who complain that my courses are too hard, since she has heard good things and seen good results -- such as conference papers and acceptance to grad school -- from students whom I've mentored.) And my division chair has noticed in the past few years that the English faculty members get rated higher by the students when we teach courses in our specific subject area -- he has specifically asked me to teach my Drama as Lit course again, and was beaming about the student response to my News Writing course.

Perhaps I will try a Minute Paper directed towards the course as a whole. I am more likely to ask students to write a short end-of-class response to a specific lesson. For instance, last week I asked my Intro to Literary Study students to write down questions they have about the resumes they are writing for a professional-development unit. In Lit Crit, where most of the class actively participates in intense and productive discussions, I have asked students to write down a quick anonymous response about what they felt we accomplished. Many of their responses had as much to do with the class dynamic as the course material, which I take as a good sign that the students are paying serious attention to a resource -- the class discussion -- that takes constant attention over the course of a 2 1/2 hour class period.

I'm very grateful that we've started student oral presentations, so that I don't have to be "on" in the same way for the entire class period. It's not that I talk the whole time -- far from it. But it's intellectually exhausting to make sure everyone's participating and following along. It is rewarding, so I end up with that "tired-but-it's-a-good-tired" feeling. But it is a welcome break when a student has the floor for 20 minutes; I can spend more time thinking and lining up future conversation topics in ways that relate directly to what the student has just said. More important, I get to listen, and just enjoy the classroom culture.

Here's the dirty secret that you'll never see printed in a publisher's glossy promo material: Every textbook on the market is a crashing bore to read. All the publishers will assure you that they've added special features designed to attract today's young people and that the prose is lively and engaging. Yeah, right. The colorful maps, pop-out documents, intra-textual questions to contemplate, vibrant graphics, etc. serve only to drive up production costs and students won't use them. Note to profs: Got an image or a chart you really want students to use? Put it on a PowerPoint and project it in class.

Texts are not boring because of the people who write them. I know many of the folks whose names are on texts and know that they're dynamic teachers and writers. The problem is density. Put simply, most texts try to do way too much. I'm a proponent of multiculturalism and the last thing in the world we need is a return to "dead white men" history, but the more any text tries to do, the less coherent it will be. What would make more sense is for publishers to knock out some specialized texts. I'm a social and cultural historian and there's little that I teach doesn't reference race, class, and gender; hence, I don't need a text that parrots me in print. What I could use is a really short political/economic history; just as those whose specialty is political history would probably appreciate a nice cultural survey, or perhaps one that discusses multiculturalism. --Rob Weir --Teaching Without Textbooks (Inside Higher Ed)

I generally teach from a number of short books, rather than one whopping text. The exception is Lit Crit, but Keesey's book is a collection of lit crit essays stitched together with chapter introductions; it does not attempt to summarize all that was ever accomplished in lit crit.

Update: after writing the above, I began thinking of how valuable my big literary anthologies have proved to me, even though the class for which I purchased the anthologies only touched on a fraction of the texts. As an undergrad, I took a two-semester 300-level survey of British Lit, which was taught each term by a top-notch prof with a national reputation. There were 300 English majors and minors in that class, and while we didn't read every text in our two-volume, densely-printed Norton Anthology, I was glad to have those books a few years later when I was studying for my PhD area exams. But at SHU, our 300-level courses tend to be more focused rather than broad.

Regarding the anthologies themselves, they are all text, with no splashy (and expensive) fold-out maps or other gimmicks. So I wouldn't put them in the same category as the overblown textbooks Weir is criticizing in his article.

--Darth Vader being a smartass (YouTube)

I took one of Jill's classes two years ago and got addicted to blogging. I still keep it up although I don't write as much anymore, partly because of what Elin said I think: it's too separated. Facebook, flickr etc. connects, and are more "chill out" places where it's ok to simply goof around and say "hey what's up." You're more free when it comes to how much you want to read and write, and you don't have to bring in anything new and fresh. I still like to write, but don't have the time and facebook is such a brilliant way to keep in touch with friends from all over the world. I hardly ever e-mail these people anymore. Simply post on their walls and comment on their pictures. It's an easier, simpler and faster way of keeping track of everyone. Maybe it's like-- fastfood online socializing? --Ina --the novelty of blogs is wearing off? (jill/txt)

The quote is from one of Jill Walker's students.

I have noticed much the same thing. My freshmen are coming into school with an intense, well-developed online social network, so blogging doesn't feel attractive and innovative. It's just another kind of homework for them.

I have carefully kept the blogging homework associated with responses to assigned readings, as part of a long-term strategy to get students to write focused responses to specific passages in the assigned readings, rather than simply restating the main point in their own words or writing, "There is a lot of symbolism in this story. [List of symbols and what they mean.] Discussion question: Do you agree that there is a lot of symbolism in this story?"

Something new I've done this year is have students in an upper-level course blog once a week on a literary term that they had to look up while doing their other reading. I also have students blog their notes for oral presentations.

I'm very pleased with the academic quality of the blogging (most students in that class have blogged for me at least two or three times already). But there is definitely less online socializing, less of students posting their extra-curricular poetry and inviting peer feedback, etc.

I don't think that's a bad thing -- its a sign that the SHU blogs were ahead of their time, and what was experimental for us is now increasingly mainstream.

--XYZZY Awards 2006 (IF Wiki)

The XYZZY Awards are the Oscars of the Interactive Fiction community. I'm usually watching the kids on the weekend when the awards ceremony is held, but I always enjoy reading the transcript. The winner of Best Game is The Elysium Enigma.

You Can Never Have Too Many Cabinets (Half-LIfe 2 Mod) (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

(Although that is probably too many ovens.)

The kids are in bed, my wife is watching TV, and I've got a few hours to fiddle with Hammer on a Saturday Night (well, it's a bit past midnight now, actually). Soon I'll go up and visit with her for a bit.

I made these cabinets as 3D objects in Blender, exported them as flat image, followed the seven steps to texturing enlightenment (the filepaths are very tricky -- that's usually where I get stuck) to turn them into texture files, which I can now paint on the walls of blocks.

I'm now fairly satisfied that I should be able to make anything that is blocky, down to a resolution of about one inch. My next step will be to make a 3D prop -- probably something simple like a picture frame to start with -- and create an image file that will be wrapped around the contours of the prop.

I've recently downloaded iRogue for my PDA, and I've got one more final push to finish a big interactive fiction academic project that I've been working on for years. I always enjoy working with Hammer, but I can feel the call of retrogaming stirring my better-than-average text-fired imagination.

Performing a morality play - especially one penned in the Middle Ages - might not seem too appealing to an average college theater student.

Dr. Terry Brino-Dean, associate professor of theater and director of the Seton Hill University theater program, has come up with a way to give "Everyman" -- a medieval drama that deals with man's fear of dying and his hope for redemption through his actions on earth -- a contemporary twist.

In a theatrical style that college students can relate to, Seton Hill's new adaptation of "Everyman" is a musical with songs by the American folk rock duo The Indigo Girls. The Everyman character is played by five students who tell the story while sitting around a drum circle on a camping trip. --Candy Williams --Seton Hill's 'Everyman' keeps medieval text, adds modern music (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

I attended this show last night with my son, Peter (age 9) who thought it was great. He got the main message -- that your material possessions won't follow you into your grave, so you should pay attention to how you live your life.

Until just now, when I looked it up for this blog entry, I thought that my only knowledge of the Indigo Girls was their rendition of "Iko Iko" in the opening scene of Rain Man, but IMBD says that was actually perforemed by a group called The Belle Stars.

So I guess I actually knew less than nothing about the Indigo Girls.

The production used the full medieval text, with some modernization of archaic terms. I quickly grew to understand the effectiveness of having Everyman's speeches (some of them rather long) broken up and distributed among five actors who share the role throughout the play. Having each actor refer to "I" and "my" rather than "we" and "our" did emphasize the solitary nature of the quest -- each "Everyman" was making a solitary journey, but in keeping with the peer-to-peer culture the play depicted a group of peers experiencing the message in parallel.

During the talk-back session afterwards, I invited Terry to talk some more about his choice to make Everyman into a group, because that seemed to be so much at odds from the message of the play -- that we enter our graves alone, except for our Good Deeds. Having Everyman played by 5 different people who could put their arms around each other and comfort each other seemed to work against that message. (Like a good teacher, he bounced the question back to the audience first, though after a few comments he did note that the play does have both a communal and individual message, and his production chose to emphasize the communal one.)

More if I have time -- too much shouting and pounding. No, I'm not referring to the drum circle that opened the show (which was a lot of fun to watch), I'm referring to the perils of blogging with small kids at home.

(Update, several hours later:)

Also during the talk back session, I noted that the actors who played Death, Good Deeds, and Knowledge did not sound at all like they were speaking rhymed verse. I said something like "I'm an English professor, so I notice these things, and I mean that as a compliment. Those lines are hard to speech."

I was so surprised at the irony of my own slip-of-the-tongue that I said, "Hard to speech? I think I'm going to bail out now."

After that, Terry closed the session, and my son started jumping up and down with glee, pointing at me and saying "This guy killed the discussion! This guy killed the discussion!"

Chess pastry cutters handmade in brass by Biggles to celebrate the first year of Ms Sophie Sarin's "Thursday Chess Club".

Each piece can be made into biscuits. Not only do you have the satisfaction of taking a piece, but you can eat it as well!
--Edible Chess (Biggles)

They are advertised as "one of a kind" art objects...

Politicians and other moral crusaders frequently create "folk devils," individuals or groups defined as evil and immoral. Folk devils allow us to channel our blame and fear, offering a clear course of action to remedy what many believe to be a growing problem. Video games, those who play them, and those who create them have become contemporary folk devils because they seem to pose a threat to children.

Such games have come to represent a variety of social anxieties: about youth violence, new computer technology, and the apparent decline in the ability of adults to control what young people do and know. Panics about youth and popular culture have emerged with the appearance of many new technologies. Over the past century, politicians have complained that cars, radio, movies, rock music, and even comic books caused youth immorality and crime, calling for control and sometimes censorship. --Karen Sternheimer --Do Video Games Kill? (PDF) (Contexts)

Anyone, she wrote, "has the right to free speech. No one has the right to be employed at a newspaper. That is a privilege." She continued: "At the Collegian, we hold our staff members to high standards and require them to act professionally on and off the job, particularly when they are representing the Collegian and responding to criticism." --Another Facebook-Related Fall (Inside Higher Ed)

The quote is from a student editor who fired a columnist due, in part, to his membership in a Facebook group.

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

I sometimes wonder if half the fun of action games isn't pretending to be a kid again: you can run and run and never get tired. Also, jump down the stairs without worrying about a sprained ankle. --Andrew Plotkin --Review: Myst Online: Uru Live (Zarf)

That was just a parenthetical comment, but its the reason I blogged this review.

Today we harness the masses for everything from choosing the next pop star on American Idol to perfecting open source software and assembling Wikipedia articles. But perhaps the most widespread and vital uses for group input online are in scoring systems. In addition to eBay feedback, these are the customer ratings that Amazon.com and Yahoo Shopping post with product reviews. They're the feedback scores that Netflix tallies to help subscribers decide which movies to order. And they're the up-or-down votes that sites like Digg and Reddit (part of the Wired Media Group, which also includes WIRED magazine) rely on to determine which stories to feed Web surfers.

But as rating systems have become more popular -- and, as Resnick shows, valuable -- there has been what some would say is a predictable response: the emergence of scammers, spammers, and thieves bent on manipulating the mob. Call it crowdhacking.

[...]

Then there's Spike the Vote, a sort of Digg-based pyramid scheme in which members earn one point every time they digg an endorsed story. Once members have enough points, they can submit stories of their own to be dugg by the network.

Recently, Spike the Vote's owner, known only as Spike, sold the site on eBay. A Digg user named Jim Messenger bought the site and gave it to Digg, which promptly shut it down. But Messenger wasn't just being altruistic. He bought Spike the Vote because he knew Digg's followers would put a story about what he had done on Digg's front page. This, he figured, would attract customers to his search engine optimization business. --Annalee Newitz --Herding the Mob  (Wired)

During the dot-com craze, it was rare to find articles that critiqued technological promises from a knowledgeable standpoint. Or maybe I, like so many others, was just more interested by the positive articles.

MySpace and Facebook offer young people a laboratory to develop the online networking skills that are so important to 21C life. But as this article shows, each new development can be broken by scammers who are intent on manipulating the system for their own gain.

Caring is easy. Keeping students engaged and operating at full capacity over a two-hour block is difficult. Serving every student the highly specific smoothie of success and failure -- just enough success to encourage them, just enough failure to challenge them -- is difficult. --Dan Meyer --Career Crisis #2 (of 2) (DY/DAN)

A response to the movie Freedom Writers, which seems to glorify one part of the job and ignore the other.