April 2007 Archive Page

Surely, Cho's diseased mind was prepped and primed to commit mass murder, at some point. But did NBC's show, the night before, serve as his prompt? In his afflicted state, did that "Dateline" installment push him over the edge? It's unlikely that we'll ever know.

Yet, the numerous similarities between the Hyde and Cho stories are inescapable. So is the timing. Cho's rampage began fewer than 12 hours after NBC's episode about Hyde ended. And Cho interrupted his rampage only to send NBC a you-pushed-me-to-do-this missive. --Paul Mushnick --Did 'Dateline' Push Cho Too Far? (NY Post)

"So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone?, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did." Umm, yeah, what to wright about?? I'm leaving to join the Marines and I really don't give a F... about my academics....

My current English teacher is a control freak intent on setting a gap between herself and her students like a 63 year old white male fortune 500 company CEO, and a illegal immigrant. If CG was a private catholic school, I could understand, but wtf is her problem. And baking brownies and rice crispies does not make up for it, way to try and justify yourself as a good teacher while underhandedly looking for complements on your cooking. No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting. --Allen Lee --Allen Lee's essay (Sun-Times)

This is an excerpt from the essay that got a high schooler arrested for disorderly conduct.

And the consequences:

Because of pending criminal charges stemming from his essay, Lee's recruiter told him Friday evening that the Marine Corps has discharged him from his contract, said Sgt. Luis R. Agostini, spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Station Chicago. -- Chicago Sun-Times

Here's a fascinating glimpse into the way this particular high-school student represents his understanding of English class:

"In creative writing, you're told to exaggerate,'' said Lee. "It was supposed to be just junk. . . ."

Blogging this one for future reference...

One Iota of Difference (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

*Sigh.*

I've already fixed the one I found on Wikipedia.

Floyd Collins was a caver who became trapped in Sand Cave on January 30th, 1925 50m from the entrance by a 26 1/2 pound rock. He was found and provided with food and media attention until February 4 when a further collapse cut him off, leading to frantic tunneling attempts, but he was found dead on the 17th of February.
--Floyd Collins (Metafilter)

A good collection of links about a caving legend.

Since Collins was the subject of the first modern media circus, I'm considering doing a unit on the event in a future journalism course. I'd probably include the "Baby Jessica down the well" incident and the more recent West Virginia mining accident (where the press reported jubilation after the false word spread that most of the miners were rescued, when in fact most were dead).

Read the poem slowly. Most adolescents speak rapidly, and a nervous reader will tend to do the same in order to get the reading over with. Reading a poem slowly is the best way to ensure that the poem will be read clearly and understood by its listeners. Learning to read a poem slowly will not just make the poem easier to hear; it will underscore the importance in poetry of each and every word. A poem cannot be read too slowly, and a good way for a reader to set an easy pace is to pause for a few seconds between the title and the poem's first line. --Billy Collins --How To Read a Poem Out Loud (Poetry 180)

My students are gearing up to for a sonnet slam. A friend from high school lent me the CD Billy Collins Live, and as I googled Collins I came across the website he posted when he was the US poet laureate.

Told to express emotion for a creative-writing class, high-school senior Allen Lee penned an essay so disturbing to his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct, officials said Wednesday.

Lee, 18, a straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School in Cary, Ill., was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with the misdemeanor for an essay that police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.--Jeff Long and Carolyn Starks --Illinois police arrest teen after teacher "disturbed" by essay (Seattle Times)

A large focus of the book is the internal machinations of game production, and the demands it places on a writer. For example, a basic shooter may only require a few weeks of work on the writer'sbehalf for the basic story, while a full-blown RPG could have the writer coming back time and again to rewrite dialogue to match the flow of the game.

Ince throughout the book emphasizes the use of interactive fiction and we get the impression this is his preference. He even goes as far as to say Half-Life 2 is not the best example of good story exposition, as the player neither takes part in dialogue, or is required to pay attention to it, lessening its importance. --Logan Booker --Writing for Video Games (Atomic)

A review of Steve Ince's Writing for Video Games.

"We have estimated that the mean temperature of this super-Earth lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid," explained Stéphane Udry, from the Geneva Observatory (Switzerland) and lead-author of the paper reporting the result. "Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth's radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky -- like our Earth -- or covered with oceans," he added.
--Astronomers find first habitable Earth-like planet (Earth & Sky)

I can't hear you, Bert. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I walk into my classroom about two minutes before class starts. It's a great hybrid room, with 24 workstations around the outer edges, tables in the middle, and a huge projection screen up front.

As usual, a few students who aren't in my class are using the computers. Some have obviously just come into the room and are just logging on.

"A class is about to start now," I say to a group of students. The students start to pack up.

One student in another corner of the room has headphones on, and I can hear his music blasting from across the room. I walk towards him.

"A class is about to start now," I say.

He does not hear.

I walk over to him.

"A class is about to start now!" I say, louder.

He does not respond.

I stand very close to him, and this time he looks up.

"A class is about to start now!!" I say, even louder.

"What??" he says.

"Number one, your music is rather loud, and number two, a class is about to start now!"

"When is the class going to start?" he says, looking around for a clock.

"Now!!"

But of course, by this time he has finally turned down the volume.

"You didn't have to come at me so hard!" he grumbles, annoyed and offended, and ready to defend his turf.

From his perspective, I came up to him and yelled at him... but of course the only reason I was speaking loudly was because he couldn't hear me when I talked normally.

Even though I was annoyed, part of me wanted to laugh, since I couldn't help thinking of Ernie and Bert doing the "You've got a banana in our your ear" sketch.

I'm sure that fellow found another lab in the building, and although I prefer to start class without fighting battles first, life goes on. Maybe I'll just make a mental note to get to class a little earlier next time, so I have time to clear out the room with less fuss.

The vast majority of gamers know life is not a Doom level - these rules are merely simplifications and abstractions that streamline very complex actions for smoother gameplay. We know when someone is shot in the head they do not lose 20 hitpoints. Games are not an excuse for their worldview, but rather a useful metaphor that allows us to jump into their heads for awhile.

One thing that kept striking me while playing is that Dylan and Eric, despite being younger, seem much more self-aware than what we've learned about Cho. Most of the dialogue in the game is taken verbatim from their writings, recordings, and police reports, and I buy it as a legitimate and thoughtful glimpse into their pseudo-nihilistic mindset at the time of the attacks. Perhaps this ability to reflect comes from having a sounding board in each other, whereas Cho was a loner. The result was the same pointless carnage, of course. But it does convince me that they knew what they were doing was wrong in every possible, concievable sense of the word. Perhaps that makes them all the more evil, and truly worthy of hell, if it exists, despite their lower body count. --Mike Duncan --Super Columbine Massacre (Bad Rhetoric)

Some good commentary on a game that was easy to win (in that it wasn't technically difficult to rack up points and be victorious in battle after battle) but very hard to play (in that I had to overcome emotional resistance to the fact that I was expected to make the plot progress by gunning down icons representing high school students and teachers).

I've been meaning to write down more thoughts on this game, and I guess reading this post was all the prompting I needed.

An early sequence in which we are supposed to sneak through the school and plant bombs without being caught was quite annoying. For no good reason, the game refused to let players save anywhere but the parking lot. That mean that if you got caught in the hall, you had to start that sequence over. If you planted one bomb and then got caught, you had to start over. If you planted both bombs but didn't make it out to the parking lot without being chased by a hall monitor, you had to start over.

After the bombs don't go off, I had a moment of relief -- even though I knew exactly what was supposed to happen next. I was supposed to start killing.

I had to take a break -- I was on a train ride to a conference where, I delivered a talk that used this game as a reference point. Even though it was a minor reference, I didn't feel right talking about the game without finishing it, so I went back to it.

When I targeted someone in the parking lot and approached, expecting the fight sequence to kick in, instead I got an encounter with a kid that Eric and Dylan apparently knew well enough to spare.

That was a masterful stroke on the part of the designer, Danny Ledonne. I don't know whether it's possible to target someone else first, but for a moment, because I was ready to kill this simulated character, but the game spared my target. For a moment, I felt like I was a worse person than the real killers whose steps I had been retracing, since I made the choice to kill someone they chose to spare.

And once I got back inside the school, this time armed with weapons and able to save the game wherever the hell I wanted, I understood why the opening level was so tedious and pointless. It made me hate the hall monitors for making me go back and play the bomb-planting sequence over again dozens of times.

While those two design choices made me want to keep playing in order to see how the game would screw with my emotions again, assaulting the people in the various rooms quickly became tedious. The students rarely ever fight back, and when the occasional jock throws a punch, the damage is minimal. But every so often, instead of the same old battle sequence, the game would deliver a brief exchange of dialog or even a full-blown flashback.

I didn't want to empathize with the player-characters, but I found myself going "awwww" in sympathy when a girl doesn't pick up the phone or return a call from Eric Harris; then when the flashback ended, the game went into the usual combat sequence, jerking me out of a sympathetic reverie into the cold realization that the backstory only fueled the hatred of the real killers.

A rather unlikely scenario has Eric and Dylan rescuing a kid who is being beaten up in the bathroom. I don't think there is an option to target this kid along with his tormentors. Once the tormentors are gone, the kid offers you a heath powerup and leaves. I find it hard to believe that anyone would beat up a kid in the bathroom while gunfire is going off in the hall, but the sequence does argue that Eric and Dylan saw themselves as heroes of some sort; still, my willing suspension of disbelief didn't quite cover this vignette.

The extended sequence in hell also got tedious; the boys are separated at first, and for the first time the enemies are capable of doing some real damage, so I felt a sense of accomplishment when I reached the checkpoint that reunited the boys. From then on, survival was simply a matter of learning which enemies to target first when they attack in groups, and occasionally running past enemies to search for treasure chests in which more powerful weapons and other powerups are lurking. It was an easy matter wiping out the enemies on the way back.

The monotony of the hell sequence was occasionally broken up by visits to other parts of hell, where for instance one can meet icons of various historical figures and figures from pop culture (such as an alien or JonBenet Ramsey) who have a few thoughtful words to exchange (and, for some strange reason, video game characters). It wasn't always clear to me why these characters were in hell, or why if the killers denied the existence of God they would expect a traditional hell with fiery rivers and demons, or why Satan seems perfectly happy that Eric and Dylan just wasted most of the inhabitants of hell, why John Lennon doesn't seem to mind playing "Imagine" ("No hell below us... above us only sky") while he's depicted in a very traditional hell, or why for that matter the pop culture figures in the other regions of hell are not supposed to be targets for the killer's rage.

Once I understood that the tedium Ledonnne imposed during the early High School levels had a payback, I guess I got my hopes up.

I guess I'm saying that I wanted more story interspersed with the action.

There is a final payoff of sorts, where Satan gives you a flying dragon that you can use to move to any part of the huge Hell level, but since I had methodically swept through every enemy on my quest to finish the game, there was very little for me to do except fly to all four corners of the screen and pick up a couple of necessary inventory items. Being able to fly around hell seemed like such a paltry victory. I guess it was too much to ask for the demons to unite and lead an assault on heaven, a la Paradise Lost.

After the game proper is over, an extended series of non-interactive cut scenes delivers Ledonne's final message.

I interpreted the sequence in which a parade of speakers walks up to a podium on the steps of Columbine High School as Ledonne's attempt to quote from multiple authorities and survivors who got it all wrong.

A final sequence (was it really final? I'd have to check my saved games one more time to be sure of the sequence) showing slides of the killers looking like ordinary boys made me sick. I thought it pushed too hard for a sympathetic response; every one of their victims deserved such a respectful and detailed slideshow, and I would have spent hours watching it in order to atone for and exorcise the feeling of complicity with which the game left me.

Contestants had to stand with their hands behind their backs until a bell sounded and a message appeared on an overhead screen. The winner was judged on whoever's message -- checked for exact punctuation -- reached the judges first.

The text tests ranged from "faster than a speeding bullet..." and "what we do in life echoes in eternity" to the less poetic "OMG, nd 2 talk asap," which for those over 30 means "Oh my God, need to talk as soon as possible." --FYI, 13yo skool grl is nu US txt mssg chmpN (Yahoo! AFP (will expire))

Olympus DS-50 Voice Recorder (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Two brand-new Olympus DS-50 voice recorders just arrived at SHU. I've ordered two DS-40s as well.

My students have been learning podcasting basics with some older voice recorders, but the virtue of that older equipment is that it's very easy to understand.

The DS-50s are state-of-the art, but I realized with dismay just now that they only record in Microsoft's proprietary WMA format, rather than the more common MP3 format. The open-source Audacity audio editing tool does not currently have the ability to open WMA files. I can, of course, just plug the voice recorder's output into the computer's mic jack, push PLAY on the voice recorder and REC on Audacity, and transfer the file that way. That's how my students are importing audio from the voice recorders they're using now, so it's really not a burden when you think of it individually.

But that wouldn't be at all efficient if I asked students to fan out and bring back raw audio for me to incorporate into a workshop of some kind.

Microsoft says Windows Media Player 10 will export a WMA file into an MP3 format, but I found Windows Media Player a bewildering labyrinth of features that are completely irrelevant to my needs. The menu interface is not like any of the hundreds of other Windows tools I have used, so I can't even tell where I am supposed to look to find out what version of Media Player I've got.

Fortunately, I found a free tool called Switch, which quite painlessly converts WMA files to MP3s.

It was six hours before opening night. Sarah Holdren, director of a Yale student production, had just entered the theater for a routine pre-performance errand when the man who runs the hall gave her an update: In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, a Yale administrator decided that she didn't want any weapons used or portrayed during theatrical productions. --Elia Powers --Stage Fright (Inside Higher Ed)

Puh-leese.

Grown-ups and all but the youngest kids know that the swords on stage aren't real. And those young kids probably won't be able to sit through a live theater performance that isn't tailored to them, so they would not likely be in the audience.

At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia's largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be "positive."

In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin. --Andrew E. Kramer --50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio (NY Times)

This is a frightening development.

Make the logo as big as you can
Make the logo bigger, yeah!
That logo isn't big enough
So make the logo bigger
Bigger, bigger, make it big!
Make the logo bigger! --Make the Logo Bigger (Burn Back)

Awesome heavy metal spoof of a naive request that web designers hear from their clients all the time.

Displaying the client's static logo is not the the best use of the user's screen real estate.

On my "Newbie Web Author Checklist," item 5 includes the following:

Get rid of wasted space at the top of the page, and move the content up higher on the page. Shrink that logo and move that long-winded mission statement to an internal page; use the space you recovered to tell me what's new on your site, so I won't have to hunt for what you're so eager to share.

While many teens post their first name and photos on their profiles, they rarely post information on public profiles they believe would help strangers actually locate them such as their full name, home phone number or cell phone number.

At the same time, nearly two-thirds of teens with profiles (63%) believe that a motivated person could eventually identify them from the information they publicly provide on their profiles. --Lenhart and Madden --Teens, Privacy and Online Social Networks (Pew Internet & American Life Project)

Today many people find it strange that the biggest meal of the day once centered around noon, but it made great sense at the time. Artificial lighting such as oil lamps and candles were expensive, and provided weak illumination at best. So people went to sleep at sundown, because it's difficult to work and eat in the dark. The last meal of the day was a rushed affair, a quick snack before the lights (the sun) went out. The only exceptions were those who had to work at night, and the extremely wealthy and powerful people at royal courts. The wealthiest courts, like those of France and Burgundy might stay up after sunset, their grandly decorated halls illuminated by thousands of candles or torches. But they were unusual; most medieval people never witnessed such spectacles.

Traders and merchants, who sometimes had to stay in the shop to handle the last daylight stragglers amongst their customers, might close shop at dusk and spend the last hour or two of their day in candlelight or firelight. But they made it to bed as quickly as they could, to rise early the next day and open up their shops again. Only the extremely wealthy had candles to burn and could waste daylight hours sleeping in late. So supper, the third and last meal of the day, was usually eaten before the sun went down, or very shortly afterward. --Sherrie McMillan --What Time is Dinner? (History Magazine)

Apparently, women's social needs are the reason why both lunch and tea became cultural touchstones in England.

I put it on my "to do" list to eat lunch with colleagues in the cafeteria once or twice a week, and when I'm home I'm usually the one who serves the kids (though my wife tells me what to make, or at least gives me options, so it doesn't really take much mental effort on my part). While chocolate is definitely my weak point (I make the rounds each day at Seton Hill, stopping by offices where people keep chocolates for visitors), if you removed the social aspect of meals, and look just at giving your body fuel to keep going, I prefer foods I can eat with one hand while sitting at my computer.

Each day I walk into my own classroom. Each day I stand before students who have book bags that I would never dare look into, believing that ignorance is bliss. I don't want to know who's packing and who's dealing. A stupid sentiment, I'm sure. But am I really any safer knowing what they carry? Or will it only make me more paranoid? Everyday at work, we teachers know exactly what we walk into. Last week a former student was shot by police after a brief foot chase. Had he not pulled his gun, they probably wouldn't have fired. Incidentally, he's considered a "person of interest" in his stepfather's murder. Two weeks ago a seventeen-year-old girl died from an apparent overdose. The woman whose baby was found under the bed... yep, had connections here. Each term, at least one student will have to drop out due to incarceration. Students who go m.i.a. are common.

We walk into that and we teach and we try so damn hard to pull those who want to learn up to where they want to be but don't quite have the coping skills to do on their own. We pester and cajole, bribe and bargain. Let me help you. Come to class. If you at least try, I can show you where you're right and where we can work to improve. --Miki Louch --Columbine Revisited (Simple sentences sprinkled with hopes of complexity)

I just came from an evening class where we went a half hour over because every student went a few minutes over their presentation time, and the discussions were productive and thought-provoking. I'd like to think that it's possible to make a difference, and tonight's class and Miki's blog entry both support that belief.

I was going to stay at the office and work late in order to catch up, but pfft. I'm going home to my family.

I Smell Pretty (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This morning as I was getting ready to take my daughter to preschool, she told me that she sprayed my clothes with "pretty perfume."

I assumed she meant that she had sprayed the pile of dirty clothes near my bed, but my eyes have been watering all day because it turns out she must have sprayed my shirt while I was in the shower.

I don't know why I didn't notice it first, but my eyes are watering as I type this.

There were a few minutes to spare near the end, but I decided to not ask students to share their opinions/feelings just yet, mainly because I didn't want the class to be a lot of "well I heard?"

Now that I've just watched the 10pm news and found out the student was an English major, I [like Dennis] feel guilty. My reasons for this guilt are for not yet allowing my students to talk this event through, even if that venting was all speculative. It looks like this student could have used a space in which to vent. --Daisy Pignetti --VA Tech, a teachable moment? (Doctor Daisy)

Our brains are good simulators... it's impossible not to try learning from this situation by trying to place yourself into the situation, and imagining what you could have done to make it unfold differently.

Blaming the Va Tech president for not sending out an e-mail sooner strikes me as misguided. Now that the suspect has been identified and we have documents to examine, I think reporters looking for a story to publish won't emphasize the anger at the administration.

i am in an abusive relationship right now have been in it for 7 months now. i dont feel the best. we allways fight he makes me feel like crap like i am nothing like everything is my fault. he promises me he ownt ever do it again this has happened over 20 times. and than he hits chokes slaps and hurts me again he apoligizes than we fight for no reason again and he gets jeoulos again it happens again. he is very jeoulos and controlling. not even letting me go to the mall with my sister. thinking i am allways cheating on him. it is hurting me bad. tonight is the night i am going to leave him. i hope that i am being serious when i say this because every other time i said this i allways end up going back with him. i just cannot believe i had to go through this allready only 17 years old. bye. --racheli am in an abusive relationship right now (blogs.setonhill.edu)

Somebody recently left this comment on a blog entry on Nathaniel Hawthorne that one of my students posted in 2004. As the administrator of blogs.setonhill.edu, I see all the comments that come in for approval, and I regularly approve all the course-related comments so that online discussions don't shrivel on the vine. In the past few days, somebody has been reading blog entries, posting a quick but seemingly relevant comment, and then leaving link to a spam portal. So I've been looking more closely at what I would ordinarily approve or delete, and this submission caught my eye.

I have already sent a quick e-mail to the address the poster provided, but who knows whether it was real or fake. I have no evidence that the poster is in any way connected to Seton Hill University... I presume she just found a page that had keywords she was searching for.

I guess I am just feeling pretty emotionally raw as I think about the latest news... I've submitted an article proposal that looks at Super Columbine Massacre RPG! as a form of new media composition, and when I heard about Cho's multimedia manifesto, I realized that I would have to read it in order to write the article I proposed. That's not a cheerful thought.

Maybe someone in Rachel's life can help her make a sensible choice before it's too late.

Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance. From some mix of our frontier past, our Little House on the Prairie heritage, our Thoreauvian desire for solitude, and our amazing wealth we've derived a level of independence never seen before on this round earth. We've built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world's bounty from the privacy of your room. And we've built a culture much the same -- the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don't need a helping hand from a soul -- save, of course, from the invisible hand that cups us all in its benign grip.

There are a couple of problems with this fine scenario, of course. One is: we're miserable. --Bill McKibben --Old MacDonald Had A Farmers' Market -- total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal (In Character)

The laws of Roombotics, published on iRobot's website, are basic ethical rules governing Roomba conduct. The first law states that the device "must not suck up jewelry or other valuables, or through inaction, allow valuables to be sucked up." The second law prescribes that Roomba "must obey vacuuming orders given to it by humans except when such orders would conflict with the first law." The third and final law authorizes a Roomba to "protect its own ability to suction dust and debris as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law." --Roomba Violates All Three Laws Of Roombotics (The Onion)

Rumours that Chiang, 23, was the mass murderer swept across the world after links to his gun-obsessed blogs were posted on social networking website Facebook and similar sites. More than 180,000 people visited his sites, with many noting the similarities between him and the man described in accounts of the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Some went so far as to jump to a conclusion. "Early 20s, Asian man, vtech student. Fits the bill," wrote one commenter on one of Chiang's blogs. Another simply wrote: "Why why why why why?"

His blogs are decorated with a multitude of photos of Chiang posing with semi-automatic weapons and Russian rifles and training at a marine camp. His last post before the killings showed him proudly standing alongside his collection of 14 Russian Mosin Nagant M44 weapons. --Kenneth Nguyen --Judged by the internet (The Age)

I asked my journalism students today... if they heard gunfire on campus, would they pull out their cell phone camera and head towards it, hoping to get a scoop?

I told them they should get to safety.

When I learned that the young man who was identified as the shooter was an English major, the whole incident became suddenly more real. It shouldn't have -- the human tragedy would not be less heartrending if the student had chosen different coursework. So now, on top of all the other emotions that I'm feeling as I contemplate the event, I feel guilt.

My journalism students are doing next week's podcasts on local reaction to the massacre.

Gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who've blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we're in a weird position: We're the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids.

So it turns out that, whoops, now we've got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding? --Clive Thompson --You Grew Up Playing Shoot'em-Up Games. Why Can't Your Kids? (Wired)

Erin Sheehan was one of four people able to walk out of her 9:05 German class in room 207 Norris Hall. --T.Rees Shapiro --Monday, April 16th 2007 5:27PM: Students react to the tragedy

This item is too short, and needs some copyediting (that should be "peeked" where it reads "peaked") but it's the best eyewitness source I've seen interviewed so far.

There are no permalinks on this site, and a note says that the Collegiate Times main server is down.

The Mercury News posted an Associated Press package that included a video news story, accounts from witnesses and a disturbing home-made cell phone video that recorded dozens of gun shots and angry and disturbed screaming, presumably from the gunman.

Perhaps most troublesome was that whoever was shooting the cell phone video, actually moved toward the gunfire instead of away from it. Some obvious advice: It's not worth it. Do not endanger your life for a YouTube moment.

News coverage aside, technology potentially played a key role in informing those most at risk. The way school administrators used their digital tools may even have saved lives. --Mike Cassidy --Digital tools were potential life savers during Va. Tech massacre (MercuryNews)

My brother is a Va Tech alumnus. At the University of Virginia we enjoyed a friendly rivalry with our larger land-grant sibling.

This time of year I have lots of papers to mark and lots of stressed students who need attention; further, three days this week I'm leaving early to attend to family business (today was a birthday party for both my kids, Wednesday I always leave early so I can watch the kids while my wife prepares for her night class, and Friday my son will be in an art show), so I haven't been following this as closely as I really wanted to.

Someone else will write a thoughtful analysis of the Wikipedia and Wikinews articles on the events, and someone else will track what the Va Tech students were saying to each other on MySpace and Facebook while the Va Tech authorities wondered how to get in touch with students and what they should say.

I'm glad my kids don't mind being hugged and kissed in public, since I was doing a lot of that today.

Update: the Roanoke Times has been covering the event on its breaking news blog, changing the title to reflect recent developments, adding time-stamped items to the top of the page.

I may be nostalgic, but I'm not stupid. Today's technologically superior, multi-million dollar monstrosities are, in almost every way, superior to anything that even the most creative guy could do in his basement on an old TI. But, without the full spectrum of gaming to be measured against, the games of the day really did more to inspire and amaze on a more regular basis than today's demographic targeted, designed by committee with corporate oversight games. --The Lost Art of Innocence (Gamers with Jobs)

On Sunday, April 15, Westmoreland County residents will remember the victims of Nazism by observing Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Memorial Day. --Interfaith Community to Observe Holocaust Memorial Day (National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education)

I just got back from taking my nine-year-old son to this service, which was very moving.

The service began in the Congregation Emanu-El Israel synagogue, with a moving service that had people in the congregation reading names of victims, resistance fighters, and martyrs (rescuers) of all walks of life.

Next door in a social hall at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, filmmaker Debbie Brukman showed her documentary, "Perla: The Last of the Seven Dwarfs," a fascinating story of a family of Romanian Jewish family of seven siblings, each no taller than 90 cm, who were deported to Auschwitz. They and their family members were kept alive due to the special interest of the infamous Mengele. The last of the seven siblings died in 2001, and the film is built around an interview with her.

I was surprised that this film doesn't seem to have a web presence anywhere, but this article in the Bonita Daily News has good information about the film.

My ultimate aim is to illustrate children's books with images like the ones on this site. To this end, I am trying to find ways to make good-looking 3D images quickly--images that have all the magic of the illustrations I loved as a child. --Nick Towers

--Children's Book Illustration by Nick Towers

For a year I have been working on and off with Hammer, the Half-Life 2 world builder, with the idea of making an educational game mod. My idea involved creating a photorealistic downtown setting that journalism students could explore.

However, after picking up a copy of Scott McCloud's Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, I have begun to think about other options. This illustration was made with Blender3D, a design tool I've come to know very well. Since I'm not a good artist, the idea of being able to pose 3D shapes and generate a 2D graphic like this is appealing. I can imagine importing these graphics into Flash, and further animating them there.

I'm still dreaming about an immersive photorealistic world, full of enough detail that it could be used as a resource for practicing travel writing or investigative reporting. But that level of detail would be overkill for entry-level students who simply need practice using "on the record" and "off the record" to get sources to be more forthcoming, or figuring out what part of a source's answer is most quoteworthy.

Disney cartoons from 50 years ago are still watchable today, but what counted as eye-poppingly realistic graphics 5 years ago is painful to look at now.

I'm thinking... thinking... thinking.

Although the CRPG has certainly suffered its share of ups and downs over the decades, history shows that when things are at their bleakest, there is always a new company poised to spring onto the scene with an amazing new title that brings every true CRPG fan back to the table. Perhaps we're at such a point now; major CRPG titles have slowed to a trickle, and some critics seem all but convinced that online games like Blizzard's World of Warcraft are the logical heirs of the "oldskool" CRPG. However, rather than trace the lineage of games like World of Warcraft or EverQuest back to CRPG classics like Ultima or Wizardry, I see them more as the descendents of another genre called the "MUD," or the multi-user dungeon. --Matt Barton --The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part III: The Platinum and Modern Ages (1994-2004) (Gamasutra)

A well-done piece. I always crave more analysis from overview pieces, but it was still great to see so many familiar games (and hear assessments about the games I wanted to buy but decided not to, for one reason or another.

CITY COUNCIL is based on an actual city council meeting I covered while working for a small twice-a-week newspaper early in my career. Some of the items here have been fictionally enhanced for educational purposes. And, of course, some names have been changed to protect the foolish.

Even as an assistant editor at this small paper I knew that someday I wanted to teach journalism and I had the feeling after the meeting that the notes from this particular meeting would come in handy some day, so I filed them away. Coincidentally, my solution to writing this story was to write eight of them. The editor was out of town and I was the only one who had to make a decision on what to run in the paper. So I wrote eight separate stories on different aspects of the meeting.

Alas, the poor journalism student in my newswriting classes these days does not have that option. Instead, my students must write one mega-story that covers the whole meeting. I use it as a kind of final exam in my newswriting classes. --Rich Cameron --City Council (rcameron.com)

Only nominally interactive, which is especially notable when you are faced with all the questions that you can possibly ask each source. Still, it looks like a good tool for teaching accuracy, cross-referencing, and news judgment.

It's a stretch to call this a "game" but I'll file it there anyway becasue I don't have a separate category for "simulations."

A CBS News producer was fired and the network apologized after a Katie Couric video essay on libraries was found to be plagiarized from The Wall Street Journal. --Producer for Katie Couric Fired -- For Lifting from 'Wall St Journal'  (AP | Editor & Publisher)

Here's a copy of Jeffrey Zaslow's "Of the Places You'll Go, Is the Library Still One of Them?"

Update: Rosemary Frezza says this is the text she copied from Couric's page before it was taken down and replaced with a correction:

Hi, everyone.

I still remember when I got my first library card, browsing through the stacks for my favorite books.

For kids today, the library is more removed from their lives. It's a last-ditch place to go if they need to find something out...if Google doesn't turn it up FIRST.

Sure, children still like libraries, but books aren't the draw. A recent study found kids use libraries more for DVDs, story hours and computers than for checking out books.

Many kids skip the library altogether and head for the store. Sales of juvenile books rose 60 percent from 2002 to 2005. It's an encouraging sign that kids value reading, but many tech-savvy kids never experience the joy of using the library's shelves as a place to discover new worlds. And students are arriving in college unable to navigate libraries with a Dewey decimal system many have never used.

You local library is still worth checking out, and so are the books.

That's a page from my Notebook.

She also sent me a link to a screencap.

"It's almost always the first play I teach," she said. "I do that because very often students have only encountered Shakespeare in high school and have a misunderstanding of him as safe, moral, and dull. This one really dislodges the idea that Shakespeare is full of eternal moral truths. It takes place in a different world from what they expect."

And how does Titus go over with her students?

"Many of them have a very hard time with it," she told me. "They expect to be able to like somebody in a piece of literature, to find somebody they can identify with, and that is quite difficult in this case. It's hard to identify with Titus, who kills his own son for dishonoring him. The moral ambiguity of the play is very, very difficult for some of them." -- Denise Albanese, interviewed by Scott McLemee --A Dish Best Served Cold (Inside Higher Ed)

Great analysis of Shakespeare's slasher farce, Titus Andronicus.

I still swell with pride when I recall that as an undergrad, I asked Gordon Braden, who was teaching the Shakespeare survey at the University of Virginia, about the role of rhymed verses in this play. I pointed out that we are most likely to see rhymed verse when Aaron is either performing or talking about his most wicked, most violent deeds -- a detail that suggested to me that Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing, rather than than that Shakespeare made a terrible play.

Prof. Braden said that Shakespeare often used rhymed verses to end scenes, which is true most of the time, but, as I pointed out in the 100-student lecture hall, "Not in this play." Prof. Braden cocked his head, opened up his book, and checked a few scenes, then agreed with me that Shakespeare's use of rhymed verses is unusual in this play. (He didn't actually agree with me about what I thought the unusual rhyming meant, but that was all I needed to feel like I was pretty hot stuff that day.)

I ended up writing a paper on "Head-hewing, Limb-lopping, and General Nastiness in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus."

The first issue was providing enough fun. Every puzzle should have some reward, and a complicated or multi-stage puzzle should provide some minor rewards for partial solutions. So once I had the puzzle structure in mind (more about that later), I could see which puzzles were going to open a lot of new game-play and which were only going to bring the player up against another puzzle -- the structural equivalent of getting through one locked door to find that there's another beyond it. Everywhere there was a puzzle without much game-play reward, I added plot material for the player to discover instead -- ideally, a hint that raised more questions than it answered, something that would both reward him for getting part-way through the puzzle sequence and keep him interested in what would turn up next.

The other point had to do with managing player attention. The more time a player spends in the presence of an unsolvable puzzle (say, a door he can see from the first room but that stays locked until half-way through the game), the more importance he tends to attach to that problem. It's a huge let-down to walk through that door and find that it leads to a broom closet with one cheap treasure in it. So the big puzzles, the puzzles the player has been taught to care about, should pay off in multiple ways at once: *both* major new game-play *and* major plot information. --Emily Short interviewed by Jim Munroe --Inside Interactive Fiction: An Interview with Emily Short (Gamasutra)

MySpace vs. Facebook (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just searched Google News for MySpace and Facebook, and was surprised at the difference in what I found. Of the first seven MySpace hits, five emphasized criminal acts, and two were PR-driven pieces.

Of the first seven hits on Facebook, only one involved legal worries (in an item that also included MySpace in the title), two items seemed PR-driven, and the other four were news features that included references to Facebook organically (through a profile of the Facebook founder, or a high school paper article about the online community).

Facebook is still owned by its boy-geek founder, while MySpace was recently bought out by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorporation (which also owns Fox, TV Guide, and HarperCollins). Of course this is not a scientific survey, but MySpace was referred to over 12,000 times in Google's news database, while Facebook appeared only about 3000 times. Given that MySpace has about 80% of the social networking market share, and Facebook has only about 10%, Facebook is getting proportionately more positive press (though the coverage is not as broad, with an article in a high school paper happening to hold the top spot when I did my search this morning.)

Here are the first seven MySpace posts.

1. Court Reverses Penalty Over MySpace Post
2. Man Gets 10 Years For MySpace Assault
3. Teen Kegger Pictures in Myspace Page Lands in Arrests
4. Police: Mom solicited kidnappers on MySpace
5. MySpace Launches Dedicated Video Community for Theatrical Trailer ...
6. CBS is totally hip, and down with the Myspace
7. UMD Asks Athletes To Stop Using Facebook, MySpace

Here are the first Facebook hits (I've grouped the duplicates).

1. Students forge friendships with future college classmates on Facebook
2. UMD Asks Athletes To Stop Using Facebook, MySpace
   UMD Asks Athletes to Stop Using Facebook, MySpace Web Sites
3. OtherEgo Launches - Myspace, Youtube, Facebook in One Place
4. Online Business Community Makes Appeal to LinkedIn, MySpace ...
5. Class of '11 unites around T-shirt
6. The kid who turned down $1 billion!
7. Let's all be friends

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment? --Gene Weingarten --Pearls Before Breakfast (Washington Post)

Fascinating story about what happens when a world-renowned violinist fiddles a free concert during rush hour. In a sophisticated city like Washington, will the commuters take notice or completely ingore him?

• Got to Dance (autographed by the author, M. C. Helldorfer; illustrated by Hiroe Nakata)
  
• Has a Heart (Magic School Bus (Turtleback)) (Annie Capecki; illustrated by Carolyn Bracken)
  
• Zathura The Movie Deluxe Storybook (Zathura: The Movie) (adapted by David Seidman)
  
• Frederick (Leo Lionni)

--Coffee Table Books Meme (CultureCat)

My coffee table is deep in kid territory. If you asked me what was on my desk or by my bedside, I'd give very different answers.

What's on your coffee table?

The News Limited story suggested that net-savvy types were giving up on blogging and turning their attention to MySpace. The owner of Myspace is, of course, News Limited. Also conveniently not disclosed was the fact that, according to the Gartner report, use of MySpace has been falling steadily during the past year.

[...]

Jorn Barger says "lazy and sensational" journalists have dismissed blogs as mere diaries, neglecting the social benefit of collecting a network of links to information sources -- archiving and drawing connections between items that would otherwise be scattered and soon-forgotten. Peter Merholz reckons most blogs should probably have a readership of about five people but thinks there's nothing wrong with that. --Dan Silkstone --The blogs that ate cyberspace (The Age)

Perhaps the only thing that could have made this movie better would have been if Xerces, the God-king of the Persian army, had been played by John Stamos, the actor who played Uncle Jesse on Full House. Even the Spartans would have cowered beneath his seductive gaze and shining, well-combed hair.

[...]

Not only did I leave the theater feeling like I had gotten my $8 worth, I left wanting to go outside, rip up a sign post and throw it through my friends chest. --Paul Crossman --300 spears reviewer's attention (Setonian)

These lines gave me a good laugh. (Missing an apostrophe on "friend's", but otherwise well done.)

--Star Trek Bonanza (Something Awful)

Science Fiction movies have been a source for speculation about the future of technology and human computer interaction. This paper presents a survey of different kinds of interaction designs in movies during the past decades and relates the techniques of the films to existing technologies and prototypes where possible. The interactions will be categorized with respect to their domain of real-life applications and also evaluated in regard to results of current research in human computer interaction. --Michael Schmitz --Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies (Instrumented Spaces)

The humanist in me wants more analysis, more philosophy, more "why does this matter". Metropolis (which Schmitz incorrectly calls "the oldest science fiction movie") is filed under "movies without concepts," which doesn't exactly give much credit to the ground-breaking expressionistic set designs. It's not clear to me that the author recognizes that the scene with the human worker who moves dials on a gigantic wheel is supposed to make an artistic point. (The author calls it a "conceptual fault".) The movie also includes a scene where the Master of Metropolis contacts his foreman contacts on what we would call a video phone, and his office includes machines that resemble stock tickers, so not only does this paper miss the artistic point of the movie, it also misses the opportunity to discuss the technology.

I wasn't really satisfied to look at a picture and read a summary of the scene, though I did enjoy when the imaginary technology is paired with a real-world version.

Students at the George Mason University School of Law received a double whammy last week: First, Dean Daniel D. Polsby sent an e-mail informing them of a "special town hall meeting" scheduled for Monday where they could meet a candidate for a tenure-track job -- a 22-year-old candidate who had once posted online class notes containing a racial epithet while a law student at Harvard in 2002. Then the next day, Polsby canceled the meeting, writing that the controversial would-be professor "is no longer a candidate." --Andy Guess --Words He Can't Escape (Inside Higher Ed)

Yet another example of the power of words -- especially words posted online. I'm often amazed at how frequently students believe that something that they post online won't or shouldn't be found by an audience wider than their original intended readers.

Colleges and universities must inform students about the particular dangers they face online. But if schools actively monitor their students' online activities and students are aware of this policy, they may have a duty of care that includes preventing any illegal acts committed as a result of information posted online.

Thus, schools should inform their students about the potential dangers of using social networking Web sites, but should also be careful not to become liable if the students engage in illegal behavior. --Sheldon Steinbach and Lynn Deavers --The Brave New World of MySpace and Facebook (Inside Higher Ed)

The potential caves were spotted near a massive Martian volcano, Arisa Mons. Their openings range from about 330 to 820 feet (100 to 250 meters) wide, and one of them, Dena, is thought to extend nearly 430 feet (130 meters) beneath the planet's surface.

The researchers hope the discovery will lead to more focused spelunking on Mars. --Possible New Mars Caves Targets in Search for Life  (Space.com)

No word on whether the entrance to the caves is blocked by a 3x3 steel grate.

The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.

The report said teachers feared confronting 'anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'.

It added: "In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.

"But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques."

A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'. --Laura Clark --Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims (Daily Mail)

This article (about the UK) gives just enough details to be enraging, but not enough details to invite public action.