May 2007 Archive Page

For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable. --Hal Licino --86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins (Hub Pages)

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed. --Jonathan Saltzman --Blogger unmasked, court case upended (Boston.com)

Lindeman, on trial for medical malpractice, paid a hefty sum for his right to his opinion. He blogged about the trial anonymously while it was going on, and the prosecuting attorney found out about it.

Update: A Wal-Mart cashier who joked about bombing the store on his MySpace page has also been sacked. "If you have a MySpace site, you better act like you're a politician," he says, "Be politically correct and don't try to be funny." That's a bit exaggerated... there was nothing "political" about his comment, and there are other kinds of humor.

Venus Redemption is a unique episodic casual game created for 30+ female gamers, with a rich plot written by a noted novelist. Unlike other casual games, it features powerful storylines, deep characters, emotion-based interactive conversations and exciting adventure gameplay. However, like traditional casual games, it's extremely easy to play, requiring only the ability to move and left-click a mouse, and it's playable in short bursts if you don't have much time.

Venus Redemption is written by award-winning author Kate Pullinger, who co-wrote the book, "The Piano" with director Jane Campion, and is one of the leading pioneers of interactive fiction. Additional storyline has been written by BAFTA nominated writer, Gordon Rennie, whilst a unique ambient-orchestral musical score has been composed by veteran musician Tim Wright, best known for his work on the Wipeout game series. --'Venus Redemption' (Worth Playing)

Interesting how this game is pitched at its target audience.

Playing a game may teach the player that he can optimize the game only in certain ways (or that the game is impossible to win, like Global Thermonuclear War); but it's open to question whether the optimal game strategy corresponds to an optimal real-life strategy.

As we see more of this kind of thing (and I think we will), we as consumers of educational and editorial games, are going to need to stay alert and savvy, conscious of the way a game's rules can look like they emulate real life constraints without actually doing so. A case in point is the way Electrocity lets me participate in a fuel market without experiencing any repercussions at all from the fossil fuel burning by the people in the next town over. Would it be better all around if I just kept it in the ground? Maybe, maybe not -- but within the game there's no incentive to think about that. --Emily Short --Educational and Editorial Games (Emily Short's Interactive Fiction)

Don Woods is acknowledged to have the Right Stuff. With long, stringy black hair and a bearish grin, he looks somewhat older than his twenty-nine years. He works at Xerox and wears a dark GAMES T-shirt that contrasts with his almost chalk-colored skin. Pinned next to the Xerox employee badge on his shirt is a button that reads question authority. Wood is known as a classic, or canonical, hacker. "Here's a quick hack I've been working on," he says. He types a few characters on his keyboard, and from the computer come the calliopelike sounds of a rousing, Sousa-style marching song. "I put it together in a couple of days," he says.

One of the results of Woods' epic hacks is Adventure, a collaboration with Will Crowther. Ostensibly a game, Adventure is a metaphor for hacking. When you begin Adventure, the computer tells you your location: at a stream, near a forest, within sight of a small brick building. From there you embark on a Tolkeinesque journey through the caverns and glens of a medieval land, encountering murderous midgets, poisonous snakes, treacherous rapids, thieving pirates and magazines written in dwarf language. By telling the computer the direction you wish to move (typing n for north or u for up, for example), the computer calculates where, on the unseen map created in Woods' imagination, you will wind up next, and displays a written description of your next location. You go deeper and deeper into this netherworld, hoping to emerge by the same path with treasure in hand. There are almost 200 rooms you pass through on your way to the treasure, many dotted with hazards, and the path crosses and intertwines in ways impossible to divine without hours of exploration. Adventure is the most popular game at LOTS, and indeed it is a national craze among those with access to computers. "I would show it to people on a Friday afternoon," Woods says, "and they wouldn't leave their terminals until they finished it, maybe on Monday."

Adventure is a kind of litmus test for hackers: if you can lose yourself in the gullies and misty caverns, you might be susceptible to computer addiction. Just as the plot of Adventure is a world unto itself, the vast memory and operating system of a mainframe computer is a gigantic landscape, seeming impenetrable but eventually accessible to the most devoted seekers. Just as everything in the physical world is constructed of atoms, everything a computer processes or reads is ultimately reduced to bits of either one or zero. Like treasure seekers in the subterranean Adventure world, hackers are electronic spelunkers who have developed the skill to burrow down from the more superficial programming languages to the bedrock machine language of digits. Woods call this "going down and doing the grudgies." To get involved this deeply, you must be able to think in dizzyingly abstract terms. Your mental concentration is so intense that your consciousness is subsumed by the computer. --Steven Levy --Hackers in ParadiseRolling Stone 1982)

Levy expanded the theme of this article into the excellent book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

The film's extreme stylization -- dark backgrounds, glowing neon colors, polygonal landscapes, geometric vehicles, and an absence of external lighting -- was an aesthetic decision that embraced the limitations of computer-generated imagery. "The actual process of making something out of polygons, then shading it, became a design influence," explains Taylor. "Not only was the film made with computers, but it was about cyberspace."

[...]

Tron's story of humans interacting with sentient computer programs in an electronic world placed the narrative ahead of its time as well. In 1982, the term "cyberspace" had just been coined by science fiction author William Gibson. In another two years, Gibson's seminal work Neuromancer would launch the cyberpunk genre. --Mike Winder --You Down with MCP? Twenty-five years later, 'Tron' and other 'geek' classics are more compelling than ever (LA City Beat)

Thousands of PhDs are now working in various Google labs, and many of these people were hired from other successful businesses. Google has also acquired a number of smaller companies, many of them for either their technology or their technical talent, and these companies bring yet more entrepreneurial DNA into the mix. The company has created a potent combination of straight-from-university geniuses, straight-from-start-up geniuses, and straight-from-Microsoft/IBM/Yahoo/wherever geniuses. These bright folks work individually and in teams and 20 percent of their time is supposed to be devoted to pursuing new technical ideas of their own. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are sure (and for good reason) that their crew will generate in this 20 percent time thousands of ideas and technologies that the company can commercialize for decades to come. --Robert X. Cringely --The Final Days of Google: It is going to be an inside job. (PBS)

God forbid we manage to think about the phone as a learning device. I guarantee you that none of the sponsors of the bill have ever typed "define insipid" (or any other word, for that matter) into a text message on their phone and sent it to 46645? (Try it sometime.) I know I mention this a lot in my presentations, but I'm wondering why cell phones aren't a part of my kids' curriculum between now and the time they graduate from high school. I'm wondering why teachers aren't picking up their cell phones and finding answers to the questions they're asking, modeling the technology for their students. Why they aren't talking about ethical and effective use instead of making sure kids check them at the door. --Will Richardson --It Takes a Vision  (weblogg-ed)

A well-phrased response to Pennsylvania House Bill 1245 P.N. 1570 bill that would prohibit electronic devices from schools:

The possession by students of telephone paging devices, commonly referred to as beepers, cellular telephones and portable electronic devices that record or play audio or video material shall be prohibited on school grounds, at school sponsored activities and on buses or other vehicles provided by the school district.

Yes, it's annoying when students use their cell phones instead of pay attention during class. Now, this bill applies to children, not college students, so I have the luxury of saying that when one of my students wishes to pay attention to a gadget instead of class, I try to think of that as the student's way of sending me a message. That message may be "This part of class has become boring... move on to something else," or it may be "No matter what you do today, I am more interested in my gadget than in learning." Either way, it's information that I can use.

I don't really get that annoyed when a student's phone starts vibrating, though it is kind of ironic when a phone shifts from vibrate to some silly tune because the student has momentarily left the phone at his or her desk in order to give a formal report. I never have to say anything in such cases, because the student is usually embarrassed enough.

Even in the paper-and-pencil classroom, instructional technology has the potential to be abused. Once during a class discussion, a student kept tearing pages out of a notebook and crumpling them up quite dramatically. At first, it seemed as if the student was responding negatively to a new turn in the discussion -- as if to say, "The notes I took in the past few minutes aren't worth anything of that's where you're going with this discussion," and I could see the behavior was distracting the other students. But as this continued, I could tell the student wasn't even listening to the discussion -- I was witnessing a wild brainstorming session, in which the student was trying to nail down a thesis.

Possessing and using the paper wasn't the problem -- there are times when the ideas are flowing and you've just got to work them out. Yet the student was not aware of the effect the noisy crumpling was having on the class discussion. The solution is not to ban paper simply because it can be disruptive if a student noisily crumples it during a classroom. The solution is instead to create a supportive culture where students think of each other as resources, not cogs in the "listen/take notes/memorize/spit back" educational machine. And once again, because I teach students who choose to be in the classroom, I realize that school teachers have to spend a lot more energy on maintaining discipline, since they are expected to teach all students, not just the ones who want to be there.

A couple years ago, my dean asked me in passing if I thought the new media journalism students should be required to have laptops. I said no, and I still feel that way. I don't think all liberal arts students NEED laptops. A few students who rely exclusively on computer labs do complain about the amount of time they have to spend online for my classes, and I have adjusted the way I teach with blogs in order to make it possible for a student to log in once, rather than follow a thread as it develops. SHU is considering a program in which students sign up for PDAs; that would really open up the classroom to some new possibilities.

Yes, I would like to teach students the kind of sustained, penetrating critical thinking skills that are necessary to comprehend and produce traditional vehicles of knowledge and inquiry, such as the lecture and the essay. But gadget-loving teens come into the classroom with a huge set of experiences and strengths that the traditional classroom does not tap.

Star Wars. It's the backbone of geek DNA, even more essential than an intricate knowledge of Linux or the inability to get a date. And now, 30 years after an independent filmmaker blew us away with the exploits of a Cinnabon-coifed princess, a wide-eyed farm boy, a scruffy-looking nerf herder and the baddest throat-crushing villain this side of Mos Eisley, we still can't get enough. --Daniel Dumas --Star Wars Rewired: Interviews, Galleries and More (Wired)

A great set of features.

--Poems About Fathers (Poetry Foundation)

Having a father and being a father, I found this page interesting. When my own daughter is a teenager, I might not like "Fifteen" as much as I do now.

Take the role of the FDA inspectors in a world of increasingly numerous food imports and increasingly unmanagable risk. Your charge: try to protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources.

The first in Persuasive Games newsgame publication relationship with The New York Times, in which our editorial games are published alongside all the other op-ed content on TimesSelect. --Food Import Folly (Persuasive Games)

I'd wondered when the rhetorical potential of a current-events game would be recognized as a vehicle for critical commentary, rather than the occasional subject of a column or other traditional form.

When I go to the link on the NYT website, I get a header and footer, but no content.

Are you a skilled programmer or Web developer? Are you interested in applying your talents to the challenge of creating a better-informed society? Do you want to learn how to find, analyze and present socially relevant information that engages media audiences? Do you see possibilities for applying technology as a way to connect people and information on the Web or new delivery platforms?

If your answers are "yes," consider coming to Medill for a master's degree in journalism. You can earn your degree in just a year. You will learn new skills that will open doors to new opportunities that might help build a better democracy. And a new program at Medill offers you a chance to win a fully funded scholarship. --Medill offers journalism scholarships to programmer/developers (Northwestern)

Sounds like a great program.

Tools for Teaching Basic Programming Concepts

Alice and Scratch. Filing for future reference.

Will you, won't you... Blackwell's Quadrille (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?" -- Lewis Carroll's "Lobster Quadrille"

I just tried to order an examination copy of a book from Blackwell Publishing, and when I got what looked like an error message on the final screen (or was it the final screen? I couldn't tell.) I sent feedback to the web designer. In so doing, I noticed that on the pages you fill out when you want to get a free book, you have to opt out of being contacted -- ticking a box if you do NOT want to be contacted in a certain medium.



I noticed that, and thought it was obnoxious, but I chalked it up to ignorance on the part of the marketers. Naturally they want to collect your contact information, and perhaps they thought they were being kind by letting people opt out.

On the webmaster's feedback form, you tick a box if you DO want to be contacted in a certain medium.


Now it looks like the marketing page is set up deliberately, in order to harvest information as quickly as possible. It makes me suspicious of the publisher, which -- along with the four-page ordering form that choked on the fourth page and wouldn't let me use the "go back" button to try again -- is not for customer relations.

--Shakespeare hates your emo poems (Threadless)

Interesting cultural phenomenon... sell a T-shirt, then create a website that lets customers upload photos of themselves wearing the T-shirt.

The result turns the rebellious and snarky T-shirt designs into the uniforms of conformist consumer zombies.

--The civil war in four minutes (YouTube)

Modern interactive fiction, much more than its technically limited earlier counterparts, displays an incredible range of literary influences, tributes and styles. For Sherwin's part, science fiction is an inspiration, but the greater part of his text adventures' efficacy comes from the unique and anarchic style of his characters' dialogue. "I have been greatly influenced by the late George Alec Effinger," he says. "He was the first guy I read that was able to write science fiction chock-full of characters that I not only deeply cared about, but characters that drove the plot due to their strong wills and personalities." In text adventures, literary influences are naturally more evident; text game writers are free to attempt to emulate the same literary devices as the authors who perhaps inspired them, whether in their dialogue styles, plot development or written motifs.

Gamers in search of an edifying read could hope for nothing more than the surreal eloquence of Adam Cadre's Photopia, or the superbly idiosyncratic dialogue of Sherwin's own Fallacy Of Dawn. Sherwin cites Stephen Bond's Rameses as "the best character study in the history of videogames" -- outside the world of the text game, one would be hard pressed to find characters and situations as lovingly and artfully developed and described as they often are in interactive fiction.

However, text games enjoy a luxury not afforded to videogames in any other form; they communicate exclusively through the written word. Without needing to integrate visuals, sound or 3D gameplay, they are free to concentrate wholly upon their writing, and thus are able to achieve a focus that is usually beyond the reach of a medium as multi-disciplinary as videogames. Pacotti relates this coherence to that of books. "The novel, typically created by one person working exclusively in language, strives for a coherence only occasionally seen in film and almost never in games," he explains. "This coherence -- the integration of the smallest details into a single vision -- is the basis of good art." --PLAY-PEN: Games Due for a Lit Course (Next Generation)

This article gives the literary qualities of text adventure games some welcome attention, integrating canonical recent IF works with a discussion of good writing in recent mainstream PRGs, but I fear that it tips too far over onto the narratological side, with a good bit of cinema 101 thrown in for good measure.

Just because text games use prose instead of polygons doesn't erase the fact that, as a game, a text adventure requires coding.

Last night I found myself digging out a text-adventure work-in-progress, and I managed to squash a few bugs after I put my daughter to bed, but before my son was finished with his bath. And then after putting my son to bed, I fell asleep on the floor of his room, so I didn't get much done last night.

Though Ferguson couldn't figure out how to make his 1938 scenario work, there was a better expert who could: His 13-year-old son, who was a whiz at strategy games. Rather than rush out to attack Germany, his son carefully set up robust trade agreements with France first to make sure the country felt diplomatically obligated to go along with the fight. Presto: France fought, and Germany fell.

Ferguson became so delighted with Making History that he has joined forces with Muzzy Lane to design a new game. Due out in 2008, this one will model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran.

It'll undoubtedly be controversial. But it will also, he expects, be humbling. The power of counterfactual thinking is that forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. When we think about historical events, we have 20/20 hindsight -- so we forget how confusing and uncertain they were at the time. In 1943, nobody really knew how strong Germany was, or what Stalin was thinking. In modern conflicts, we often have a similarly false sense of surety -- too much confidence in our ability to predict the outcome of major events.

When we play with sims, they knock us off our pedestals -- because crazy things usually happen we don't predict. Yet the chaos is useful, because we can run the same situation again and again, changing one little thing each time, until we've war-gamed it deeply and understand it better than ever. --Clive Thompson --Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games (Wired)

--Deleted Scenes (StarTrekHistory.com)

An awesome collection of painstakingly-restored still shots and script excerpts, from scenes that were filmed but never aired.

--A Fair(y) Use Tale (YouTube)

Amazing demonstration of creative repurposing of Disney's copyrighted material.

Open source software makes podcasting easy -- too easy. Listening to a playlist of first-timer podcasts can leave your ears ringing from sudden changes in playback volume. The problem is audio mastering. Recording sound is simple, but mastering that sound -- compressing volume differences, maintaining a decibel ceiling, and similar operations -- is anything but. Fortunately, an open source tool offers everything you need for mastering podcasts and other spoken-word recordings. Audacity is well-known among podcasters on all platforms for its ability as an editor; here are some tips and tools for mastering and adjusting volume, aimed at podcasters, but they could apply to anyone who needs to produce a spoken-word recording under less-than-perfect conditions. --Johnathon Williams --Mastering podcasts with Audacity (News Forge)

I wish I knew about this argument a few months ago, when I was just starting to introduce podcasting to my "Media Lab" class.

The podcasting was one unit in a one-credit course that also includes working on the student paper and a term project, and of course we talked about the culture of podcasting and the nature of radio journalism, so I didn't spend a whole lot of time on technical excellence.

But maybe if I had known about this article, I would have been able to be a little pickier about the sound quality.

Really, though, Xbox Live is just an online simulacrum of a middle-school cafeteria. The crudeness is coming from the kids, not being inflicted on them. If anything, the over-25s we met were an excellent influence. They tended to be polite and mellow and demonstrated good sportsmanship?like saying "good game" after they'd eviscerated me with various weapons.

[...]

I'm right at the fulcrum point of gaming popularity. Almost everyone five years older than me doesn't really "get" video games and has little interest in playing them. Almost everyone five years younger than me can't imagine life without an Xbox (or PS2 or whatever). -- Seth Stevenson and Chris Suellentrop --The Gaming Graybeards: Can two thirtysomethings survive on Xbox Live? (Slate)

I'm pushing 40 (and this very moment is the first time I have ever thought of myself in precisely that term) -- and the guy who wrote this is 30, so I found this statement very apt.

I would probably enjoy online multiplayer games if I had the time to play them... but quite frankly, if I did have more time, I'd probably spend it modding rather than playing. (I never did finish Half-Life 2.)

--Classic Sesame Street - Ernie (almost) repairs the TV (YouTube)

My sister sent me this clip, which was one of our favorites when we were kids. (Still is today, now that you mention it... though the production values were notably simpler back then.)

Thanks, Rosemary.

We know that pro-am journalism can work only if people are persuaded to give their time, lend their knowledge, pool their intelligence. Those are donations, but not of money. Often they are more critical than money.

To succeed in this, we have to persuade several hundred people to donate good work to one big story -- and to swarm around so it gets really good. We plan to modify this site for use in future stories, more sprawling and more difficult. Maybe about the environment. Or the schools. Or -- who knows? -- the war.

A professional newsroom can't easily do this kind of reporting; it's a closed system. Because only the employees operate in it, there can be reliable controls. That's the system's strength. The weakness is the organization knows only what its own people know. Which wasn't much of a weakness until the Internet made it possible for the people formerly known as the audience to realize their informational strengths. --Jay Rosen --Why We're Doing This (Assignment Zero)

We should be jumping for joy every time a student plagiarizes, because that means our existence as teachers of composition is validated, as we have something to teach them - citation, research, the need for critical thinking. We should get down on our knees and thank the Internet for making it easier to plagiarize, because it means we will be employed for the foreseeable future, stemming the metaphorical digital tide. We should be eternally glad that plagiarism is seen as a problem that needs fixing, because if all incoming students cited their sources fairly and accurately and did clever research out of the box, then there wouldn't be much for us to do. We should leap to the opportunity to teach here. Plagiarism is a blessing, not a curse. --Mike Duncan --Objections to Turnitin (Bad Rhetoric)

Plagiarism as the felix culpa of rhetcomp. I'm not very comfortable with the idea, but it did make me think.

I do use the service... recently I noticed a suspicious paragraph, and when I used turnitin.com to print out the documentation in support of the wrist-slapping I was planning to implement, I found four or five other uncited paragraphs from the same source -- something I wouldn't have caught otherwise.

I tell myself that this student has learned an important lesson, and that it's a good thing I caught this problem early, on an assignment that wasn't worth 1/3 of the course grade.

"As for my own point of view, I see creative writing not so much as a form of self-expression (or in the case of problem students, acting out), but of learning to express one's 'otherness,' in the sense of being able to use one's imagination to devise stories or poems out of, as Keats called it, one's 'negative capability.' That is the ability not to be yourself and not to put your own limited self-interested point of view into one's creative writing. And to hold contradictory emotions and ideas together in your mind at once without judgment. To be as Emily Dickinson called it 'a nobody.'"

"In that sense, a threat of violence directed specifically toward a member of the university community in a creative writing class represents a student's failure of imagination, and should be seen as cry for help or cry for attention," [Alan] Soldofsky [director of creative writing at San Jose State] said... --A Very Scary Story (Inside Higher Ed)

It's rare to find so much specialized language quoted in a publication with a general readership. I agree with his point, but even though the audience for Inside Higher Ed is more educated than the general reader, I were this reporter I'd have used a bit more summary as a buffer between shorter chunks from Soldofsky. (In passages near the beginning and end of the sequence that features Soldofsky, the reporter does summarize.)

Using games to entice, entertain, and engage introductory programmers has been successful; many of the approaches, however, use graphical programming. This either requires a complex game engine or toolkit for students to program or a lot of additional effort for students to get the game looking the way they want. Taking a page from the game studies literature, the current paper reports on gaining the benefits of games without the graphics, of traveling back in time to the days of the great text adventure games. --Brian C. Ladd --XYZZY: Finding New Magic in Text Adventure Games (Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education)

I'm always glad to encounter new scholarship on text-based games, but the "back in time" rhetoric here is rather dismissive of the incredible artistic and programming advances that the post-commercial interactive fiction community has made.

This is a Microsoft-sponsored conference, held on the "Disney Wonder Cruise Ship."

And I, for one, welcome our new digital cultural overlords.

Seriously, though, engineering papers are a very, very different genre than the academic papers I've been writing lately. I actually presented at an engineering conference when I was a graduate student, presenting a method for sequencing writing assignments. This was nothing new so far as the rhet-comp field is concerned, but at the time the concept of writing across the curriculum was new to a lot of engineering teachers, and I did what I could to present it to them in a genre that they would find familiar.

In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. --Who Isn't Afraid of Google? (Slashdot)

I recently submitted a proposal to give the "con" perspective on a panel about one of Google's recent innovations. If that panel is accepted, this article will be a good starting place for my research.

This activity is set in a research group that is developing an antivenom for spider bites. In the opening scene, Nelson Pogline, a talented graduate student, dies unexpectedly at a university reception. As a detective, you must use chemistry concepts to determine if this was murder and if so, solve the case. You can interview suspects using Quicktime movies, investigate the crime scene for clues with Quicktime Virtual Reality images, and analyze the evidence from the crime lab. --Mixed Reception (chemcollective.org)

Haven't checked this one out yet.

We are no longer talking about shovelfuls of dirt on the coffin of computer-enforced copying restrictions; that sound you hear is the beep-beep-beep of the dump truck backing up to the grave site. --Rob Pegoraro --The Sound of Copy Restrictions Crashing (Washintgon Post)

When I think about all the expensive engineering that Microsoft embedded into Vista, and how that cost is going to be passed on to consumers who didn't want it and don't need it... and when I think about what amazing things a fraction of that R & D money could have accomplished if it had been given to the open source community, it makes me want to... I dunno... go sharpen a pencil and draft my next syllabus on paper.

After I finish blogging for the evening.

It's now common for companies to Google potential employees to uncover peccadilloes from the past. It took me all of 30 seconds, via Google, to discover one applicant's very public infatuation with indecorous sexual escapades and another's unhealthy fondness for abusing industrial strength pharmaceuticals. Needless to say, neither was hired. --Jim Louderback --On Media in Our Lives: Embarrassment forever (SFGate.com)

Will, this one will probably annoy you, but the reason I'm posting it is because it's written by one of the people who actually makes the decision to hire an applicant or trash the resume.

Has Louderback read The Diamond Age? His penultimate paragraph seems to refer to Neal Stephenson's ideas about the Neo-Victorians.

We could evolve into a much more tolerant and forgiving society, where everyone's secrets are laid bare, and no one -- aside from your mother -- really cares. Don't hold your breath. The more likely outcome is that we'll devolve into a new age of crushing civility, one that makes the current "PC" climate look downright permissive. I see a new Victorian Age dawning, where everyone's proper and polite on the outside, yet out of control in private, when the curtains are drawn and the power is off.

DeSena presented solutions for teachers to prevent the plagiarism plague engulfing a Web-based culture. "All too often teachers emphasize the content (the information) students will cull and hopefully learn. But it is our obligation as teachers to encourage them to respond to the expert or scholar, to answer his or her underlying claim," she wrote. To do this, teachers need to emphasize primary sources over secondary, to embrace students freewriting, honing in and transforming the first draft into formal writing, cultivating a thesis, creating an outline, and learning how to paraphrase. --Meghan Gill
--Sparta teacher fights plague (Straus Newspapers)

There is little new in this article; nevertheless, I appreciate a pedagogy-based discussion of the root causes of plagiarism, rather than a commercially-supported, detection-and-punishment-based solution.

He said, "Mr. Moio, I have something that I would like you to have." Without hesitating, he handed me an old, leather-bound book with an embossed title reading, "English Poems." I thanked the student and opened the front cover to discover that the book was published in 1902. Explaining to my student that the book was more than 100 years old, I thanked him again and told him that I could never take such a valuable possession away from him.

"No, really, it was my grandmother's," he said, hands in the air in protest of my attempt to return the volume, "I told her how much you like poetry and she gave it to me and told me that she wanted you to have it to thank you for helping me in Language Arts." --David Moio --A Nice Little Story to Cap off EL312 (DavidMoio)

A wonderful teaching anecdote, from a student of mine who is about my age (with a bigger family to support).

It's stories like this that remind us why we love to teach.

--20 Sided Fuzzy Dice Danglers (Think Geek)

Now those are my kind of fuzzy dice.

--Atari Candleholder (Wonderland | Mixko)

Wonderland credits a designer called Mixko, but I couldn't find it on that site. (And even I did find it there, I couldn't link to it, because the site uses Flash in a horribly user-hostile way.)

The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence

into this:

--Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online)

Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a preposition or other small word that one can usually guess from the context. Such words are so common that they are easily recognized, even when the eye is focusing on the next word in the line. So there is less back-tracking of the eyes.

The article is packed with statistics that show that students comprehend better when they learn texts formatted in this manner.

The researchers are selling an online service that reformats text on the fly, so naturally the research is going to emphasize the benefits of such a service, so keep that in mind.

The economics of book printing dictate that books are less expensive (and therefore accessible to more people) if the print fills up as much of the page as possible. But there is no such restriction on electronic text. As monitor screens get wider and wider every year, I have often wondered what to do with all that blank space on either side of the legible columns of text. This looks like a useful option.

Over the summer, I'm planning to create some new online handouts for my journalism class, so I'm blogging this for future reference.

According to Marmor, Monet's work began to show a yellowish cast as his cataracts developed. To reveal how Monet saw the world, Marmor darkened images using Photoshop and reduced the levels of blue to replicate a yellowing effect. He also used blurring filters.

The results suggest that Monet's vision corrupted his ability to see colors correctly. This -- and not a desire to reflect the growing expressionist style of painting -- may explain the abstract nature of Monet's later work. --Randy Dotinga --Photoshop Re-Creates Aging Impressionists' Eye on the World (Wired)

Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage!
Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that th' infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye. -- Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). "After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles," he said. --Americans and Japanese Read Faces Differently (Live Science)

The Pentagon is setting up a civilian Language Corps, a cadre of some 1,000 foreign-language speakers who can help the government in times of war and national emergencies.

In a three-year pilot program, the Defense Department will recruit volunteers and do testing to see if such a program would work. If successful, a permanent corps could be developed, said Robert Slater, who heads the Pentagon personnel office's security education program. --Pauline Jelinek --Pentagon creating civilian Language Corps to help in times of war, emergenciesAssociated Press)

Via Language Log.

They came from all over the world, poles in hand, and feet ready to inch more than half a mile across a high wire strung over the Han River in a spine-tingling battle of balance, speed and high anxiety. --Bo-Mi Lim --Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo (Yahoo! | AP (will espire))

This is a news article about a high-wire competition that involved crossing a body of water called the Han River.

A tip of the blaster-shield-fitted helmet to a very clever headline writer.

Some linguists are worried that the proliferation of text messaging among students may hurt the development of formal English. Johnson does not agree.

"I don't buy it," Johnson said. "I think students can distinguish between different contexts. What they would say with their friends is different from what they would say to an instructor."

Text messaging may be an important tool to help students learn the difference between different English and behaviors that are appropriate for different situations.

"Sure, text messaging can help teach that difference," Johnson said. "I would put the emphasis on explaining the importance of context."

In fact, Johnson says that text messaging may have a positive effect on language, especially with English as a second language students. --Teaching through Text Message; Cell Phones Emerge as Learning Tool (Rebel Yell)

I tend to agree. If instructors teach that text-message lingo and academic English are two points on a sliding scale (not necessarily the most extreme points), that's a good way to help students learn about the importance of audience and rhetorical context. I try to make it very clear that my expectations for blog entries are slightly more formal than in-class timed writing exercises, but I really don't mind shorthand or typos in the comments that students leave on peer blog entries.

Of course, I do ask students to demonstrate that they are capable of leaving an in-depth comment from time to time, and naturally I hope that when students are doing any sort of course work that they will be practicing the appropriate writing skills.

Police arrested a college student Tuesday suspected of opening fire in an off-campus apartment during a dispute over a video game console, killing one man and wounding two others. --Calif. Student Arrested in Shooting (AP | MyWay (will expire))

But I should have expected that. The IF Comp, an annual contest to see who can write the best text-based game, offers a vast treasury of interactive fiction, and many of the entries over the past 13 years are truly fantastic. Some, like Vespers, are lit-geek works of art, putting the bulk of commercial games to shame. --Textual Pleasure: Parsing the Annual IF Competition (The Escapist)

Imagine Gilligan's Island without the Howells and their paper dollars. Without money, commodities exchange directly: coconuts for fish, fish for bamboo, etc. But even with barter, some commodities are more "marketable" than others. Perhaps one of the castaways might eventually buy one of the Professor's books, but they will more often purchase Mary Ann's coconut cream pies -- or the coconuts themselves. Coconuts are more marketable than books.

Over time, the commodity that is most marketable becomes popular for indirect exchange: the Skipper trades his fish for Ginger's decorative shells, not because he wants shells, but because he knows he can trade them for Gilligan's coconuts. The price of a commodity is its exchange ratio for the most marketable good, e.g., 12 shells per coconut. The value of the shell money is based on the goods it traded for yesterday -- since we can't know what prices will be today. Right now, the Skipper is willing to trade one of his fish for two coconuts, and he knows that Gilligan was recently willing to trade his coconuts for a dozen shells each, therefore the Skipper wants to price his fish at two-dozen shells each: enough to buy two coconuts. Prices can change from day to day, but today's new prices will be based on the prices of other things yesterday. --B. K. Marcus --The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III  (Ludwig von Mises Institute)

Why can't anything fun ever be slouched toward? I mean, what about Slouching Towards Deliciousness, or Slouching Towards Balloon Animals? --Slouching Toward Something (Why Not Sneeze?)

When we refuse to "budge an inch," excoriate "rotten apples," or admonish slackers to "sink or swim," we speak in his voice. Although the arts sections of newspapers teem with products from self-anointed "artists" who will not survive their publicity budgets, Shakespeare after roughly four centuries still pleases general audiences, challenges intellectuals, and provokes academics. How can we not presume that such a stupendous orchestrator of character and insight operated with a coherent, multifaceted theory of human nature?

On the other hand, our ignorance of Shakespeare the man - he left no diaries or letters in his short life of some 52 years - and the clashing multiple versions of some of his texts, have always dovetailed with a contrary belief that his greatness arises precisely from utter openness to the varieties of human behavior, emotion and thought, his ability to render in concrete scenes and daring metaphors more non-reductionist nuances of the heart and mind than an army of writers centuries later.

This Shakespeare soars as the universal artist because his plays and poetry offer a kaleidoscope of the human condition while speculative bios, short on fact and long on inference, end up too dull an instrument to cut him down to size. He's a channeler rather than a source of wisdom. --The readiness to deconstruct is all (Philadelphia Inquirer)

I wish this article had come out a week earlier... I would have discussed it in my Lit Crit class. (It's still a good read.)

--atari-and-controllers (jackrabbit.etsy.com)

Via join the dots.

To Do (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

5: The number of proposals I've sent off in the last 24 hours. (Well, one I had drafted weeks ago, and another consisted of me answering the phone and saying "Yes," but still.... )

Feels like a pretty good day.

To do:

• Share with colleagues draft of revised senior portfolio for English majors (lit, creative writing, journalism) (10 May)
  
• Submit draft to administration (10 May)
  
• My own annual report (whew!)
  
• Additional work on major interactive-fiction article I've had to set aside due to teaching demands
  
• Prepare award certificates for Setonian staff members (05 May. Still have to sign them, though. 06 May.)
  
• Weird Romance (05 May.)
  
• Submit grades for graduating seniors (07 May)
  
• Submit grades for everyone else (15 May)
  
• Say good-bye to the graduating seniors who were freshmen when I arrived at Seton Hill (12 May)

That last item won't take the most time, but it will be the hardest.

This article from The Week has statistics that bolster and weaken arguments frequently used by people on both sides of the debate. --How other countries deal with gun control (BoingBoing)

Blogging this for future reference. I'll be teaching a news writing course in the fall, and one of the most challenging units involves getting students to think critically about statistical claims made by advocates of a particular issue.

After reading The Tempest and reading a student's paper about Gulliver's Travels, I'm thinking about creating a unit that involves students writing reports about interviews with people from fictional countries. There might be a society that promotes free file-sharing and has a legal drinking age of 17, but where women can't vote. There might be glossy tourist brochures that offer one view of the country, but refugees and people from minority groups would offer a strikingly different view of the country. (And some of those minority views would be wildly inaccurate.)

The idea would be to get students to practice reporting about a complex subject where following the truth wherever it may lead is more intellecutually complex than getting the right answer on a multiple choice question. I want to force them out of the habit of doing what they've been rewarded for in high school -- stating their personal reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with a prompt.

Vetting Comments Strangers Post to Class Blogs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I always enjoy telling my students when I start noticing comments that people who aren't in our class start posting comments on the course weblog or individual student weblogs.

Sometimes the poster is someone who took the course in the past and is recalling with fondness (or horror) a particular assignment. Other entries attract comments from other people on the Internet who happen to be interested in the same subject.

Here is an example of such a comment (posted to a 600-word blog entry that discussed the nature of heroism in Huck Finn) that I don't bother to approve:

im writing a paper why is huck the hero??

But here is an excerpt from a 700-word comment (posted to a student's entry about Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"), which I did approve:

My take was that it is blindingly obvious that he is a first draft of perfection, but like the Misfit, a flawed one. He talks the talk, but Jesus never said anything about the heart as a car or anything mobile - it was a mustard seed that grew IN PLACE, like a house, like the Kingdom of God.

See Also:

• Approving or Ignoring Comments on Old Student Blog Entries
  
• Blogging Now Begins Young

"You present an engineering problem, like a fighter plane that's returned to base shredded by antiaircraft fire, and ask students where they would put extra armor," said Mr. Tront. Students circle various parts of the plane that took a lot of hits. "You can show their solutions one by one and discuss them," he said.

And if no one catches on to the trick -- this was a plane that made it back safely; the damage was irrelevant, and it's the undamaged areas that were probably hit on the planes that went down, so those areas need protection -- the professor can discuss the logic behind that, too. --Josh Fischman --Take Several Tablets for Teaching: Interactive Scribbling Draws Students Into Classroom Presentations (Chronicle of Higher Education)

I blogged this because I like the cool engineering example. That's like the curious incident of the dog in the night -- the dog that did not bark (thus indicating that it knew a particular night visitor).

I am a fan of technology, but in this example I can see it being just as effective if you pass out printouts, have students mark them up in pencil, then use a document camera to project their anonymous suggestions.

I only give a handful of slideshows a year. If students get bored after about 10 minutes of a slideshow, and I had 20 minutes of material, I would probably break up the presentation (giving them a small-group writing assignment).

--Stephen Granade
--LOL Trek (Live Granades)

I was vaguely aware of the lolcats phenomenon, which involves remediating the famous "Hang in there, baby" cat poster as if the cats themselves were writing the captions.

Never did I expect it to be unleashed on the beloved Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" (which has earned it a spot on my blog.)

A Chinese student was transferred from his high school to an "alternative education center" (?) after his parents found he had designed a Counterstrike mod with maps based on his school. Two parents learned of the map he made from their kids, and they informed his parents, who in turn reported him to the Fort Bend Independent School District administrators. --Fort Bend school trustees put off video game appeal (Houston Chronicle)

It's important to note that it wasn't just the fact that the student designed a game map that depicted the school, but that the investigation turned up swords. Further, the parents reported their own son and gave the police permission to search his room. Police found nothing worthy of a criminal charge, but without any evidence that this young man had any unusual (ore even typical) anti-social tendencies, I hope all parties can resolve this quickly.

The fact that this kid happens to be Asian wouldn't have anything at all to do with it, would it?

It does look like some members of the school board feel the body has overreacted. "He did it [designed the game level] at his house. Never took anything to school. Never wrote an ugly letter, never said anything strange to a student or a teacher, nothing," according to one board member. Other members stayed away from the meeting where the student was trying to get them to appeal the decision, so it seems that overreaction will stand for now.

Digg Takedown, Obama Takeover, Army Blog Squeeze (Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

This is the last week of classes, and I've got deadlines galore (3 conference proposals, an annual report, a departmental proposal, and an article submission that I've been sitting on for a week).

So I won't have much to say, but I still thought it was worth noting the story of Digg's attempt to silence user-submitted articles about cracking HD-DVD security. Since Digg is made up of user-supported content, Digg users have responsed by submitting a flood of articles that express their unhappiness with the fact that Digg tried to suppress the HD-DVD security information (and most of those articles probably duplicate the protection information that Digg was supposed to be protecting by taking down the article in the first place).

I also note the story of how the Obama campaign was initially happy that supporter Joe Anthony volunteered to keep the Obama MySpace page. But then the Obama campaign pushed Anthony off the site, taking it over from and refusing to pay him what Anthony thought it was worth. (I don't know whether they offered a lower figure and Anthony was holding out for more, or whether they just figured it was their right to take over the site.) At any rate, Anthony says the campaign has lost his vote.

Just think of all the money that has gone into the development of complex software with digital content protection schemes that bloat the size and blunt the usability (Vista) , and that will go into litigation that will attempt to extend the economic lifespan of the 19-th century models of cultural production. Imagine if that money had instead been spent on think-tanks that aim to work with the cultural tide, rather than against it.

And while I appreciate the desire of the US Army to crack down on the possibility of leaking military secrets, wouldn't the blogosphere be a useful place to engage with public opinion and recruit new members? The military crackdown on soldier blogs suggests the public at large will lose a valuable avenue to interact with the men and women who make life-or-death decisions that affect global stability. If you think of what the US Army Corps of Engineers can do in an emergency, think of an online strike team that might be ready to swoop in the event of a Katrina-like crisis, or a Darfur-like morass, engaging the good will of people around the globe, drawing on their first-hand observations.

Am I naive? Probably. Regardless, today was not a very good day for social networking.

Getting shot hurts. -- Ronald Reagan --Reagan diaries reveal president's private musingsYahoo! | Reuters (will expire))

As an American who started drinking tea the English way while in Canada (brewed in a pot and poured into the cup, not made in the cup with a single-serving tea bag), I enjoyed the anecdote about Prince Charles.

On the night of Monday, April 23, the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up. --Richard Pérez-Peña --Business magazine fails to heed its own tech advice (International Herald Tribune)

What makes this a "dog bites man" story is the fact that Business 2.0 publishes an annual "101 Dumbest Moments" feature, in which the magazine mocks other companies for making mistakes.

Oddly enough, while I was typing this entry, I accidentally pulled my computer plug out of the wall -- again.

But the last time this happened, I must have rearranged my plugs so that only printer and monitor were connected to that particular power bar. The CPU is plugged directly into the wall. (Yay, me!)

--Map of Online Communities (XKCD: A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language)

Thanks, Josh, for the suggestion. (This is just an excerpt from the full map.)

I'm going to have to give this site some attention when grades are in... I wish the artist could draw people instead of stick figures, but the jokes are clever, sweet, and geeky.

A cameraman for the NBC affiliate in Houston was captured on home video sporting a Mexican flag on his camera while covering a rally in the Texas city that supported illegal immigrants, drawing angry shouts from counter-protesters.

In the first of two clips posted on YouTube.com, a counter-protester with a bull horn can be heard condemning the cameraman's flag.

"Why does Channel 2 News have a Mexican flag on their camera?" the man asked. --Art Moore
--NBC cameraman flies Mexican flag at march (WorldNetDaily)

In another clip, the cameraman is seen helping someone attach an American flag to his camera, too.

But the damage had been done. He was on duty, and should not have betrayed his bias.

"We believe the victim was assaulted after hours Friday by an unknown individual or individuals," a Columbia County sheriff's departmaent spokesman said. "Though autopsy results are still pending, we believe the victim suffered fatal head trauma after his face was immobilized against the glass of a photocopier and repeatedly struck with the machine's cover." --White-On-White Violence Claims Life Of Accounts Receivable Supervisor (The Onion (Satire))

I never thought the Kornfeld character was funny enough to deserve his own recurring column, but it looks like his untimely death might spark an enjoyable, long, drawn-out story.

One thing that I feel very strongly about since I began my post-secondary literary studies, is that high school teachers tend to teach the students all sorts of things that need to be un-taught when they get to college. It drives me crazy! Shouldn't we be teaching students skills they can build on when they get to college, not skills and habits they have to break in order to be successful in post-secondary education!?! So, one of my goals when I teach is not to teach my students things that they need to be un-taught later. That might mean expecting more out of my students than the average high school English teacher, but I think in the end it will benefit them greatly. --Lorin Schumacher --Lit Crit's Usefulness in Pedagogy (LorinSchumacher)

Lorin is a sophomore English and education student at Seton Hill. As part of a student Tiffany Brattina's blogging carnival on education, Lorin blogged this thoughtful essay.

I Think, I Want, I Know, I Feel, I Google (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Google Hits:

• I think (369,000,000)
  
• I want (275,000,000)
  
• I know (257,000,000)
  
• I feel (128,000,000)
  
  
• I hate (51,200,000)
  
• I love (270,000,000)
  

The picture shows Stacy Snyder of Strasburg wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic "Mr. Goodbar" cup. The photograph taken during a 2005 Halloween party was posted on Snyder's MySpace Web page with the caption "Drunken Pirate."

"The day before graduation, the college confronted me about the picture," Snyder said Thursday. "I was told I wouldn't be receiving my education degree or teaching certificate because the photo was 'unprofessional.' " --Brett Lovelace --Web photo haunts graduate (Lancaster Online)

The kicker? Snyder is 27 years old.

The denial of degree happened last year; the news hook in this story is that the former student has now filed a lawsuit.

Certainly she showed poor judgment by putting that photo on her profile. Since my only alcohol consumption is about one glass of wine per year, my own attitudes about drunken photos are biased.

Snyder surely learned in her education classes why parents hold the teachers of their children to such high ethical standards. It looks like the school system where Snyder was doing her student-teaching may have been involved. According to the lawsuit, "Conestoga Valley officials told the college their students wouldn't be allowed to perform student-teacher requirements there if Snyder was not punished."

For good reason, universities don't publish information about disciplining students; neither Millersville University nor a Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education would comment on this story. We don't know whether this were just the latest in a long string of unprofessional incidents, in which case it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. If this were an isolated incident, then denying the education degree seems very harsh.