July 2007 Archive Page

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is "this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn't work for 'my subject.'" Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include "thought experiments" where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt --on the spot -- to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler's List. It's just dumb (and lazy) of educators -- not to mention ineffective -- to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives' "language" is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea. --Marc Prensky --Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (marcprensky.com)

Extremely relevant when it was written in 2001, and still important now. When I recently gave a talk about simulations in Holocaust education, I didn't mention this passage, but I probably should have.

Until the eigth school in the list, they've only included schools with a few students which means that any large percentage drops or gains are not strange at all, but expected. To put them on the "Biggest Metro Math Losers" (what kind of name for a table is that anyway?!) is simply poor reporting.

I'm sure the editors would think a reporter insane for doing the same thing for the baseball box scores: "Mauer was 2 for 4 on Tuesday, but only 1 for 5 on Wednesday. That's a 30% drop!" --IB --Newspaper Reporting (Three Standard Deviations to the Left)

The big problem here, as IB notes, is that the article in question deals with a very small pool of students, so that normal fluctuations in the numbers look like huge drops and gains. (Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.)

Gamers are unequivocal: "Dying gives a game meaning", say posters on the PC Advisor forums. Markus Montola, a researcher at Tampere University in Finland, takes this further: "You have a motivation - to avoid being annoyed by dying. Motivation is what makes the game meaningful."

Pete Hines - vice-president at Bethesda, the developer behind the role-playing game Oblivion and its expansion pack, Shivering Isles - agrees. "Having your character die or fail is important because your actions have to have some meaning in the game, and to you."

But is the death of your character the right way to give a game meaning? Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, the developer of Fable, Black & White and The Movies, says: "A fight has to cost the player something, or it loses its meaning. Previously, that cost was time and tedium [in replaying a level]. But is that the right cost?" --Kate Bevan --Why do we have to die in games? (Guardian)

Similar sites have captured the imagination of ordinary users with a so-called "citizen" brand of journalism, but NowPublic is gaining attention for the size of its fast-growing army of 118,000 members who write and post news stories, cellphone camera pictures, and videos from 3,600 cities in over 140 countries.

"Think of us as a new kind of wire service that has eyes and ears all over the world," said CEO and co-founder Leonard Brody in an interview. "When the cyclones broke in Oman a few weeks ago, AP's bureau chief in Saudi Arabia couldn't get there. By the time he left his driveway, we already had eight photos and stories filed." --Joanne Lee-Young --News site secures landmark capital funding (Vancouver Sun)

NowPublic makes money in part by charging mainstream media for access to its citizen reporters. Do we have a scorpion-on-the-back-of-the-tortoise situation here?

First Amendment lawsuits by student journalists at public universities become moot when the plaintiffs graduate, according to a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. --Scott Jaschik --Loss for the Student Press (Inside Higher Ed)

That sounds very disturbing.

An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus' letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn't matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.

[...]

Why does Charlie Brown tear himself into knots over the little red-haired girl? The very possibility that he could go over and talk to her is far more distressing than its impossibility would be; he must take ownership of his failure. When she is the victim of a bully in the school yard, Charlie Brown's despair threatens to leap right off the comic page. He isn't suffering because he can't help her, but because he could help her, but won't: "Why can't I rush over there and save her? Because I'd get slaughtered, that's why..." When Linus helps her out instead, thereby illustrating his freedom of action, Charlie Brown only becomes more melancholic. --Nathan Radke --Sartre & Peanuts (Philosophy Now)

Of course, Charlie Brown does keep trying to kick the football, so he is not completely immobilized. He is also the manager and pitcher of a hopeless baseball team, but he (and his teammates) keep playing anyway. Radke interprets these incidents as a sign of disconnectedness with the past, and the possibility of change.

Lucy's own psychological problems make her a fairly suspect voice of reason in her role as Charlie Brown's therapist. But in Schroeder's veneration of Beethoven, we do see a largely positive representation of humanist faith.

Statistics collected over two decades show an alarming decline in the performance of America's boys--in some respects, a virtual free fall. Boys were doing poorly in school, abusing drugs, committing violent crimes and engaging in promiscuous sex. Young males lost ground by many behavioral indicators at some point in the 1980s and '90s: sharp plunges on some scales, long erosions on others. I was forced to confront a fact that I had secretly known all along: that teens of 30 years ago--my generation--were the leading edge of an epidemic of thugs, dolts and cads.

No wonder so many writers began calling for change in the late 1990s. Reliable social-science data often lag a couple of years behind the calendar; it takes time to gather and compile a nation's worth of numbers. Stories about social trends that you read today may be describing the reality of 2004 or 2005. The groundbreaking boy books were a response to statistics portraying the worst of a physical, mental and moral health crisis.

There's more to the story, however. That downward slide has leveled off--and in many cases, turned around. Boys today look pretty good compared with their dads and older cousins. By some measures, our boys are doing better than ever. --David Von Drehle --The Boys are All Right (Time)

I've blogged about the "boy crisis" before, and this is a thoughtful, moderating rebuttal.

The filmmakers hope that "Paradise Lost" will prove enticing to Christian audiences. Mr. Hazeldine said he read "several theological tomes" because "I'm adapting Milton, and then Milton's kind of adapting Genesis, and I wanted to make sure that for the faith audience, I guess, that they will see it more as 'The Passion of the Christ' than 'The Last Temptation of Christ' " -- that is, more a reverent treatment of Biblical material than a reconsideration. Both he and Mr. Derrickson said they are Christians, as are Mr. Newman and the script's original writers. Even so, Mr. Newman said the film is not "a Christian endeavor or Christian movie."

But he added that it would be "made with total adherence and respect to any of the three religions' involvement in the story of God, the Devil and the archangels," referring to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. But "it's a war movie at the end of the day," Mr. Newman said.

As a Christian, Mr. Hazeldine said, the project poses "a challenge for people like Scott and I, who have a faith, but we just love movies." He added, "We often find that we are wondering, are we too worldly for the church and too churchy for the world?" --It's God vs. Satan. But What About the Nudity? (NY Times)

I loved this correction notice at the bottom of the page: "A picture on March 4 with an article about a screenplay of 'Paradise Lost' was printed upside down. The rebel angels should have appeared in the lower half of the illustration by Gustave Doré, which was inverted by Art Resource." Somehow, that doesn't seem like a good sign.

Via Kelo the Great.

The power class was buzzing around in the sky, watching the ruination of someone's life way down below - making buckets of cash by broadcasting someone else's tragedy, then - WHAM - the real bursts into their own life, they become the live tragedy - but we're still viewing the whole thing through the lens of a t.v. camera. How tragic and fascinating. --Baby_Balrog

I'm sad for the deceased. I'm sad for their families. I wish someone had used some good judgment at some point to prevent such a tragedy. | I'm also hoping it leads to less of this kind of "content" on the news, but recognise how futile that hope is even as I type it. --batmonkey --''This may be the end of this thing...'' (MetaFilter)

From comments posted on MetaFilter's coverage of today's midair helicopter crash in Phoenix.

Sometimes called the reptilian brain because its basic structure dates back to our reptile ancestors, the brain stem is largely devoted to our most primal instincts, far removed from the complex, higher-brain skills that allow us to understand humor. And yet somehow, in this primitive region, we find the urge to laugh. --Steven Johnson --What's So Friggin' Funny? (Discover)

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of "publishing". Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy. --University Publishing in a Digital Age (Ithaka)

Filing away for the ol' tenure application.

Update, 01 Aug: IHE report; McLemee analysis.

Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen. --Queen guitarist to complete doctorate (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

This brightened my day.

Now, I love black backgrounds more than anything else in the design business, and yet I was still very surprised to acknowledge how dark theatrical posters are and that, specifically, in this context, the top 25 grossing movies of all time across all ages didn't run a very wide gamut. Only at the tot level did color start to play a real role. And while the psychological and emotional explanations of what colors mean are too varied to take any which one as authoritative, it is nonetheless telling that black is the color of choice in movie posters. --Chris Eichman
--Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies  (Under Consideration)

The top of the image represents NC-17 posters, while the bottom represents G movies.

Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn't much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden's in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27. --Frank Rose --How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life (Wired)

I recall scratching my head in puzzlement last year when the Second Life stories started appearing in the media. Didn't the VR hype fizzle out with the 90s?

Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti --Breaking News: Something Happening in Haiti (The Onion (Satire))

Great commentary on the accelerated news cycle.

The car could be up on blocks and be just as astonishing. | It goes to show you how we in the press so often miss the big stories that are right under our noses. There is a famous journalistic legend about the time a young reporter covered the Johnstown flood of 1889. The kid wrote: "God sat on a hillside overlooking Johnstown today and looked at the destruction He had wrought." His editor cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God." --Ebert on "Herbie: Fully Loaded" (2005)

Watching "Bedazzled," I was reminded of the ancient newspaper legend about the reporter sent to cover the Johnstown Flood. "God stood on a mountain top," he wrote, "and saw what his flood waters had wrought." His editor cabled back: Forget flood. Interview God. Why was I remembering this old story? -- Ebert on "Bedazzled" (2000)

"God stood on a mountain here today," he wrote, "and saw what his waters had wrought." His editor cabled him: "Forget flood. Interview God." That was my reaction while watching "Gospa." Ebert on "Gospa" (1996)

Watching "Fire in the Sky," I was reminded of a famous old journalism story. Sent to cover the Johnstown Flood, reporter Bob Considine began his story: "God stood on a mountain top here today, and surveyed the damage that His floodwaters had wrought." His editors cabled him: "Forget flood. Interview God." In the case of "Fire in the Sky," my advice to the filmmakers would be, forget the five pals and their problems, and spend more time with Travis Walton inside the spaceship. --Ebert on "Fire in the Sky" (1993)
(rogerebert.suntimes.com)

It's a great anecdote. I don't see anything wrong with using it four times over 12 years, but it's interesting to see how the text of the story changes.

"At first I didn't believe a seagull was capable of stealing crisps. But I saw it with my own eyes and I was surprised. He's very good at it." --Seagull becomes crisp shoplifter (BBC)

Very strange. My brother-in-law Robert sent it to me.

--Statetris (mapmsg.com)

Like Tetris, but with American states.

"I have never forgotten the magic night that my own father, like his father and his father's father before him, gently woke me, bundled me up in a warm blanket and quietly led me outside to see the Northern Lights for the first time," said the elder Meier, dejectedly sipping a cup of hot cocoa on the back porch as his uninterested son ran back inside to his Sony PlayStation. "It was a moment I'd always looked forward to sharing with my own son."

"Well, so much for that dream," added Meier, heading to the kitchen to pour the boy's untouched mug of cocoa into the sink. --Child Unimpressed With Aurora Borealis After Whole Day Of Tekken 3 (The Onion (Satire))

An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers after one criminal's girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim's head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better. --Gang Kidnaps Gamer to Get Password Using Fake Orkut Date (Gizmodo)

The story points to a website that appears to be in Portugese, so I can't investigate this story any further. It fulfills so many stereotypes it just doesn't sound credible... the kidnap victim isn't named, for instance. I don't see any coverage of this outside the gamer weblogs and fansites, so I'm leaning towards "PR hoax" on this one. Perhaps time will tell.

Barker: "I think that Roger Ebert's problem is that he thinks you can't have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written 'Romeo and Juliet' as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know? If only she hadn't taken the damn poison. If only he'd have gotten there quicker."

Ebert: He is right again about me. I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist. Would "Romeo and Juliet" have been better with a different ending? Rewritten versions of the play were actually produced with happy endings. "King Lear" was also subjected to rewrites; it's such a downer. At this point, taste comes into play. Which version of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare's or Barker's, is superior, deeper, more moving, more "artistic"? --Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker (Roger Ebert | Sun Times)

Film reviewer Roger Ebert fisks novelist and gamer Clive Barker. Filing this for a rainy day.

As I see it, a good reporter is like a pinball in play, always gathering, writing, revising, gathering, writing, revising--until time runs out. The job is as simple, and as hard, as that.

The advice here is based on the teachings of reporters I admire. It is also based on conclusions I have drawn during 26 years as a writer, editor and teacher. --Jim Hall --Beginning Reporting (VCU)

Looks like a great resource.

Here's a quick three-step photoshop tutorial to make coloring pages for your kids from any digital photo. Kids will love coloring pictures of themselves and their family (what could be more fun than giving grandpa spiky purple hair and a green beard). --coloring pages from your photos - 3 easy photoshop steps (fototiller)

There once was a horse-riding chap
Who took a trip in a cold snap
He stopped in the snow
But he soon had to go:
He was miles away from a nap. --Lore Sjöberg --Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks (Bad Gods)

--Echochrome - the Escher Game (YouTube, Via Game Girl Advance)

What a hypnotically simple interface! This is a PSP game. Since I'm not a platform gamer, I'll have to admire this one from afar.

bootlegs are wierd the only time i gop online is to blog on this my space woich juliet you are free to bring oiver to m,y site as its mine and i own it, anyway i dont know i told all myf riends an dyou too to be there 1030 sharp because weve been allabout goping on time and i was told 1030- then there was one of the mopst remarkable technicaL PVERSIOGHTs in my entire career- the oplder dudes whove done hgouse sound from, SIR a jillion times forgot to TURN ON THE SUBWOOFERS. so i beeged for 15 mopre minutes to figure out why the hell a real band wich would be moine sounded like a trebley backing band to an american idol songbird, tweeters are the hiogh end and woofers tge low but sib woofers are the bass and the toms and kick growl and i rtold stu the truth= chicks just do not end up with drummers of his strentgth and aptitude- whatver that fguy nedsx to keep him happy - wich sinc ehe has a farm on tghe Isle of Wight and just nothing fazes him - isnt to hard- hi sintetion is just to play cdrums and imA bit of a dudem, im thinking and i think im right abou tthis we need obne more Samantha level ro0kc ballsy song - even though has that fine razors edge al;mist cheeze but not bridge wich quuickly turns ballsy= mne and pete wrote one "car crash" wich wqe doid at studio b when LP was prepping for her biog and hey i aint getting in any trouble again so no fucking names- --Courtney Love --nyc wtf?Warning, horrific spelling and grammar per usual! (Courtney Love's MySpace)

This is sort of a random chunk out of a 7000-word blog entry. One single paragraph in the middle is about 3500 words long.

I had previously blogged a speech Love gave in 2000, which was a well-argued, detailed explanation of how the recording industry makes millions off of bands that (according to Love) barely make any money at all. I found that speech persuasive and enlightening, but I find what she wrote in her MySpace page to be completely incomprehensible. The really funny thing is that people are leaving comments praising Love and thanking her for what she wrote...

Wow. I guess it really is the thought that counts.

A string of publishers failed to spot blatant plagiarism of one of English literature's most famous authors, in a cheeky test to see if she would have secured a book deal today, a report said Thursday.

David Lassman, head of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, sent manuscripts to 18 editors seeking a publishing contract, using only slightly disguised versions of chapters from the iconic novelist's most famous works.

But only one publisher spotted the fakes, which included perhaps the most famous line in all English literature, the opening sentence of her 1813 work "Pride and Prejudice".... which he renamed "First Impressions".

"Thank you for your recent letter and chapters from your book 'First Impressions'. It seems like a really original and interesting read," wrote Penguin. Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling's agents Christopher Little said they were "not confident" of being able to place the work.

The only editor to spot the ruse was apparently Alex Bowler of Jonathan Cape. --AFP (Yahoo | AFP (will expire))

This story illustrates the level of attention paid to the "slush pile" -- the flood of unsolicited manuscripts that entry-level editors sift through. The editors would have had to take the extra time to write a personalized rejection letter, and my guess is that even the editors who noticed the prank didn't feel motivated to take that extra time.

I never thought that I would spend my fifteen minutes of fame dressed as as ostrich. --Megan Ritter --Adventures in ostrich suits.... (Megan Ritter)

A member of Seton Hill's College Republicans posts a brief reflection on her appearance on a Time.com front-page feature, as one of the 10 weirdest YouTube questions posted for the upcoming Democratic presidential nomination debate.

Without the internet, we would see fewer costumed students making choreographed question-posing gestures in front of the White House, and I think it's safe to say the world would be just a little bit poorer for it.

Interest in ombudsmen has increased in response to all the polls showing that readers do not hold newspapers in particularly high regard. This problem is hardly a novel one. Similar circumstances led Ralph Pulitzer to establish a Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play at his New York World in 1913. According to a 1916 issue of American Magazine, Pulitzer had become concerned about the increasing blurriness between "that which is true and that which is false" in the paper. He had reason for concern. One of the questionable practices uncovered by the bureau's first director, Isaac D. White, was the routine embellishment of stories about shipwrecks with fictional reports about the rescue of a ship's cat. After asking the maritime reporter why a cat had been rescued in each of a half-dozen accounts of shipwrecks, White was told, "One of those wrecked ships had a cat, and the crew went back to save it. I made the cat the feature of my story, while the other reporters failed to mention the cat, and were called down by their city editors for being beaten. The next time there was a shipwreck there was no cat but the other ship news reporters did not wish to take chances, and put the cat in. I wrote the report, leaving out the cat, and then I was severely chided for being beaten. Now when there is a shipwreck all of us always put in a cat." --Cassandra Tate --What do ombudsmen do? (Organization of News Ombudsmen)

When he was editor of a daily newspaper in 1964, "nearly 90 percent of the households in that town subscribed to the paper, and people would get up in the morning and read it," Mr. Lavine says. With one radio station and one television station nearby, he says, "there were only three places you could go to find out whether the world had survived overnight. We assumed that what we were doing was right because everyone turned to us."

But those days are gone. Now journalists must understand what their audiences are interested in, as well as the best way to grab their attention. The dean believes that Medill is uniquely poised to straddle the line between journalism and marketing since it consists of both a school of journalism and a program in integrated marketing communications. --Katherine Mangan --Journalism Dean at Northwestern U. Develops Curriculum With Increased Emphasis on Multimedia and Marketing (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

And as far as I know, no other news outlet in the world got this point wrong except the BBC -- not even the tabloids.

People often accuse the BBC of agenda-driven falsification of stories. Perhaps that's sometimes true, I don't know. But in the cases of science mis-reporting that I'm familiar with -- and there are many of them -- the problem seems to be that the reporters and editors concerned are arrogant, lazy, and not very smart.

[...]

Perhaps the BBC News stories in question are turned out by low-level employees who are given only a few minutes to re-write each press release, and are strictly prohibited from doing any independent research, even as much as might be accomplished in a half an hour of web research, or a brief interview with an expert. If so, then all the blame belongs to the managers who have thus condemned their writers to produce drivel. --Mark Liberman --They Just Don't Care (Language Log)

It should be a great moment for the publishing industry, which for years has been limping along with flat sales. But amid this avalanche of commerce and pre-publication hype, the book business is ruefully taking note of a startling incongruity: Very few U.S. booksellers will be making big money from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." --Josh Getlin and Martha Groves --Harry Potter and the diminished returns (CalendarLive.com | LA Times)

Confusing ''b'' and ''d'' (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Hold your hands like this, and imagine an "e" in between them, and you've got the word "bed".

My five-year-old daughter was having so much trouble telling the difference between her ''b'' and ''d'' that my wife urged me to look up dyslexia on the internet. Along the way, I came across several sites selling stickers or posters showing the word "bed" superimposed over the image of a bed, but Carolyn's thumbs worked just fine for her. When she's guessing, I sometimes have to remind her to "do the thumbs," but she often does it on her own.

We're still working on getting her 5s and 3s to face the right way, but the b and d problem seems to be solved.

Asking contributors to "write the story on open-source car design" had all the appeal of asking people to rewrite their college term papers. Asking them to talk to someone they admire and respect was met with a far warmer response. --Jeff Howe --Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (Wired)

An assessment of Wired's pro-am journalism experiment. Can a crowd of volunteers produce quality news reporting?

But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: "How do you like 'Harry Potter'?"

Of course, it's not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it's an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And you'd better answer correctly. Start carrying on like Moaning Myrtle about the repetitive plots, the static characters, the pedestrian prose, the wit-free tone, the derivative themes, and you'll wish you had your invisibility cloak handy. Besides, from anyone who hasn't sold the 325 million copies that Rowling has, such complaints smack of Bertie Bott's beans, sour-grapes flavor.

Shouldn't we just enjoy the $4 billion party?

[...]

Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy "The Deathly Hallows" on a single day. There's something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves -- without a movie version or a set of action figures. Through no fault of Rowling's, Potter mania nonetheless trains children and adults to expect the roar of the coliseum, a mass-media experience that no other novel can possibly provide. --Ron Charles --Harry Potter and the Death of Reading (Washington Post (will expire))

I have sampled the books, but as much as I enjoy the setting and the characters, I find nothing on any given page that stands out to me as being good writing.

My nine-year-old is reading the books on his own.

Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad.

I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself. --Clive Thompson --These Games Are So Bad, It's Not Funny (Wired)

Taylor Mali Poetry Slams (''What Do Teachers Really Make?'' and ''The Impotence of Proofreading'')YouTube)

Wow. I needed that.

The summer's more than half over, and I've got to start focusing on getting things off of my summer "to-do" list.

Your job is very simple! All you need to do is look out for the features that mark out sprial and elliptical galaxies. In fact, as you're a human and not a computer, most galaxies should be easy to classify since they're obviously spirals or obviously ellipticals. On this page, you will practice classifying galaxies. On the next page, you will take a short trial to test your skills. If you don't pass the trial, you can try again. Once you pass the trial, you can start contributing to Galaxy Zoo science!
--Galaxy Zoo

I got a 13 out of 15 score on the qualifying test.

I gather that astronomers have developed software that chops telescope images up into chunks centered on bright objects, and that people are better at identifying the bright spots as clockwise spiral galaxies, counter-clockwise spirals, oval galaxies, or something else (like a star or a satellite). Or, to be more precise, the effort it would take to create a computer program that surpasses human skill is not worth investing, when it is possible instead to get an army of volunteer humans to do the work. (This is called "Flintstoning," which refers to the usefulness of certain low-tech solutions, such as Fred using his feet underneath the car.)

For a long time, I have daydreamed about making a computer program that asks students to evaluate short writing samples, such as thesis statements or news leads. The idea is that I would first train students with samples that I have already graded. Then those students who have demonstrated that they are good at evaluating the writing samples (that is, those whose answers closely match mine) start being asked to evaluate samples written by their peers. I imagine that a particular student sample would get evaluated by at least two peers; if the peers disagree, then the system would flag that sample, and I would break the tie.

I wouldn't use such a system to mark assignments for a grade -- my thought that it would be useful for the kind of assignment where students get credit for simply doing the work, and the added value would be that students would get some kind of structured peer feedback. I would make sure to read and comment on at least a handful of exercises in each set, and this system would help me identify which students are not only doing a poor job writing their own exercises, but are also unable to recognize when a sample exercise meets the criteria.

--Bull Run Victim Photo -- Editing QuibblesYahoo | AP (will expire))

No, Lenahan lies on a hospital bed.

The redundancy of "as shows" and "showing" and "he was gored" and "were gored" also bothers me. And the inconsistency doesn't do much for me, either. The same caption refers to "traditional bullrun" and "morning bull run," and a little later also says "the bulls horn entered beneath his skin."

It's impossible to remove all such mistakes from a stream of copy that goes out around the world, but so many mistakes in one caption suggests something other than carelessness. Where was the editor?

Something about that smug little grin tells me that Mr. Lenahan is unlikely to care.

I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid. But they're made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist.

We are all phantoms. --Hydrogen Atom Scale Model (Phrenopolis)

On a balmy morning in June, Rebecca Miller, a petite 26-year-old actress and Brown University graduate, was perched on a wooden bench in the East Village, just a block from the apartment she shares with her fiancé, a theater director, and two cats. By the looks of her outfit, she was firmly grounded in the 21st century, just another hip lass with loose curls, a scoop-necked top and denim skirt with naughty front slits.

Then she opened her mouth, and it was if one had been transported back--oh, 150 years or so. --Lizzy Ratner --The New Victorians (New York Observer)

Yes, as we all know, the Victorians held unmarried cohabiting theatre people in the highest social esteem.

An article about neo-Victorians that doesn't refer to The Diamond Age, the Goth aesthetic, or SteamPunk? Tosh!

This article takes a rather thin concept and stretches it rather unimpressively.

[Update: when I mentioned this article, and Miller's function as an example, my wife said "150 years ago, she would have been the daughter who humiliated her family and ruined all of her sisters' chance of respectable marriages."]

"You know, they're not that bad, but they were meant to be private. And it is making me feel very vulnerable that the entire country has to see them now because of this situation." --Miss N.J. releases blackmail photos (MSNBC)

Amy Polumbo, the 22-year-old Miss New Jersey, says she had put the photos on a password-protected area of her Facebook profile. The photos, as described in this article, sound pretty tame compared to the kinds of paparazzi photos that routinely show up on celebrity websites, but once again we have an example of a young person who didn't think of the consequences of her actions.

Note the way the reporter creates contrast by juxtaposing the description of a suggestive photo, snapped in what seems to be a public place (and posted onto a website), with Polumbo's rather naive expectation of privacy:

One shows a smiling Polumbo with a man she identified as her boyfriend, his open mouth over her left breast. Polumbo is fully clothed in the photo, which appeared to be snapped at a nightclub.

"This was meant to be private," Polumbo said.

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text. --Sidewalk stencil choose-your-own-adventure (Flickr)

Very cool concept.

—What People are Doing [US Social Networking Sites] (Businessweek)

An interesting, but not very well-sourced graphic, that shows 70% of youth (ages 18-21) are members of social networks, but only 37% create content on those sites. (I’m not sure what the researchers count as “creating content” — there’s a separate column for “Critics” who comment on and rank the content others create, so presumably, according to this chart, leaving a message on someone’s wall doesn’t count as content creation.)

Found via Reeves Library.

Not knowing what they could and should do to plan for the future was a constant refrain among the undergrads. Whether or not college faculties and administrators are comfortable acknowledging that a majority of students have enrolled because of their belief that a college degree will lead to an attractive and secure career, the fact remains: Some professional level of advisement is an expectation by virtually all young people on campuses today. --Howard and Matthew Greene --The Next (Real) World: Are you preparing your students for it? (University Business)

--Lego White and Nerdy (YouTube)

Weird Al's awesome "White and Nerdy" has spawned not just one but several different Lego versions (of various quality levels).

Q: What do you come across when you get a planet with antlers?

A: Uran-moose!

My five-year-old daughter made up that joke in the car this afternoon. I helped her a bit with the set-up. Her first version was, "What do you come across when you get Uranus with antlers?"

Born July 24, 1914, Mirvish took over his father's grocery store at 15 and eventually came to amass an enterprise that includes Mirvish Village, the Princess of Wales Theatre, the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Old Vic Theatre in London. --Entrepreneur and theatre impresario Mirvish dead at 92 (Canada.com)

Honest Ed's was a Toronto landmark, well worth the walk from the University of Toronto. His store was tackier than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but he invested hugely in the local theatre district, and had a self-deprecating "regular guy" image.

Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years.

* User-Created Content. It's all about the audience, and the "audience" is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small tools and easy access have opened the doors for almost anyone to become an author, a creator, or a filmmaker. These bits of content represent a new form of contribution and an increasing trend toward authorship that is happening at almost all levels of experience.

* Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest. Social networking may represent a key way to increase student access to and participation in course activities. It is more than just a friends list; truly engaging social networking offers an opportunity to contribute, share, communicate, and collaborate.

* Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives. Feeding our need for instant access, mobile phones are our constant companions and offer a connection to friends, information, favorite websites, music, movies, and more. From applications for personal safety, to scheduling, to GIS, photos, and video, the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing rapidly, and the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.

* Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world--or diverge wildly from it--present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s.

* The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing. New tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike. Although this area is farther out on the horizon, we are beginning to see what new publications might look like--and how new scholars might work.

* Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing. They are still quite difficult to produce, and examples are rare; but steps are being taken toward making it easier to develop this kind of game. In the coming years, open-source gaming engines will lower the barrier to entry for developers, and we are likely to see educational titles along with commercial ones. --The Horizon Report 2007 Edition (PDF) (New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative)

I'm glad to have found this document, as I start to pull together materials for my tenure bid.

Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner of Silver Spring and Max Simon of Potomac -- both 18 -- cry out, "Just like in 'Lady and the Tramp'!"

And Schwartz could take it no more. "Stop!" he yells.

"Try to think less about which movie scene you are reminded of and more about the way people really act in real life. Everything isn't related to a movie!"

Really?

To most of the workshop students, life has become totally visual. They are members of not so much the Me Generation as the Eye Generation.

"I really don't like reading a story. I like seeing it," says workshop student Craig Patterson, 17, of Grove City, Ohio. "I almost always prefer the movie version of a book. Movies can capture the beauty of an image more than books can." --Linton Weeks --The Eye Generation Prefers Not to Read All About It (Washington Post (will expire))

Hmm... a reporter sits in on a summer film class, and is shocked --- SHOCKED!! -- to learn that the students who are motivated enough to pay for it are likely to think in visual terms. What is this world coming to?

To be fair, the subhead is "Students in Film Class a Microcosm of a Visually Oriented Culture," so the WashPo makes it clear these are not random students. And even among English majors (who one would think are more likely than the average student to be interested in reading), I do often notice that even students who are excited by writing often approach a first-person narrative as if they are describing a movie. Thus, they write "A big smile spread across my face" or "I gave him a puzzled look," conveying the interior state of their first-person protagonist from an external, visual point of view. Most have never considered alternatives, such as quoting dialogue ("You remembered the violets!") or the protagonist's unvoiced thought ("Was Smitty trying to use a 20-gauge reamer on a blown gasket? God, what I wouldn't do to get away from these clueless hicks!"). If you plan the story to SHOW why the protagonist likes violets, and even if you don't actually stop to explain what a 20-gague reamer is and why a hick would think it was appropriate to use on a blown gasket, when the protagonist's reaction to the violets or the reamers convey information about character, setting, plot, etc., then the details have done their job.

We thought our "Pimp my Book Cart" contest was a funny idea that would spawn a dozen or so entries. But it seemed to spark something, and we started hearing from folks all over the country. It even spawned a "Pimp my Book Trolley" contest Down Under in Australia (we're judging that one too).

Still, by last week we figured all the fuss had been just that, and that it was still going to be just a few contenders. But then a few days before the deadline, in a display of procrastination that impressed Bill, they started pouring in. We ended up getting over 100. --Pimp My Bookcart Contest Winners (Unshelved)

"The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags," says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year's International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds.

"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased -- which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making." --From Rags to Riches, Or How Undergarments Improved Medieval Literacy (Alpha Galileo)

Filing this for a future "history of the book" unit. Via Language Log.

Sites like the Blake archive mark an important point of departure from expensive clothbound volumes available in university libraries -- and unique items in private collections -- to high-resolution facsimiles freely available to anyone with Internet access. Even the nonspecialist (like me) can easily spend hours appreciating Blake's aesthetic achievement beyond reading the unadorned transcriptions of his poems one might find in an anthology.

The editors have performed a great service for the general public, but what about the exacting standards of literary scholarship? Does the Blake archive meet the expectations of professionals?

[...]

Yes, young scholars, you may cite the Blake archive. --"Thomas H. Benton --Authoritative Online Editions (Chronicle of Higher Education)

'One approach to seeing the future is through scenarios -- carefully crafted "what if?" stories that let us imagine several different outcomes', the book says. It suggests holding a 'scenario party' (seriously) where you can 'pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends'. In short: we have no idea what the future will look like, but let's knock about some shocking 'what if?' scenarios over a glass of wine to make ourselves feel simultaneously terrified/terrifically important. It's the closest you'll get to a naked admission from the climate change lobby that its warnings of floods and pestilence and swarms of locusts are based on its members' own fevered, teenage imaginings rather than a scientifically revealed forecast of what is to come. --Brendan O'Neill --The planet's burning. Let's party!  (Spiked Online)

A snarky, class-focused review of The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook.

W. R. Hearst, New York Journal, N.Y.: "Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return. "Remington."

"Remington, Havana: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war. "W. R. Hearst." --Not likely sent: The Remington-Hearst ''telegrams'' (W. Joseph Campbell, PhD | Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly)

Campbell deconstructs this oft-quoted but thinly sourced anecdote about the power of yellow journalism.

I had previously blogged the same author's analysis of the "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" story (which survives mostly intact).

If I'm working on a project, it's my dream. I'm not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else's pyramid. If you're going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession - and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism - I say to you this: make it mean something. Spend your life making meaning. Create things that excite you, which get you out of bed early in the morning and keep you up late at night. Create experiences that will set minds on fire and inspire, in turn, to create experiences for others. We all have a reason for wanting to create games and, at some level, it boils down to an experience we had playing someone else's creation, their dream. What was that game for you? --Swink --The Teaching Game: Part One - Transitioning (Game Career Guide)

An interesting feature from a games industry professional who got tired of the grind and gave it up. I'm a little worried that Swink is romanticizing the teaching profession as much as he had previously romanticized the games industry, but this is still a good read.

RUR Cats (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My first (and probably only) contribution to the LOLCats meme.

In the 1920s, the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) introduced the world to a word that quickly displaced older terms such as "automaton."

As author Karel Capek was working out the plot, he fretted that calling them "labori" would be too stuffy. His brother Josef, a cubist painter and author, muttered, "Then call them Robots," drawing on a Czech word meaning "menial labor" or "servitude."

The illustration is from a Josef Capek's children's book, A Doggie and a Pussycat: How They Wrote a Letter.

Okay, that was pretty obscure, but now I can get on with my life.

It isn't clear whether Linden Lab simply took the Woodbury island offline, or actually destroyed the software behind it. Dori Littell-Herrick, an assistant professor and chairwoman of the animation department, said she believed it was the latter. If so, the university would need to build another island if it re-established a presence in Second Life.

Ms. Littell-Herrick suggested that Woodbury's island could have attracted unruly avatars because it was more open to outsiders than other college sites in Second Life. And while the island is gone, no Woodbury faculty or student avatars appear to have been barred.

"We need to see what went wrong because obviously getting shut down was not the result we were looking for," she said.

Edward Clift, an associate professor and chairman of Woodbury's communications department, who is responsible for the creation of Woodbury's island, railed against Linden Lab's action in an interview with the Second Life Herald.

"The destruction of the Woodbury 2.0 campus is, in my view, an egregious shot across the bow of academia," he said. --Andrea L. Foster and Dan Carnevale --The Death of a Virtual Campus Illustrates How Real-World Problems Can Disrupt Online Islands (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

It feels somewhat ungrateful to complain in today's television environment, with so many well-written, superbly acted shows available, that the screen is destroying the page. But it's true, especially if you pause to consider that reading fiction is something that requires time, time away from a screen. More and more, though, Americans don't have the time to think, let alone to read. They are working harder and less efficiently than ever (and in many cases, for less money than ever). In this environment, there is no better delivery system than the image for themes which transport - because that's how our eyes work the rest of the day. The Sopranos does the imagining; our eyes need only follow.

And so we return to the central question: why is this television show referred to by so many literate viewers as a novel? --Has the novel been murdered by the mob? (Guardian Unlimited)

The last TV show I actually followed was Babylon 5, which ended in 1998, so all I know about The Sopranos is what I pick up from articles like this.

We prefer to take the money we would have spent on Cable TV and use it to buy DVDs that we really want to watch. Also, family members will sometimes fill up a videotape with shows like Zaboomafoo and Between the Lions, and the kids will watch them over and over. So we actually have a pretty big library of videos for the kids to choose.

My five-year-old is used to waking up at about 8am for a "show, drink, and a snack," and I typically include something fun-but-educational in the list of three or four suggestions I make when I let her choose what she wants to watch. Then, typically I will fall back asleep on the couch with her, or I might get my laptop out and check my e-mail. My nine-year-old son will often wake up before the movie is over, and usually they will start playing together when the movie is over. For one of his three daily lessons (7 days a week, year round, though we will count a family trip to a local historical site or ordinary kid stuff like piano lessons or swim classes), Peter will sometimes watch a documentary or a move set during the time period he's studying.

So I'm not pretending that the television set is not a part of my life. My wife does watch TV news on a regular basis, and she enjoys some of the late night talk shows, but I'm usually putting the kids to bed and sometimes falling asleep on the floor after reading the good-night story. We've been trying to find a good evening to watch Time Bandits together as a family, and I'm looking forward to that.

But right now, my five-year-old daughter has just finished writing a poem about snow, and I'm off to help her cut paper snowflakes. If I can find an index card, I'm going to cut a hole in it that's big enough for my children to crawl through.

They were surprised when a magazine article asserted that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men. If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have noticed it.

They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books and magazines for years. But they couldn't find any research supporting them.

"Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended periods of time," Pennebaker said.

Indeed, Mehl said, one study they found, done in workplaces, showed men talking more.

Still, the idea that women use nearly three times as many words a day as men has taken on the status of an "urban legend," he said. --Randolphe E. Schmid --Study: Women don't talk more than guys (Yahoo! | AP (will expire))

The Goldmans own the copyright, media rights and movie rights. They also acquired Simpson's name, likeness, life story and right of publicity in connection with the book, according to court documents.

The Goldmans want to rename the book "Confessions of a Double Murderer" and plan to shop it around, Cook said. --Victim's family buys rights to O.J. Simpson book (CNN | AP)

An interesting twist in the story. This is the book that had been titled If I Did It.

And yet, outside the anthologies and beyond the campus, these outlooks have influenced public policy at the highest levels. Their endurance in public life is a rebuke to the humanities reading list, and it recasts the putative sophistication of the curriculum into its opposite: campus parochialism. The damage it does to humanities students can last a lifetime, and I've run into far too many intelligent and active colleagues who can rattle off phrases from "What Is an Author?" and Gender Trouble, but who stare blankly at the mention of The Public Interest and A Nation at Risk.

This is a one-sided education, and the reading list needs to expand. To that end, here are a few texts to add to this fall's syllabus. They reflect a mixture of liberal, libertarian, conservative, and neoconservative positions, and they serve an essential purpose: to broaden humanistic training and introduce students to the full range of commentary on cultural values and experience. --Mark Bauerlein --An Anti-Progressive Syllabus (Inside Higher Ed)

Just filing this for future reference. I taught a lit-crit class for the first time last term. It was organized around a core of four or five literary texts that we kept reading and re-reading under different critical lenses, so there wasn't much room in the course for a free-floating political diatribe that was unconnected to primary reading. I did add "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which wasn't in the anthology, but is on Bauerlein's list.

As a journalism teacher I have a professional interest in objectivity, so it was natural for me to seek an anthology that was organized with contrast and multiple perspectives in mind, rather than one that promoted institutional branding. Still, that course was already fairly intense...

We are starting up a new "Writing about Literature" course, which is for all English majors (lit, creative writing, and new media journalism), so it makes sense to offer a very broad range of ideas in that course, while I taught the "Literary Criticism" course in order to prepare students to deal with criticism in grad school.

While the Internet still retains some of the "wild wild west" feel, increasingly Internet activity, and particular blogging, is being shaped and governed by state and federal laws. For US bloggers in particular, blogging has become a veritable land mine of potential legal issues, and the situation isn't helped by the fact that the law in this area is constantly in flux. In this article we highlight twelve of the most important US laws when it comes to blogging and provide some simple and straightforward tips for safely navigating them. --12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know (Aviva Directory)

Via Steven Krause.

I won't be stuck standardizing verb tenses in business documents my whole life. One day, I will copyedit the Great American Novel.

"Sure," you say, "along with every other detail-oriented grammarian in the country." Yes, I know how many idealistic young people dream of taking a manuscript that captures the spirit of 21st-century America and removing all of its grammatical and semantic errors. But how many of them know to omit the word "bear" when referring to koalas? How many know to change "pompom" to "pompon"? --Someday, I Will Copyedit The Great American Novel (The Onion (Satire))

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack. --Ben Clerkin --Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey (Daily Mail)

Among other tactics, middlemen for the countries misrepresented themselves to gain access to the Defense Department's surplus sales or bought sensitive surplus from U.S. companies that had acquired it from Pentagon auctions and weren't supposed to allow its export. --Sharon Theimer --Jets shredded, kept away from 'bad guys' (Yahoo! | AP (will expire))

My kids were watching an episode of Batman from the 60s. In it, Batman calls up a naval officer and asks whether Uncle Sam has recently sold any top-secret submarines. An officer looks in an index card file and says yes, in fact they recently sold a submarine to a Mr. "P. N. Gwynn," who left a post office box for an address. Upon hearing Batman's curt response, the officer looks like a chastened puppydog and says something like, "Was that bad?"

The story notes that the government changed the way it handles sensitive surplus equipment after the AP reported how unfriendly forces were getting their hands on sensitive surplus equipment. Noting the chronology is not the same thing as explicitly claiming a cause/effect relationship, but the implication is clear.

Here's a great quote that helps create a mental picture:

The shearing machine, which uses pincers to rip apart the planes, weighs 100,000 pounds. The shredder is 120,000 pounds. An F-14 weighs about 40,000 pounds.

Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life.

Infants quickly learnt that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention. By eight months, more difficult deceptions became apparent, such as concealing forbidden activities or trying to distract parents' attention. --Richard Gray -- Babies not as innocent as they pretend (Telegraph)

Is "fake crying" really the same thing as "lying"? It's a form of communication that serves a social purpose, like saying "thank you" when you don't really feel grateful.

It seems like the real news here is not that researchers discovered new details about cognitive development, but rather the application of a new shading for the concept of deception.

I guess it's a little late for a link to the Will Farrell baby landlord skit, but finally it seems appropriate.