Rhetoric: July 2007 Archive Page

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.)

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.

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)
Forget Flood. Review Movies. (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.

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.

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.

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)

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."]

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)

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.

'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.

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.