Here's how I've been spending my time lately.  It's after 8pm Sunday, and I've been at work since I handed my kids off to my wife this morning right after church. 

Tomorrow morning I drop this baby off in the Provost's office.

The question is... should I add this photo to the front cover or not?

English
Program
Review
Self-Study

 

2007-08

Seton Hill University

 

A chunk of pages got caught in the hole punch, and when I pulled them out the bottom of the hole punch opened up and all these little paper dots went flying in the copy room.

As an undergraduate, I started filling a jar with paper dots, and I told myself that I'd start earning a living off my writing before I filled the jar. (I met that goal, if you can call being a starving grad student earning a living. I might even still have the half-full jar of paper dots somewhere.)

There is still work to be done on the program review, but now I get to head off to New Orleans with one less thing on my mind.

Information Week:

The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong "Au Clair De La Lune" on April 9, 1860.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a "phonautograph" to scratch sound waves onto a sheet of paper covered in black smoke from an oil lamp. He never intended to play the sounds. Instead, he archived the recording and patented a method for understanding sound. Researchers recently unearthed the recording at the Academy of Sciences (French) in Paris.

Audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the informal collaborative group First Sounds created high-resolution, high-grade scans of Scott's phonautogram, converted the images into digital form, and played the sounds on a computer with a virtual stylus. Then they evened out speed fluctuations and tweaked the tracks to pull the voice forward.

I've been making an extra effort this year to create some new worksheets designed to teach basic, stand-alone concepts in my Introduction to Literary Study class.

Here's a new worksheet to help students write a sonnet.  Below is the part they're actually supposed to submit... after that I've included the text that explains the assignment. I've already taught the basic form of the sonnet, so this is a review, but I tried to make it stand on its own.  My goal is to teach the form, rather than to encourage or reward creative expression, but I also want students to have fun.

Suggestions?  Comments?

Workbook 2-2: Write a Sonnet                                           Name ____________________________
(Bring printout to class.)

This is a poem that I wrote; Eye Contact published it a few issues ago.

 

Your retro, old-skool little song enshrines The unrelenting jackboot five-stress beat Of heel-toe thumping heel-toe bumping feet In fourteen rigid rhyming goose-step lines. What talent's there? I'll never march; I swarm! I curse your foolish rules, your chains that bind, That dare to organize my off-beat mind; For truly I don't need no steenkin' form. Why pack and prune, revise, rework, rephrase My unproof'd laundry list of angst or hate? In beatless bliss I'll blurt and bloviate And vent my emo vices in cafés. From boxy vises freed, such verse as mine Shall flow like so much screw-top Wal-Mart wine.

Scan the poem (identify the rhyme scheme and stress pattern). (Write on this page.) Note the "turning point" and identify the new idea. (Write on this page.) Identify the "main point" driven home in the final couplet. (On this page.) What can you conclude about the relationship between the imaginary speaker of the poem, and my own intentions as the author of the poem (and a teacher who asks students to write sonnets)? (Answer in a brief paragraph on the back.)

 

Part IIa:  Present your own original sonnet in the grid. You may write on a printout, or edit this file.

Part IIb:  Write a short paragraph (on the back) that explains how your poem demonstrates your knowledge of prosody (see Hamilton) and your ability to apply that knowledge in an original creative work. Explain any deliberate deviations from iambic pentameter.

Blackboard, a company that sells popular course-management software, recently won a $3.1 settlement against Desire2Learn.  According to Slashdot,

Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."

However, according to Desire2Learn,

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims.

At a workshop next week at the 4Cs, I'm presenting a half-hour on intellectual property and ethics, in an attempt to get users of off-the-shelf course management tools to think about what it means when they give an outside corporation so much control over the content of their courses.  (I'm guilty of this, too, since I use Turnitin.com a lot, so my intention is not to scold but rather raise questions; Mike Edwards will then introduce some open-source alternatives to commercial software.)

Here's a "glass is half full" headline that makes me proud to work at Seton HIll:

Seton Hill U Students Step In, Help Officer Being Attacked By Man

Here's a "glass is half empty" headline that makes me go "oops":

Seton Hill student turns Taser on Greensburg police officer

Here's a more neutral headline that went out on the state news wire:

Westmoreland Co. university student turns Taser on police officer

Here's what seems to be a mistake:

According to the news accounts I've read, Spisak was the one who assaulted the officer, so I don't know why this image has the label "victim."

The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news:

Philip Meyer, in his book "The Vanishing Newspaper" (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls "that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose" is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to "Abandoning the News," published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers' stock valuation.

New to me... disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum.

In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, either "G*d" or "G-d" for those whose religious beliefs preclude writing God in full), or as a technique by forum moderators to censor unwanted posting, such as spam, internet trolling or political opinions.^[1] The net effect of disemvoweling text is to render it illegible or legible only through significant cognitive effort, thus suppressing unwanted comments and discouraging such comments from being made in future.

From Orwell's 1984, which I'm teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein.

By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient.  The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.   Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.  Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.  The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.  With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.  Every citizen, or least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.  The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, notice did for the first time.

I find this passage intriguing, in part because the printing press is usually seen as a tool that created an intellectual tradition (by fulfilling and extending an economic and social demand for the mass production of accurate, authoritative texts) rather than the first step in a process by which the control of the means of production shapes the thoughts of the consumers.  This passage points out the invention of the two-way telescreen as the tipping point, because in this vision the means for broadcasting over telescreens is not distributed to the masses. Even in his office, Winston Smith does not communicate by telephone, only via paper orders sent through peneumatic tubes.

If we have time, I'll introduce the students to a little bit of Michel Foucault.

I love the retrofuture. The year I was born, 1968, Mechanix Illustrated offered this prediction of life in the year 2008. I'm still waiting for my flying car, but some of the other predictions were remarkably accurate.

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

Play This Thing offers this review of "Photopia" (a text game by Adam Cadre).

Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It's barely interactive at all.

And yet it works. Photopia could be a short story, but it would lose most of its impact. It's difficult to explain why that is without ruining the game. The key to Photopia's success is the interactions between the player and the main character (who, interestingly enough, is never actually playable).

Photopia takes the term "interactive fiction" to a new level, because that's really what it is.

Photopia actually brought IF to that new level almost 10 years ago, back in 1998, so this isn't exactly news -- but the game is still worth the praise today.

The Times Online has a story about children's non-profits that are seeking to ban potential employers from checking social profile websites as part of the job application process. I would agree that what a child posts at age 14 is probably not relevant to a job he or she might want to get at age 22. Nevertheless, I regularly remind my students to be careful of what they publish (and, sadly, what your friends publish).

"When young people put up their personal profiles they are not thinking about job or university applications. Typically, they are simply talking to their mates. Employers or admissions tutors who delve into these places are being highly and inappropriately intrusive. It's a bit like looking at someone's diary," Mr Carr told The Times.

"A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly focused adult norms."

The children's charities are seeking clarification on whether discrimination legislation could be used to stop companies from using social networking sites for recruitment purposes.

Just watch it. You'll get it.

Mike Edwards describes his first time teaching Bartleby the Scrivener:

I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who'd used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I'd asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead discussion in class today, and to come to class with notes on motivation and action in the story to help them do so.

I brought my laptop to class, which I'd never done before. (Each classroom has its own dedicated computer.) I set it up on my desk. In the seconds before class started, I said to them something like this: "You've just read a story in which someone, with a screen between him and the other characters, fails to do what they expect of him, and in violating the expectations customary to their relationship, causes disruption and concern."

And that was All. I. Said.

For my "History and Future of the Book" course, I've been using a Kindle that my university library purchased on my request. Gizmodo has a good article on the digital rights associated with Kindle e-books.

In the fine print that you "agree" to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books--you're not paying to own 'em, in spite of the use of the term "buy." Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine--which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay--no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though--so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn't take away your purchases. Still, it's a license you can't sell.

But is this claim legal? Our Columbia friends suggest that just because Sony or Amazon call it a license, that doesn't make it so. "That's a factual question determined by courts," say our legal brainiacs. "Even if a publisher calls it a license, if the transaction actually looks more like a sale, users will retain their right to resell the copy." Score one for the home team.

The Australian publishes an interesting detail about coverage of climate change:

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not whethat you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

The other day I was listening to NPR and heard someone (a scientist? activist? somewhere in between?) discussing differences in satellite photos taken in about 1997 and 2004 (or something like that -- I didn't catch the details), and using the differences in these photos to illustrate the effects of global warming. I didn't keep listening long enough to find out whether the reporter asked the guest whether it made good scientific sense to make draw conclusions from two isloated data points. It would be a very different thing if you looked at photos taken every year on the same date over a period of 10 years, and the photos showed a consistent change (with some variation for the typical random fluctuation one expects from the climate).

I've been following climate change politics for some time, mostly because it's a good example of a meta-narrative that all news stories seem to have to fit -- along with "your children are in danger from strangers they meet on the internet" (when the vast majority of perpetrators are family members).

Carolyn, my five-year-old, wept in the middle of "Owly 2: Just a Little Blue."  The Owly books use no words, just icons and facial expressions to tell some very complex stories. Carolyn likes stories about adventure and friendship, and she's a visual learner. Once I helped her interpret the first few speech bubble icons, she was able to "read" the story to me quite easily. Bedtime is always a struggle for her, and I don't think she was really prepared for the emotional intensity of the story. The story ends on a happy note, but the next day she was still distressed enough that she had to tell mommy about the sad parts.

There's no death or betrayal, just a misunderstanding, but the long wordless sequence where Owly seems to give up his hopes communicates disappointment and sadness so clearly that I think my daughter was caught off-guard.  The book is absolutely delightful, but you should know your child -- the artwork really drives the emotion home. 

Language Log offers a great post about the comics convention of using typographical symbols to represent swear words.

In any case, ! -- * @ # $ % & seem to be the characters most commonly used in the U.S. (I suppose £ and € get some play outside the U.S.) At the moment I have no idea about why = is out of the game.]

I've been playing Rogue, so I want to translate that as "potion, scroll, gold, Rogue, corridor, stairway..."

This article from Politico poses some interesting questions.

The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe. The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics.

Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

One reason is fear of embarrassment. In its zeal to avoid predictive reporting of the sort that embarrassed journalists in New Hampshire, the media -- including Politico -- have tended to avoid zeroing in on the tough math Clinton faces.

Avoiding predictions based on polls even before voters cast their ballots is wise policy. But that's not the same as drawing sober and well-grounded conclusions about the current state of a race after millions of voters have registered their preferences. --Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen

I can't wait to see more of Get Lamp.

BoingBoing links to an interesting story about time travel and a self-policing community of time-travelers (modeled on a Wiki community).

11/21/2104
At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler's admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that's it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I'm looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:
PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren't worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint's still fresh. Freaking n00b.

At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.

Sky News:

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90, according to an aide.

When I was little, I loved a book about a little red lighthouse that was dwarfed by the construction of a new bridge. I was just thinking about that book recently, and made a mental note to ask my mother what the title was so I could get a copy and read it to my five-year-old. Today I was browsing on the book-sale table at the Latrobe library, when the very book I was looking for jumped out at me:



A few minutes with Google revealed something I never knew... apparently there really was such a little lighthouse that was scheduled for demolition, but when this book was published in the 40s, it proved so popular that the authorities decided to preserve the little lighthouse instead. (Photo by The Insider.)

There's even a Little Red Lighthouse Festival!

Scotsman:

"I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn't have fired. Not at him." -- 88-year-old Luftwaffe veteran Horst Rippert, speaking of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, aviator and author of The Little Prince.

So I'm sitting at Julie's place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice:

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

I hate to take up the position of the Jeopardy judge and simply say "bzzzzzz, wrong!" but... that's just wrong.

And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but... this is a case of looking in at something from the outside (I would assume, based on the admission later in the post that Jerz knows little about music) attempting to critique something without ever getting the insider's perspective.

I would argue the exact opposite of the first portion of the quote (before the dash). But let's also be realistic; if Jerz has encountered, or thinks he will encounter, a student who can only remix, he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America.

Where to start with this one?  The "about" page says "Who am I? I'm just a guy. I've got a story like everyone."   The author claims to be "someone who spent four years teaching--and three prior to that as a TA/writing tutor--at an open admissions college" but that doesn't really help me figure out whether I am writing to a grad student who is struggling to figure out the professional landscape, a very bright undergraduate who could use some gentle instruction in tone and focus, or a professional college instructor who should know better.

Here is the comment I posted...

"that's just wrong."

Could you clarify what part of my statement you mean? Are you reacting against the part where I say "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture," or the part where I say that it *is* possible to design remix assignments that ask them to think critically?

"And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but..."

Let's have a conversation instead, shall we?

"he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America. Every student who makes it through that system with any success--meaning 95% of our trad students--will know how to write a five paragraph essay."

I regularly teach freshman who are fresh out of high school, and I know for a fact they can't all write a five-paragraph essay -- because if they could, they would not be in my "Basic Composition" class, they would all be in "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" (I think about a third of our students skip Basic Comp, not 95%). Perhaps the public schools where you are are much better than those where I am, or perhaps we simply disagree over what level of writing counts as acceptable. Regardless, I applaud any effort to break students out of the high-school five-paragraph-essay box, and I won't dismiss your conclusions as "wrong" simply because the experiences that inform them differ from mine.  I will, instead, ask you to clarify.

For the record, here is the thesis of my blog entry:

"It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source."

And here is the conclusion:

"I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice."

Your defense of remix culture is a very good example of the thinking that makes me shake my head. I am not writing against remix; I am writing about a willingness to settle for the creative expressions of personal reactions to a text, without demonstrating the ability and willingness to explore those ideas more fully.

Before I go any farther, let me first state that I recognize that a blog entry is not the same thing as an academic paper. The rhetoric of blogs is rougher, and sometimes the invitation to rumble is what motivates us to post our ideas online.

And I also note that in the remix culture, creating and publishing that initial response can take on the role of the discovery draft, sparking conversations that help the student develop a more accurate, more thorough, more nuanced understanding of an issue.

I'm responding because "What's with the Remix Disrespect" does not merely engage with my ideas; it makes several global statements about my competence, both directly and implicitly, which I find personally distressing. This entry presumes to judge my whole career based on what I wrote in this single blog entry from 2004. It assumes a superior rhetorical stance -- first dismissing the idea of being a game-show judge, then promptly performing exactly that role; then rejecting the idea of hurling an insult, and promptly doing just that.

I find it interesting that in one passage where, instead of taking on the persona of an expert, I prefaced a statement about music by citing my source (since I can't rely on personal knowledge of what classical composers do when they quote each other), that detail surfaces in your blog as evidence of the claim that I am a cultural outsider who can't understand remix culture (which, as you know, involves far more than music).

So... my critique of the remix culture lies specifically in the convention that assumes the author's personal expression of reactions can substitute for investigating the issue.

If you would like to get a greater understanding of my attitude towards the remix culture, I invite you to search my blog for terms such as "remix," "open source," or "modding." I invite you to sample my own remix of Teletubbies and gothic poetry) or some of my found poetry exercises (poems comprised of lines taken from student blogs), or this blogger's account of a 2007 CCCC panel I co-organized, "When Student Experts Remix the Discipline: New Media in the Composition Classroom," or some of my recent articles on the blogosphere, video game history. You might also look at the websites for the courses I teach in Video Game Culture and Theory, or "The History and Future of the Book" or the 400-level studio course I teach in "New Media Projects," or the student work that you'll find via links on those sites.

While your entry refers to "a terrible fear of plagiarism," please note that my blog entry only mentions plagiarism once, in a sentence stating that remix is *not* the same thing as plagiarism -- thus, my only reference to plagiarism *agrees* with your position.

Were I writing this entry today, after four more years of watching the impact of the remix culture, I would not have written "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture." I would have said something about how a student who remixes *well* has to understand the raw material, so a good course built around remix will have to include analysis and fact-checking.

Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism's new report:

Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day's newspaper, Rosenstield said. "The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online," he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to a large degree, embracing the changes being thrust upon them. A majority say they like doing blogs and that they appreciate reader feedback on their stories. When they're asked to do multimedia projects, most journalists find the experience enriching instead of feeling overworked, he said. The newsroom is increasingly being seen as the most experimental place in the business, the report found. Most news Web sites are no longer final destinations. The report found that many users insist that the sites, and even individual pages, offer plenty of options to navigate elsewhere for more information, the project found. Rosenstiel said he's even able to reach Washington Post stories through the New York Times' Web site.

Guardian

If generations of gloomy boys could pretend they were the next TS Eliot, then there have been plenty of gloomy girls who have their very own role model in Plath. And a very powerful role model: unlike Eliot, she succeeded in killing herself. Cue thousands of lines of self-pitying poetry without the command and talent of Plath's.

I regularly introduce poetry to freshman English majors. Some who write angsty poetry as a form of literary self-therapy are surprised to learn that there's a difference between the "I" who speaks in the poem (through a fictional character), and the identity of the poet who created the fictional character in order to achieve some artistic effect in the mind of the reader (rather than to achieve a verbal exorcism of personal demons).

I thought maybe two or three students would "friend" me out of pity, but I was rather surprised that within about 24 hours I had 35 confirmed "friends" -- several of those within the first few minutes of registering for the service. Only half of those contacts are from Seton Hill -- the rest are academics I know from the blogosphere and from conferences.

A few are people I knew in my hazy pre-Internet youth, including theater friends from my student-acting days.


When I get back into the office, I'm going to have to set up some e-mail filters, because this is what my in box looks like at the moment. If all my students use their university accounts for Facebook, it's probably no wonder that some of them seem to have trouble finding my e-mails.  (P.S. In the time it took me to put this entry together, I picked up 2 more "friends.")

Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response.

Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue "wing" on the left, and the number of conservative inlinks as a red "wing" on the right. The emotional charge of the discussion around the news link is shown as a "heat indicator" on the outside of the wings. Emotional charge ranges from a single orange square to four white-hot squares. Clicking on the wings produces a dropdown of the individual blog posts linking to the news article. In the dropdown, emotionally charged posts have a fuzzy border, while emotionally neutral posts have a solid border.

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil. (Steve Salerno, Skeptic)

The mythical Red State/Blue State paradigm is just one of the more telling indications of a general disability the media exhibit in working with data. A cluster of random events does not a "disturbing new trend!" make -- but that doesn't stop journalists from finding patterns in happenstance. Take lightning. It kills with an eerie predictability: about 66 Americans every year. Now, lightning could kill those 66 people more or less evenly all spring and summer, or it could, in theory, kill the lot of them on one really scary Sunday in May. But the scary Sunday in May wouldn't necessarily mean we're going to have a year in which lightning kills 79,000 people. (No more than if it killed a half-dozen people named Johanssen on that Sunday would it mean that lightning is suddenly targeting Swedes.) Yet you can bet that if any half-dozen people are killed by lightning one Sunday, you'll soon see a special report along the lines of, LIGHTNING: IS IT OUT TO GET US?

The Tribune Review published this story about an incident at my local library.

The director of the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library was injured Wednesday afternoon while blocking a married couple who allegedly tried to steal a Christmas novel.

[...]

Muccari said he was near the entrance for the 4:22 p.m. incident because he was posting tax forms on a bulletin board by the metal detector when the alarm went off as Jennifer Cook walked through.

He determined that a book in her bag was her own, but discovered that she was concealing a copy of "Finding Noel" in the front pocket of her hooded sweatshirt.

"She said, 'I wasn't trying to steal it,' and I said, 'Oh really?' " Muccari said.

When Muccari asked a clerk to call police, Jennifer Cook offered up the book, said she had to be someplace and asked him to cancel the police call, Muccari said.

Although David Cook initially claimed not to know about the attempted theft, he pushed Muccari as the couple tried to flee, police Capt. George Seranko said.

Police were able to identify the Cooks because the man left behind his wallet and the woman left behind a broken, silver necklace with a charm bearing the name "Jennifer." Police have been unable to locate the couple.

I love the details the reporter puts into the story, such as the quote from the judge who married the Cooks.  I looked up the opening of "Finding Noel" on Amazon, and found this:

When I was a boy, my mother told me that everyone comes into our lives for a reason. I'm not sure I believe that's true. The thought of God weaving millions of lives together into a grand human tapestry seems a bit fatalistic to me. Still, as I look back at my life, there seem to be times when such divinity is apparent.... Of course such a theory carried to the extreme would mean that God sabotaged my car that night because, had my car's timing belt not broken at that precise moment, this story never would have happened. But it did, and my life was forever changed. Perhaps my mother was right. If God can align the planets, maybe He can do the same for our lives.

Maybe the Cooks should have thought about that before their little encounter with Muccari.