November 2008 Archive Page

I read the blurb for this article four or five times, trying to figure out what it was about.

The effects of addition can lay whole families to waste...  (Register)

I should think that subtraction causes more stress on the family unit than addition, and disagreements over multiplication can probably cause division. You never know... some shady characters might try to establish, right in your neighborhood, a lab for cooking up math!

"The message behind every movie and book, behind every theme park and T-shirt is that our children's world needs Disney," he says.

"So they absolutely must go to see the next Disney movie, which we'll also want to give them on DVD as a birthday present.

"They will be happier if they live the full Disney experience; and thousands of families around the world buy into this deeper message as they flock to Disneyland."

He continues: "This is the new pilgrimage that children desire, a rite of passage into the meaning of life according to Disney.

"Where once morality and meaning were available as part of our free cultural inheritance, now corporations sell them to us as products." -- Telegraph

A few years ago I prepared a "Disney World View" course, but I haven't taught it yet. I'm just blogging this in case I get the chance to offer it again.

In the past, I have pointed out copy-editing weaknesses at Story Book Forest at Idlewild Park, in southwestern PA.  When I was last there, shortly before Halloween, my son stopped in his tracks and said, "They repainted the Little Miss Muffet Sign!"

And he was right... they repainted some of the signs. Just now, when I was clearing out my camera's SD card, I noticed I had a set of before and after photos. Here's one sign in September 2005:


Here's the same sign in October, 2008.


I must say I rather miss the webbing, and the lettering for "Little Miss Muffet" is almost illegible. (What's the deal with the vines?) The new sign omits the period after "whey," so that the revision is now a run-on sentence. But at least the egregious "besider" error has been fixed.

My family saw the American Family Theater's production of Babes in Toyland this morning.

Barnaby the Bumbling Villain, sneering from under a painted-on handlebar mustache as he gloats over his possession of the widow's mortgage, pursues the heroes to Toyland. There, after much stock-character humor (cunning disguises, stunning surprises... lovers divided get coincided) the climax comes as the heroes pin Barnaby down, tickle him, and force him to eat a gumdrop from the "goody gumdrop tree." 

This sets up a musical transformation that begins with Barnaby tossing his black hat offstage, then catching the white hat thrown by a stagehand. After a few dance routines with the newly reformed Barnaby, we see his pantomimed proposal to the widow he had initially been trying to throw out onto the street.

I thoroughly enjoyed the melodrama, and my six-year-old was hopping up and down in her seat to the songs.

As we were filing out, I asked my ten-year-old why he looked so thoughtful.

"They shouldn't have forced Barnaby to eat the gumdrop," he said. "Even if he's a villian, they interfered with his free will.

I didn't know what to say. Other than telling him this was another one for the blog.

"It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online," said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report's lead author. "There are myths about kids spending time online - that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age."  -- MacArthur Foundation

Some details:

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on "hanging out" with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Significant findings include -

• There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.
  • Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.
  • Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.
• Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.
  • Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.
  • The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.
• Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.
  • The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.
  • Young people respect each other's authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.
• Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.
  • Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.
  • Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.
  • "Geeked-out" learning opportunities are abundant - subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

I'm already aware of much of this. Knowing that students would rather learn from peers, I've added more group work, and I've added a requirement that students in my advance media classes publish a screencast about their final project to YouTube.  In future classes, I'll have students review those videos as part of their research process. 

My younger students (in the entry-level class) are generally much more excited about new media than the upper-level students (some of whom either barely tolerate or openly loathe the "new media" component of the "new media journlaism" program).  I've got to watch my lower-level students closely, so that I can adapt the upper-level classes to their strengths, and keep that process going throughout the major. That means I'm probably going to have to introduce more experimentaton in the lower-level classes, since I've got to cast a wider net to find out which techniques are the most productive.

As a professor, I collaborate with other authors all the time.  But I rarely assign collaborative writing assignments. I often ask students to critique each other's papers or beta-releases, but that's not the same thing as having them collaborate to create a single, coherent document.

I'm teaching a literary criticism class next term. The last time I taught it, students expressed a lot of frustration at how long it took them to get the hang of what criticism is. You're not writing summary, or personal opinion, or factual investigations about the author's life.  So what do you write about?  I can't really think of a way to get students to learn how to do lit crit, other than having them read models, talk about it, and try it.

Even though I always hated group work when I was an undergrad (and I never did any as a grad student -- not once), after a conversation with my colleague Lee McClain, I think I'm going to have my literature students write their first few papers in teams. I'll probably have some mechanism so that a student who is part of a successful team paper can request to write the next paper individually. That way, the students who are sure that they can do better on their own can opt out of the group work quickly. 

Young people around the world are learning, in their pre-teen years, to use tools like Game Maker, Click & Play, Stagecast Creator and others to build simple games. As they move into their teens and twenties kids learn to master and use Flash, modding tools, and even sophisticated tools like C++, game engines and graphics tools to create the complex, sophisticated games they imagine and design. Many of these students go on to enroll in college and graduate school game design and construction courses and majors, creating, while in school, games at, or very close to, professional levels.

But can students design and build successful educational games? The answer appears to be yes, as well, especially under the right conditions. And that is very good news for our schools and our learners. Because the next generation of educational games - the games that will truly engage and teach students - is likely to come from the minds of other students, rather than from their teachers. -- Marc Prensky (PDF)

I'm surprised not to see a reference to MIT's Scratch. Otherwise, a very good article.

A federal jury delivered a mixed verdict today convicting a Missouri mother of misdemeanor charges in a nationally watched cyber-bullying case in which the woman was accused of using a fake MySpace account to torment a teenage girl who later committed suicide. The jurors, however, rejected more serious felony charges against Lori Drew, 49, who was involved in a hoax on 13-year-old Megan Meier. The panel deadlocked on a conspiracy count. (LA Times)

This is a complex issue. While it's easy to wish that they throw the book at a grown woman who participates in a scheme to torment a young girl, an important component of the prosecution's case was that Lori Drew violated the terms of service (TOS) for using the MySpace service. How many of us click "I Agree" without carefully reading the text? The Electronic Freedom Foundation argues that bad things could result from a conviction based on a TOS violation.

Wired has some good background, reminding us that bloggers had a hand in publicizing the case.

And then there was light -- and it was powered by the sun. The Vatican on Wednesday activated a new solar energy system and announced an ambitious plan that could one day make it an alternative energy exporter.

The massive roof of the "Nervi Hall" where popes hold general audiences and concerts are performed, has been covered with 2,400 photovoltaic panels to provide energy for lighting, heat and air conditioning.

After weeks of tests, the system went on line at full throttle hours before Pope Benedict held what officials called the "first ecological general audience in the Vatican." (Reuters)

Jason Scott has started a new blog that will discuss the progress of his documentary, GET LAMP.  Here's a good entry on the contents of Steve Meretzky's basement.

As part of the GET LAMP project, I've been collecting artifacts and images throughout the commercial heydays of text adventures, and nobody got bigger than Infocom in the early 1980s. And Steve was one of the big designers at Infocom, creating or co-creating some of the most lasting games in the genre: Planetfall, Sorcerer, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Stationfall... and then went on after Infocom to make many other classics as well. He is a towering figure in the games industry, recognized as one of the greats, among other designers who have produced one-tenth his output. But beyond his place in the history of text adventures, he's also acutely aware of the history of text adventures, and the process, and the trends of a gaming industry.

My AT&T long-distance calling card ran out of minutes, so I decided to try to renew it.  I checked the website and saw these terms:

Minute value applies to state-to-state calling only. A surcharge not to exceed 10 minutes applies to U.S. pay phone calls, a portion of which compensates pay phone providers. One minute billing increments; partial minutes used are billed as full minutes. Rates may be higher for calls to/from mobile phones. For calls that begin and end within the same state, minutes will be deducted at the following rates per minute of talk time: 1 minute: DC, IL, IN, MA, RI, USVI; 3 minutes: AL, AR, CA, CT, DE, GA, HI, KS, KY, LA, MD, ME, MI, MS, NE, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PR, SC, TN, UT, WI, WV; 5 minutes: AK, AZ, CO, FL, IA, ID, MN, MT, NC, NH, OK, PA, TX, VA, VT, WA, WY; and 8 minutes: MO, ND, SD. International rates are higher than state-to-state rates, vary according to area called, and are subject to change. Call Customer Care for international calling information before leaving the U.S. Recharge minutes may have different rates, surcharges and terms and conditions and are not refundable. Directory Assistance rates are higher than state-to-state rates. Minutes do not expire. PIN cannot be used for toll free calls, calls for paid services with premium charges or for operator-handled calls. Service provider makes no warranties and its liability is limited per service guide. Any disputes arising from purchase or use of this card are settled by arbitration, which doesn't apply to CA residents for disputes arising in CA. Safeguard your PIN. You are responsible for loss or unauthorized use. PIN may be terminated without notice if fraud is suspected. PIN is not returnable or exchangeable unless defective. Direct unresolved complaints to the regulatory agency in the state where Card was purchased. Use of Info to Go will incur additional minute deductions. Service provided by AT&T Corp. or affiliate; by AT&T Alascom in AK. Service provided where authorized.

Here's the relevant information... regardless of the fact that AT&T says it is selling "minutes," calls within most states will result in more than one "minute" being deducted for every minute of call time.

My definition of "minute" is not flexible enough to accept that I should be charged five minutes for every one minute of calling time in Pennsylvania.

Is this typical of phone service contracts?

A poll is just a starting point for discussion, not an ending point that proves any one argument. With that in mind...

Results indicate that the Internet is the most trusted news source among all age groups, and overall, more trusted than newspapers and television news combined. FOX News is the most trusted news source on television and The New York Times is the most trusted national newspaper outlet. Three out of four people feel that news coverage is biased, and that media coverage influenced the outcome of the Presidential election. (IFC / Zogby PDF)

Via a thought-provoking Metafilter item:

The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility.

The old model was beautifully simple. A newspaper publisher in a monopoly market in the twentieth century was like those counts of Savoy who built a castle on the rock of Chillon between the foot of a mountain and the edge of Ltke Geneva. Travelers could swim the lake or climb the mountain, or they could pay a toll to the occupants of the castle. That arrangement kept the Savoys and their heirs rich and comfortable for three centuries.

Today, the castle is a museum. Technology has created other ways to cross the lake and the mountain. And so it is with publishers. They still own the channel along which information is passed between local retailers and their customers, but it's no longer exclusive. -- Philip Meyer Columbia Journalism Review (2004)

How long has this been around? I just noticed it.  Google's user interface is so streamlined that any change at all is noteworthy. I haven't had the chance to play with it. I'm not sure how much I want my own biases to affect Google's search results, so I'm going to have to read up on this before I play with it.

SearchWiki lets you customize your Google Web Search results by ranking, removing, and adding notes to them. You'll see your changes whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. You can also see how other users have tailored any given search results page with their own notes and changes.

Looks like it's got two parts... in one, you can signal your approval of a site by clicking the up arrow button, and in the other you can click the X to remove it from your results. And you can also leave comments (here, I've clicked on the speech bubble to open up a comment box.)

How will these various affect the results Google returns in response to different searches? I want to know that before I start using it -- I might X out a site that's very good, but that I already know about, if my goal is to find NEW sites that refer to a certain term.

Do I want to type my critical commentary into a Google box, rather than keep it on my blog (where I can keep an eye on it)?

Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.

I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I read suggested it was pretty lame. I'm very cautious about putting hard work into creating content in a proprietary format that I can't export (ahem). 

I recently downloaded Sketchup 7, which is the latest version of Google's 3D design tool, but the free version still doesn't have an easy way to export your models to other formats.  So I'll probably delete Sketchup from my hard drive (after I've made screen shots of the models I've created, so that later I can re-create them in Blender3D, which offers an insane number of import and export options).

Great little feature from the Chronicle

Here are some of the things you learn when you participate in a Milton marathon:

1. Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that would make The Lord of the Rings' archfiend, Sauron, weep with envy! Epic battles, with angels hurling mountains at their demonic foes! This is edge-of-your-seat material. "It's a really cool story, which I wasn't expecting," said Anna Coffey, a sophomore who took part in the reading to get a jump on her homework for a "Great Conversations" core-curriculum course.
2. Milton is not that hard to read out loud. As Mr. DuRocher pointed out in a set of "Guidelines for Reciting" he handed out before the marathon, "Paradise Lost is written in modern English." Compared with Beowulf, Paradise Lost is a walk in the park.
3. Milton is really hard to read out loud. Very few people get words like "puissance" right on the first try. Milton loved a runaway sentence and just about any now-obscure classical or geographical reference he could get his hands on, many of them polysyllabic nightmares. Partway through Book VI, Mr. DuRocher offered advice to the tongue-tied. "Whenever you encounter a word you don't know, that's a word to pronounce with special certainty," he said. "It's probably best to mispronounce demonic names anyway."
4. It's worth it. "It's really a good poem," said Mr. Goodroad. "It's a lot better to hear it than to read it."

It's pretty cool to see a Chronicle of Higher Education blog covering text games:

It's noon and you've still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it's been months since you've last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she's out the door and flying back to Australia if you don't finish the paper by the end of the day.

What's your next move?

This is the premise for Violet, a text-based computer game in which a graduate student is the main character. As the student, you must fight through countless distractions and solve a number of puzzles to finish the paper in time to save your relationship. The story is told by Violet, who allows you to examine objects in your office and ask for hints.

Created by Jeremy Freese, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, Violet recently won the 14th annual Interactive Fiction Competition.

I'm willing to give the new Star Trek a chance. I loved Babylon 5 during its initial run, and I'm intrigued by the possibility of a re-imagined Trek.

[G]ames are inherently about exploration, in the abstract sense of discovering strategies and options, seeing how rules interact and so on. And yes, you can summon screenshots of Warhammer halls bigger than the Taj Mahal, or mountain vistas in Lord of the Rings Onlinethe Other: societies wholly different from mine, cultures built on assumptions so divergent from my own that I hadn't realized they were assumptions.

This, for me, is why playing MMOGs doesn't feel like travel. They offer too little of the Other.(Allen Varney, The Escapist)

The latest issue of The Escapist

Wired reviews Mirror's Edge

When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot -- precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you.

What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable. Because the game is designed around the concept of parkour, or moving through obstacles, most times when you see something that looks like you could jump on it, you can. The gameplay requires it.

The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception. It's why you feel so much more "inside" the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic.

This will be an interesting update for all the dissertation chapters that have already been written on Lara Croft's virtual body.

The votes have been tabulated, and we have our winners! Congratulations to the top three games, Violet, Nightfall, and Everybody Dies, as well as to all authors for entering. And a big note of thanks to everyone who judged the games. The full results are available below. (IF Comp 08)

See the results page.

Motringate? Mommygate?

An ad on the Motrin home page, aimed at moms who carry their babies in slings, has upset hordes of mom-bloggers who use the social networking service Twitter.

The best analysis I've seen so far is by Joyce Schwartz (known for coming up with the idea of putting missing kids on milk cartons), but if you want to dive into the fray, search Twitter for Motrimmoms.

Apparently Johnson & Johnson doesn't pay attention to the blogosphere over the weekends, because any with-it company would take the ad down immediately and post an apology.

BeyondMom has a transcript of the ad and some interesting commentary -- which includes the suggestion that maybe all the attention being called to the ad (which is a bit condescending to women who wear their babies) will help sell Motrin to people who "aren't mom enough to babywear."

Two positions.

Assistant Professor of Composition

Institution: Seton Hill University
Location: Greensburg, PA
Category: Faculty - Liberal Arts - English and Literature
Posted: 11/10/2008
Application Due: Open Until Filled
Type: Full Time

Seton Hill University invites applications for an Assistant Professor position in Composition, beginning fall, 2009. The faculty member will teach first-year composition courses, with a secondary teaching responsibility as a generalist in undergraduate English.

Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in Composition/Rhetoric with an M.A. in literature (or related area). Background in writing assessment and/or writing in the disciplines a plus. An outstanding candidate who has completed all but the dissertation may be considered.

Send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, official transcripts, and a statement of philosophy of teaching composition, a writing sample, a teaching portfolio, a developmental composition syllabus, a set of teaching evaluations from a composition course and three letters of reference to. The review process will begin February 15, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled.

Seton Hill University is a Catholic, liberal arts University, educating traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and graduate students. Classes are offered in a variety of formats - day, evening, and weekends. Seton Hill has a student-centered campus culture based on Catholic values, acceptance, community and service. The campus is located 35 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Postal Address: Dr. John Spurlock, Chair
Humanities Division
Seton Hill University
Seton Hill Drive
PO Box 507F
Greensburg, PA 15601
Email Address: spurlock@setonhill.edu
http://www.setonhill.edu

Second Position:

Assistant Professor of English
Location: Greensburg, PA
Category: Faculty - Liberal Arts - English and Literature
Posted: 11/10/2008
Application Due: Open Until Filled
Type: Full Time

Seton Hill University seeks published novelist of popular fiction (preferably mystery/suspense), to teach and to mentor novel-length theses in the graduate low-residency Writing Popular Fiction program (half-load), and to teach undergraduate courses in creative writing and first-year composition.

Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in English, MFA considered. Background in journalism, publishing, and/or editing a plus. Teaching experience/potential at undergraduate level desirable.

Send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, official transcripts, a statement of philosophy of teaching, a writing sample, a teaching portfolio, and three letters of reference. The review process will begin February 15, 2009 and will continue until the position is filled.

Seton Hill University is a Catholic, liberal arts University, educating traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and graduate students. Classes are offered in a variety of formats - day, evening, and weekends. Seton Hill has a student-centered campus culture based on Catholic values, acceptance, community and service. The campus is located 35 miles east of Pittsburgh.

Postal Address: Dr. John Spurlock, Chair
Humanities Division
Seton Hill University
Seton Hill Drive
PO Box 507F
Greensburg, PA 15601
Email Address: spurlock@setonhill.edu
http://fiction.setonhill.edu
http://www.setonhill.edu

A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as "very happy" spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research.

Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time use studies and a continuing series of social attitude surveys, the Maryland researchers report that spending time watching television may contribute to viewers' happiness in the moment, with less positive effects in the long run.

"TV doesn't really seem to satisfy people over the long haul the way that social involvement or reading a newspaper does," says University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson, the study co-author and a pioneer in time use studies. "It's more passive and may provide escape - especially when the news is as depressing as the economy itself. The data suggest to us that the TV habit may offer short-run pleasure at the expense of long-term malaise." (University of Maryland)

Note that this is a press release about the research, not the research itself, so take it for what it's worth. If anyone sees this covered on the TV news, let me know -- I'll gain a lot of respect for that news team.

Fiction - including poetry - should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE).

Novels should be required reading because fiction "does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does," said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University's Brooks World Poverty Institute.

He said: "Despite the regular flow of academic studies, expert reports, and policy position papers, it is arguably novelists who do as good a job - if not a better one - of representing and communicating the realities of international development. -- Telegraph

I heard about Bloxorz this afternoon at a meeting.

This evening, I came down to the study where my kids were playing Lego Indiana Jones for the umpteenth time, and without any fuss, started playing Bloxorz on the laptop.

Within thirty seconds, my six-year-old daughter was begging to play it. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old son wanted to play, so we fired up another computer for him.  I taught my daughter a few moves, which she then taught to her brother.

Now they are alternating turns (with some fussing and complaining, but no more than usual.)

Peter: "Oh, man! This the hardest game and the most fun puzzles I've ever played"

Carolyn (glaring at me) "Daddy, are you done blogging? Now, daddy? Now? Daddy! You said you'd let me play Bloxorz on your laptop! (Singing a song) Now, now now... now, now now.... now now now?"

On the morning of Nov. 10, 1938, Fritz Ottenheimer was awakened by an explosion that shook
his bed.

Ottenheimer was just 13 then -- a boy living in Konstanz, Germany. And he was a Jew. -- Jennifer Reeger, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Last night, my son and I attended Seton Hill's Kristallnacht memorial service. It's generally a good sign when they start running out of programs and ask people in the audience to share. I've never before seen such a crowd for this program. (I understand the men's and women's basketball teams showed up en masse.)

During the service, I was saddened to hear of the recent death of Jack Sittsamer, a Holocaust survivor whose life was the basis of the play Mazel (which I saw with my son at SHU a few years ago).

A 1960s tape recorder the size of a household fridge could be the key to unlocking valuable information from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon. An archiving error by NASA has meant 173 data tapes have sat in Perth for almost 40 years, holding information about lunar dust that could be vital in expanding science's understanding of the moon. ABC News (Australia)

The NASA tapes are another example of why digital archiving is a growing field. My old school plays are mostly on Betamax video tapes; my wedding is on a 3/4 inch videotape (we have a copy in regular VHS), and I shot my own home videos on three additional formats (mini VHS-C tapes, digital video tapes, and, now, an  integrated hard drive).  Add to that all the informal videos I've snapped with my pocket digital camera, and the conversations I've captured with my voice recorder, and I've got a lot of media consolidation to do.

There's a closet on the Humanities floor that has educational recordings (poetry readings, biographies, great speeches from the 20th century) on laser discs, casette tapes, vinyl records, and who knows what else.

At my previous school, the English department meeting room had a huge cabinet full of slides -- portraits of authors, their birthplaces, scenes depicted in their works, etc.  I remember using some of those slides, mostly out of guilt, since I figured if I didn't use them, nobody else would.

So what exactly are the barriers of entry for great thinkers (or groups of thinkers) to leave their mark on games? What must happen for games -- or interactive entertainment, if you will, to mature as a medium?

While no one knows the answer to this question, many people (and companies) have stepped up to the plate to attempt to bring games to the next level. The Nintendo Wii has been a monumental development in the games industry, not because of its innovative technology, not because is has helped get people off of the couch, but because of the way it has changed the audience.

My mother, who claimed she could never play games, frequently plays Wii bowling with my aunt. A substantial amount of Wii owners claim that it is their first video game console. This means that, by taking away the buttons that confounded my mother and replacing them with movement-based controls, Nintendo has opened up the possibility that games could be for people other than kids. -- Brice Morrison, Gamasutra

Professor Philip Busse blogs about his adventures stealing political signs. 

Sure, I understand that stealing a sign will not change anyone's mind, and, most likely, will only embolden McCain supporters' disdain for liberals. Even so, yanking out the signs and running like a scared rabbit back to my idling car was one of the single-most exhilarating and empowering political acts that I have ever done. -- Huffington Post

Stealing signs is bad enough. He blogged about it, and expressed surprise that he got a negative response from his readers.

Writing the essay was an opportunity to explore and talk about political speech and the desire that most of us have to express our politics -- both in mature and immature ways, and sometimes a mix of the two.... I'm disappointed that most readers seem to have focused on the thefts, and not on the larger thoughts. -- Northfield News

Stark, unadorned writing. No melodramatic flourishes or sentiment. Just the truth. Powerful.

Fewer than 100 survived Treblinka. I am the last one. The will to live is stronger than anything else; I never gave up. Maybe I'm meant to be alive to tell the story. This is the last generation to hear first-hand from survivors. In 10 years, there won't be any of us left. People should know what happened to us. -- Eddie Weinstein

The web today is not the same as it was during the last presidential election.

Old media, apparently, can learn new media tricks. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations covering them.

For many viewers, the 2008 election has become a kind of hybrid in which the dividing line between online and off, broadcast and cable, pop culture and civic culture, has been all but obliterated.

Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama's comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.

When viewers settle in Tuesday night to watch the election returns, they will also check text messages for alerts, browse the Web for exit poll results and watch videos distributed by the campaigns. And many folks will let go of the mouse only to pick up the remote and sample an array of cable channels with election coverage -- from Comedy Central to BBC America.  David Carr and Brian Stelter, New York Times

Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are killing our own chances to have readers in the future or be remunerated for the scholarship we do. It's not only about the modest royalties that faculty authors may or may not receive, it's about the principle of valuing each other's scholarship and editorial work. I order good, attractive and useful paper-and-binding books or textbooks for my classes because I want there to be a system in place to support my work as an author and editor in the future.

If the paper and binding book vanishes as a dominant commodity, as it seems to be, maybe the new virtual system of book distribution, reproduction and delivery will allay some of the problems I describe in relation to photocopies and PDFs. It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? -- Christopher Conway, Inside Higher Ed

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for "Mark" ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. (Wired)

Just a few days ago, I submitted a conference proposal that asked whether academic blogs are the new five-paragraph-essay, so this article comes at a good time.  Here's the concluson:

Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

As a writing teacher, I'm perfectly happy to hear that bloggers are expected to write good prose.

I don't plan on giving up my own blog anytime soon, but the fact that so much energy has moved to feeds and commercial social networking sites -- the Wal-Marts of the blogosophere -- means that I have changed what and how I write on this blog.

Via

The FPP -- first-person painter! I wish the creator hadn't chosen to go eerie with the mood, that seems like cheating a little... it's so easy to go scary. Still, it's beautiful And it's an XNA-developed title. Interesting.

The Unfinished Swan - Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

Thanks, Mike, for pointing out this one, which is a close second to "Translate Server Error."

The English is clear enough to lorry drivers - but the Welsh reads "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated". (BBC)