January 2009 Archive Page

Hey there!

I am an NYC actress (and a former English Literature major) currently in production on a one-woman show (yes, ANOTHER one) of this phenomenal story. I was doing some research and just this afternoon spent some very enjoyable time reading the blog entries from your students in 2007.

I have been in love with this story since I first laid eyes on it in HS American Literature course, and then a few years later in undergrad. From the time I read it, I thought it was written just like a monologue, and dreamed of doing it someday.

I will say that actually memorizing and "living" the words as I speak them has opened up all sorts of insights for me that I never had upon reading/rereading/deconstructing/etc. for many, many years! That said, I still discovered new things to think about from your students, and am very much looking forward to peeking in on their discoveries (if that is allowed).

Thanks so much,

Annalisa

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies covers the same ground as the original masterpiece - only that ground is full freshly-vacated graves.  The "strange plague" has been the scourge of England for years.  London has been walled off, and the countryside is littered with zombies (politely referred to as "unmentionables").  Attacks occur on a daily basis - overwhelming the conventional army, and leaving England's defense to a small band of highly-trained hunter/killers.

The Bennet sisters have spent their lives training in the deadly arts, and are considered among the finest slayers of the undead.  None is more feared or admired than the lovely Elizabeth - a serious girl who has no time for silly things like love.  But when Elizabeth meets a haughty fellow slayer named Darcy, she discovers there's one thing she can't defend against...Cupid's arrow (cue sweeping romantic music).

When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called "I'm sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!" and another called "With all due respect, Gaza, I don't support you," which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas and lamented the recent shooting of two Egyptian border guards, which had been attributed to Hamas fire. Another group implored God to "destroy and burn the hearts of the Zionists." Some Egyptian Facebook users had joined all three groups.-- Samantha Shapiro, New York Times

He thinks that he will never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

But poems charm and poems please,
And many are lovelier than "Trees."

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast,

Can hardly look at God all day,
While lifting leafy arms to pray.

Where are her eyes, mouth, arms, and head?
Perhaps she lifts her legs instead.

Can that same tree in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair?

Perhaps her arms (or legs?) are hairy.
A tree like that should make one wary.

That bosom on which snow has lain?
You'll search a tree for it in vain.

Unless . . . a hairy bosom too?
That tree belongs inside a zoo.

One line is good. I can't complain
Of "intimately lives with rain."

Bad poems persist; they sadden me.
Not even God could make that tree.

--David L. Hoover, 2004 (Reproduced with permission.)

It used to be that we in English departments were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text. Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds as much as words. Worlds are emerging as the consummate genre of the new century, whether it's the virtual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft or the more specialized venues seen in high-end simulation and visualization environments. Virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that.

Importantly, "world" here means something very much like model, a selective and premeditated representation of reality, where some elements of the real are emphasized and exaggerated, others are distorted and caricatured, still others are absent altogether. Virtual worlds are interactive, manipulable, extensible; they are not necessarily games, though they may support and contain games alongside other systems. Virtual worlds are sites of exploration, simulation, play. We will want many virtual worlds, not few, because reality can be sliced and sampled in an infinite variety of ways.

All programming entails world-making, as the ritual act of writing and running Hello World reminds us. Virtual worlds simply lend literal and graphical form to this ideal. It's no accident that what was arguably the very first virtual world, Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-only game programmed in 1975 depicting the user's exploration of a cave (it launched a whole genre of commercial successors), was embraced by programmers who saw unraveling the game's puzzles and tricky underground passages as a parable of their art. -- Matt Kirschenbaum, Chronicle. (See also the same author's digital humanities sidebar.)

The Freytag Pyramid

Concocted 146 years ago by a German philologist, Freytag's pyramid was long held aloft as the one-size-fits-all narrative template, despite the fact that it describes the tidy Aristotelian side of storytelling (Ben-Hur) far better than its frayed quantum fringes (Memento). Techniques like open-ended conclusion, audience interactivity, and nonlinear chronology "were part of the avant-garde 30 or 40 years ago," says UCLA film school dean Robert Rosen, "but they're taken for granted now."

Fortunately for Western civilization, I've developed a new model. Allow me to introduce Brown's Ziggurat (in 4-D!)^tm. It accounts for all the time-shredding, symmetry-defying, viewer-inclusive wackiness of New Story. --Scott Brown, Wired

Many of the recently laid-off staffers, Stengel says, "were people whose jobs really didn't exist anymore."

On October 10, 1765, an Annapolis printer changed his newspaper's title to the Maryland Gazette, Expiring. Its motto: "In uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life again." Later that month, the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal replaced his newspaper's masthead with a death's-head and framed his front page with a thick black border in the shape of a gravestone. "Adieu, Adieu," the Journal whispered. On October 31st, the New-Hampshire Gazette appeared with black mourning borders and, in a column on page 1, lamented its own demise: "I must Die!" The Connecticut Courant quoted the book of Samuel: "Tell it not in Gath! publish it not in Askalon!" The newspaper is dead!

Or, then as now, not quite dead yet.-- Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

Wickstrom's firing followed the June 2007 Journal publication of a story concerning a university computer security breach. A file containing the names, Social Security numbers, grade point averages and other sensitive information of former students was discovered by student journalist Blair Loving in a public area of the university computer system. He opened the file thinking it was information about the College of Education.

Wickstrom's contract was not renewed in August 2007 because university officials felt she mishandled a copy of the file.

The letter of censure, sent to WOU President John Minahan, raises concerns about the way the university handled Wickstrom's case. In addition, CMA is concerned that the present academic and student affairs environments are not conducive to healthy journalism and student media programs at WOU.

Specific concerns raised in the letter of censure include the following:

• The search by university officials of the student newspaper newsroom without notifying the students or the adviser.
• The university blaming the newspaper staff and its adviser for exposing the security lapse on its computers.
• The handling by university officials of the security investigation and Wickstrom's case, both of which indicate a lack of understanding of the basic philosophy, principles and ethics that guide CMA advisers.

Melanie stood holding her Cassaba melon like a globe or Yorick's skull in her left hand and read it slowly rotating it to see all the lines; she then passed the Cassaba around and everyone read a line; amazingly, there were exactly 13 circular lines on the melon; she then cut it open with a sharp folding knife of illegal dimensions (on an airplane, certainly) and passed slices that everyone ate like communion, there being present also an eerie, nearly sacerdotal silence. And so it went, fruit after fruit, read, performed, eaten, in an order that could have not been more perfect if Noah's monitors had been there. We thus learned that: a) poetry can be edible (and perhaps it should be); b) fruit is a sexier medium than paper or pixels; c) school could be fun, d) "intermediate" could mean that even though the medium had not been quite reached (advanced), the closeness to experience itself (beginning), made it worthwhile, e) it's not so easy to write on fruit without good magic markers, and f) T.S. Eliot need not be memorized. --Andrei Codrescu, Inside Higher Ed

It's remarkable how many of the genre's classic elements can be traced back to the feverishly fertile imagination of one man, Edgar Allan Poe. Once you start looking, the clues are everywhere.

Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his gloomy gothic tales

Born 200 years ago, on 19 January 1809, Poe was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction and essays. But his influential contribution to crime and detective fiction mainly derives from a handful of short stories.

The most important are the three featuring his French investigator, C Auguste Dupin.

Educated Americans have a tendency to think that (i) intelligence can be directly assessed through the surrogate of compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar, and that (ii) compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar can be checked quickly and easily by glancing in Strunk and White's brainless little pamphlet of 19th-century grammar nonsense. Both propositions are wrong and dangerous, yet tacit acceptance of them is widespread.

I have heard of a boss who openly declared that he wouldn't have anyone working for him who would write a split infinitive. When I assault that as ridiculously misguided, a perversion of grammar sensitivity, it's not because the important thing is whether adverbs go in between the meaningless marker to and the accompanying plain verb in an infinitival clause. I'm not an idiot, and I don't think the exact location of adverbs and other verb phrase modifiers is something to organize your life around. But that's the whole point: it's not me who's doing that, it's this insane boss. What makes the issue a serious one for me is that a man would judge intelligence and employability on something like this. It does indeed display pig-ignorance of English syntax and literary usage to be hung up on split infinitives, but that's the less important point. The more important side of it is that this boss is a maniac who has his priorities all wrong. I'm worried not about where his adverbs might go but about where his marbles have gone. The danger is not about modifier location but about whether he will be an insane boss in other ways as well. --Goeffrey K. Pullum, Language Log

He will always be Captain Kirk's finest foe, the would-be conqueror who first tried to steal the Enterprise in the classic Star Trek episode "Space Seed" and then finally robbed Kirk of his best friend in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Montalban's magnetic, robust presence; that voice that sounded like a ride over rolling hills -- he made Khan Noonien Singh the worst kind of despot: the kind you're pretty sure you'd die for. --Mark Bernardin, Entertainment Weekly

Legends of Zork, which is being published by Activision, is currently in beta with no official release date yet disclosed. Prospective players can join the beta at the game's official website, as well as sign up for automated updates on Legends' development status. -- Wired

Three teenage girls who allegedly sent nude or semi-nude cell phone pictures of themselves, and three male classmates in a Greensburg Salem High School who received them, are charged with child pornography. WPXI

This past year has been catastrophic for the New York Times. Advertising dropped off a cliff. The stock sank by 60 percent, and by fall, the paper had been rated a junk investment, announced plans to mortgage its new building, slashed dividends, and, as of last week, was printing ads on the front page. So dire had the situation become, observers began to entertain thoughts about whether the enterprise might dissolve entirely--Michael Hirschorn just published a piece in TheAtlantic imagining an end date of (gulp) May. As this bad news crashed down, the jackals of Times hatred--right-wing ideologues and new-media hecklers alike--ate it up, finding confirmation of what they'd said all along: that the paper was a dinosaur, incapable of change, maddeningly assured as it sank beneath the weight of its own false authority.

And yet, even as the financial pages wrote the paper's obit, deep within that fancy Renzo Piano palace across from the Port Authority, something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution. Each day, peculiar wings and gills poke up on the Times' website--video, audio, "drillable" graphics. Beneath Nicholas Kristof's op-ed column, there's a link to his blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube videos. Coverage of Gaza features a time line linking to earlier reporting, video coverage, and an encyclopedic entry on Hamas. Throughout the election, glittering interactive maps let readers plumb voting results. There were 360-degree panoramas of the Democratic convention; audio "back story" with reporters like Adam Nagourney; searchable video of the debates. It was a radical reinvention of the Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.

[...]

Half the battle, in Bilton's experience, is fighting older readers' nostalgia, which to him is a kind of blindness. " 'I like the way paper feels,' " he scoffs. "To the next generation, that doesn't mean anything. You know, if we were all reading Kindles, and someone began raving about this new technology, the 'book'--here's something you can't share, can't search, that only holds 500 pages--no one would be interested.

"Print is just a device. The New York Times is not just a newspaper, it's a news organization." For those who believe these changes are gimmicks, he has no patience: "This isn't a storm! This isn't something that's going to pass! It's the ice age. People aren't going to suddenly open their eyes and we're back in print." -- Emily Nussbaum, New York

Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don't forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or "robots" (a term introduced in 1921) that might free us from the burden of labor... or else run amuck and destroy/enslave us. -- Joshua Glenn

At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.

Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related concepts in small groups.

Teachers and students conduct experiments together. The room buzzes. Conferring with tablemates, calling out questions and jumping up to write formulas on the white boards are all encouraged.

"There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture," said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. "It was the students' job to figure it out." --Sara Rimer, New York Times

As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print.

The Printed Blog, a startup founded and funded by former business productivity software entrepreneur Joshua Karp, is launching a twice-daily free print newspaper in cities across the country aggregating localized blog posts.

"Why hasn't anyone tried to take the best content and bring it offline?" said Karp, who thinks print media is far from dying. --Chris Snyder, Wired

The story's arc is like that of a football thrown lazily against a crisp autumn sky: Even a dog can figure out where it's going to land. Hell, I could accurately predict individual lines of the game's dialogue. I'm not saying the narrative in Gears of War 2 was bad; I'm saying it was -- with a few, startling exceptions -- completely mediocre.

And yet here's the even crazier thing: I think the weak story made the game better.

Normally, we assume that shoot'em-up games need a good story to help you "care about the gameplay." Because shooters are extremely similar to each other in terms of mechanics -- kill things, scrounge for ammo, go kill more things -- they require a strong narrative to give the action some emotional payload.

We often say the same thing about role-playing games and other genres. The play is so generally similar from title to title -- complete quests, level up, complete harder quests -- that it is only the quality of the narratives that pulls you along. No story, no incentive to get to the end. Right? The story and characters give the play meaning.

Except, for me, Gears of War 2 worked in precisely the opposite way. The gameplay is so insanely superb that it imbued the narrative with meaning. --Clive Thompson

Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American LIteracy (NEA, 2009)

The percentage of American adults who report reading any book not required for work or school during the previous year is still declining. It fell from 56.6 percent in 2002 to 54.3 percent in 2008.-- Bob Thompson, Washington Post

It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users "reply-all" to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. --Slashdot

The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press's ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there's no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience--not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.

Most likely, the interim step for The Times and other newspapers will be to move to digital-only distribution (perhaps preserving the more profitable Sunday editions). Already, most readers of The Times are consuming it online. The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still ...) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it's intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times' reach many times over.-- Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic

GlobalNerdy, via.

You've probably seen many articles on companies and organizations saying that they take social media seriously. Here's one such organization that you might not expect: the United States Air Force. Take a look at the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, reproduced below:

Click the diagram to download the PDF version (455K).

The "rules of engagement" are quite good. You might find them to be useful for your own blogs, whether personal or corporate.

Many believe there is solid data that a great deal of the Earth has been warming slightly over the last couple decades, but the exact reason why is still unknown.  There's an abundance of theory about what might be causing it, but much research remains to be done.  There also have been telltale signs that there has been some cooling this year, but again, this needs to be viewed in a broader context.

In the end, what people need to realize is just because it isn't the end of the world doesn't mean that global warming might not be happening.  And whether it is or isn't; understanding and analytically examining our planet's climate is an endeavor worth devoting time, money, and some of the world's brightest brains to.  Likewise, "environmental" initiatives like species conservation, land protection, fuel efficient vehicles, and alternative energy are good ideas with or without AGW beliefs. 

It's been an interesting year, and it the coming year to follow, I suggest that readers following the warming debate take into consideration both sides of the issue, even if you agree more with one. -- Jason Mick

in which you take on the role of the Israeli military, building tanks, fighter planes and missiles in order to pummel the Palestinian territory and kill as many people as possible within three minutes. Bonus points are awarded for hitting hospitals and police stations. Meanwhile, the Hamas threat is characterised by spluttering Qassam missiles, which whir out of Gaza and usually explode uselessly in fields. The author of the game claims in a recent interview to have begun the project almost two years ago, in response to a UN report on the human cost of the continuing conflict.

Reactions have been mixed. News site Kotaku clearly feels it's in poor taste, but political gaming expert Ian Bogost writes that Raid Gaza is successful as a polemical attack on Israeli tactics.

At the heart of the debate is an ongoing question - are videogames an appropriate medium for political satire? -- Keith Stuart, Guardian

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project announced Wednesday that it plans to downsize half of its staff and reduce the salary of the remaining employees. OLPC will also halt its development of the open source Sugar environment and focus on building its next-generation hardware device. These plans are part of a major restructuring effort that has been necessitated by the financial downturn and the organization's dwindling resources. --Ars Technica

"Until now the nation has lacked a broad-based, quantitative analysis of the status of the humanities in the United States," said Leslie Berlowitz, chief executive officer of the American Academy and project co-director. "We need more reliable empirical data about what is being taught in the humanities, how they are funded, the size of the workforce, and public attitudes toward the field. The Humanities Indicators are an important step in closing that fundamental knowledge gap. They will help researchers and policymakers, universities, foundations, museums, libraries, humanities councils and others answer basic questions about the humanities, track trends, diagnose problems, and formulate appropriate interventions."

• Part I:  Public Education and the Humanities by William J. Reese
• Part II:  Taking the Pulse of the Humanities: Higher Education in the Humanities Indicators Project by Roger L. Geiger
• Part III:  In Progress: The Idea of a Humanities Workforce by David Laurence
• Part IV:  Landscape of Humanities Research and Funding by Alan Brinkley
• Part V:  This American Life: How Are the Humanities Public? by Julie Ellison

Are you a politician? a candidate for real political office? an MP in the UK? A Senator or member of the House of Representatives in the US? or the equivalent anywhere in the world? If so, I...a humble games programmer from the UK would like to give you a free gift. a FREE copy of Democracy 2 for you to practice with. There are no strings attached whatsoever, I won't publish your name anywhere unless you say I can, I'm not getting anything out of it other than the knowledge that just *maybe* I'm helping to make our current crop of politicians more prepared for the task ahead, especially with a global recession on the horizon. -- Positech Games (Via)

This is fascinating. Not the literary hoax part, so much -- because I seriously doubt any historians of Restoration England were deceived -- but how the "fake" text travels through the authentic, the "real" history (the source texts), to prove a nonexistent past, and how that process reflects exactly what Dale Spender is doing in the fictional Diary. In some ways, this is the same trajectory that all texts take, feeding off a factual "before" to create an admittedly fictionalized "now" (skewed, biased -- we all admit what we do when we write, today), which then becomes the historical fodder for the future.

Actually, this is exactly what Samuel's Diary does, too. Perhaps best known for its entries on the Great Fire of London or the plague -- indeed, often used as a primary source text for these events -- the Diary recounts some of the most important events in British history; yet it falls far short of the documentary evidence historians might wish to have. In fact [pun intended, har har], the Diary ironically exposes how mediated the past is precisely because we expect a journal to be so unimpeachably "authentic," so far beyond the frustrating arguments over history as narrative, or the frames of interpretation that muddy up a text.

Now maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them -- for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle of the Great Arianna, of course. As for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech staff? Those jobs could be offshored to, I dunno, Third World child labor. If HuffPo takes such steps, I could see the site being worth maybe $4 mil. (Then again, there's always the karma risk of exploiting workers. If a disgruntled work-for-free blogger or a slave-driving HuffPo middle manager ended up, say, inserting ground-up melamine into HuffPo blog posts in an attempt to trick people into thinking the content was more substantive than it really is, that might save Arianna some money in the short term. But what if a reader or commenter got poisoned?) -- Simon Dumenco

The wellhouse was one of a series of concrete catchments placed by the NPS [National Park Service] around the flanks of Flint Ridge. These mostly collected water draining from perched springs on top of the Big Clifty Sandstone, and routed water via pumps to collecting tanks on top of Flint Ridge. The original water collection system was built by the CCC in the 1930s. It was to supply the CCC camp AND Mammoth Cave hotel and visitor center. Around 1960 the NPS reactivated some of the system to provide more potable water for the upcoming Job Corps camp to be built at the site of the old CCC camp on Flint Ridge. CRF told the NPS this water system would be inadequate because during the summer when they needed the most water, the least amount would be supplied. Our prediction turned out true, and a waterline was brought in from out of the park. So the wellhouse was really a pump house, a relic of that old water system. To my knowledge it was not functioning in 1960, when I recall seeing it for the first and last time. My recollection is dim: I remember a 6 ft. x 6 ft. sandstone building with a cedar shingle roof and a sagging or missing door. It may have had moss on the roof. I think it did not contain a pump. And I do not recall a spring or pool of water in it.

One machine dates back to the 1880s when it was used to make shoes, and for the past 100 years has made the tabs with brass eyelets used to hook the roll into a piano.

There are also aging machines to perforate and punch the holes, to cut the stencils to print the lyrics, to spool the rolls and to glue the roll boxes together.

"There are so many facets of it. The perforating machines are old and cantankerous, and they're one star in a constellation of machines that all have to be functioning," Berkman said.

How interesting that the manfacture of player-piano rolls outlasted the sales of pre-recorded videotape.

In an undergraduate genetics course, students were, on 16 occasions during the course of a semester, asked a pair of "isomorphic" questions, which have different facts but require students to apply the same principles or concepts. Instructors asked students one of the questions, had them "click" their answers, discuss the question with their neighbors, and then revote. Then, they were asked to answer the second question individually, via the clickers. A significantly higher percentage of students answered the second question correctly than did so on either the original question or the first question when it was asked a second time (without revealing the results from the first query). -- Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

On a disaggregated Web, it seems, people and advertisers simply will not pay anything like the whole freight for investigative reporting. But Hamilton thinks advances in computing can alter the economic equation, supplementing and, in some cases, even substituting for the slow, expensive and eccentric humans required to produce in-depth journalism as we've known it.

Already, complex algorithms -- programming often placed under the over-colorful umbrella of "artificial intelligence" -- are used to gather content for Web sites like Google News, which serves up a wide selection of journalism online, without much intervention from actual journalists. Hamilton sees a not-too-distant future in which that process would be extended, with algorithms mining information from multiple sources and using it to write parts of articles or even entire personalized news stories.

Investigative reporters have long used computers to sort and search databases in pursuit of their stories. Investigative Reporters and Editors and its National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, for example, hold regular computer-assisted reporting training sessions around the country. And the country's major journalism schools all deal in some way with computer-enhanced journalism. The emerging academic/professional field of computational journalism, however, might be thought of as a step beyond computer-assisted reporting, an attempt to combine the fields of information technology and journalism and thereby respond to the enormous changes in information availability and quality wrought by the digital revolution

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I need to find a simple book that sort of explains the trends of Web 2.0. Nothing too techy, but something that would talk about what makes it special, what people are doing with 2.0, and the best ways to utilize its philosophies.  Basically, my company is moving towards plenty of web work now that  I'm here (I'm the only designer who can do Flash and web design), but  my bosses aren't aware of a lot of the new practices in modern web design.  So I was hoping I could recommend a book for them to read that would help them get on track with modern web design and marketing. Does a book like this even exist?

Admissions officers are looking for the "silver bullet" to uncover the secret to social networking. But, as this latest controversy illustrates, there is no magic solution in a space whose content is controlled by users, and policed by a community. To be part of the conversation of any social network to the point you can nurture your institution's brand name, you have to bring value to it first. --  Usher and Reicherter, Inside Higher Ed

Let's face it--each new stage in life brings dramatic changes that are difficult to anticipate. No matter how smart you can be in college, you will still get surprised by the working world.

I faced these surprises myself. I thought the working world would be hard since it lacked the freedom I had at Stanford. I was wrong. During my first job, I had much more free time than during college in part because I didn't have to study on weekends.

I encountered many other surprises along the way. In the spirit of guiding others, here are the top 10 things I learned while working...  - Presh Talwalkar (Mind Your Decisions)

After I got my BA, I stayed at the same school for my MA, so the transition wasn't that hard.  For my PhD, I went to a different country, which involved some culture shock, but the isolation was good for my studies. Yet here I am, in my 10th year as a faculty member, and I'm still adjusting to all the stuff I'm expected to do (teaching! advising! research! meetings, meetings, meetings!).

All of Tawalkar's tips are worth reading, but the one that really caught my attention is this:

3. You're on a team-you don't need to compete for grades

In college, course success was usually measured by beating the curve. Professors often forced a distribution of grades, meaning even very high marks could be a B grade if everyone happened to do better.

This is why the working world can be liberating. Work projects were like being on a great team in a school project, with even fewer slackers. People helped you in times of need, and often projects were split across different offices.

It reminded me about my seventh grade science class. He was an amazing teacher, and one time asked us what companies value the most. This had nothing to do with science, but he was willing to spend time telling us this. We spent a whole class discussing ideas, proposing things like initiative and intelligence. Just before the bell rang he told us the answer was "team work." None of us believed him then, but looking back, I would say he is 100 percent correct.

I like to think of the cosmos as a theater, yet a theater cannot exist without an audience, to witness and to celebrate. Robot craft and mighty telescopes will continue to show us unimaginable wonders. But when humans return to the moon and put a base there and prepare to go to Mars and become true Martians, we--the audience--literally enter the cosmic theater. Will we finally reach the stars? -- Ray Bradbury, National Geographic

The McCarthy purges were a disgraceful blot on the national record of any nation aspiring to free speech, and are still, evidently, a matter of passionate concern.

When Elia Kazan, who sang like a bird, was awarded a lifetime Oscar 40 years later, many in Hollywood made it plain that his betrayal was a matter of the rawest feeling.

Still, there is something naive and faintly bizarre about Miller's much-admired response to the McCarthy period, The Crucible, comparing the communist hunt to the 17th-century witch hunt. As Kazan's wife pointed out, the difference was that there really were communists. It was disgraceful to pursue people for their political views, but it was absurd to suggest that the political views were dreamt up in bouts of mass hysteria, like the accusation of witchcraft.-- Philip Hensher (Telegraph)

Arthur Miller lived for some 50 years after his greatest literary successes, though I have taught (and will teach again this spring) his 2002 play Resurrection Blues. 

Nicastro and fellow legislators want the papers to survive, and petitioned the state government to do something about it. "The media is a vitally important part of America," he said, particularly local papers that cover news ignored by big papers and television and radio stations.

To some experts, that sounds like a bailout, a word that resurfaced this year after the U.S. government agreed to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the automobile and financial sectors.

Relying on government help raises ethical questions for the press, whose traditional role has been to operate free from government influence as it tries to hold politicians accountable to the people who elected them. Even some publishers desperate for help are wary of this route. -- Robert MacMillan (Reuters)