May 2009 Archive Page

Nearly a century after she was rescued from the decks of the sinking Titanic, the last remaining survivor of the disaster has died, aged 97.

Elizabeth Gladys Dean, known as Millvina, died today at the nursing home near Southampton where her care had been subsidised by Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet -- stars of the Titanic film -- who were moved by her story.

Millvina, the youngest passenger on the ship, was 9 weeks old in April 1912 when she set sail for a new life in America with her mother, father and brother. The family, from London, were supposed to have emigrated on a different ship, but because of a coal strike were transferred to the Titanic, travelling third class.-- Times Online

I've used Google Docs for some time; most of my recent conference proposals have been drafted there. Because there is an excellent open-source (free) alternatives to Microsoft Office (OpenOffice.org), I'm not all that convinced that cloud computing is the answer. I'm not comfortable with the idea that, if my internet connection hiccups, or Google goes down, that all my work in the Google Cloud is inaccessible.

I haven't had time to experiment with Google Wave, but here's an interesting perspective, from FastCompany:

Every college student is familiar with the next liability. Email chains--the closest thing to waves at this point--are all fun and games until someone CC's the wrong person, like a parent, relative, boss or overly-sensitive co-worker. "Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process," Google says. That'll make keeping track of participants a lot harder. Subtract the aforementioned opportunities to self-edit, and you have a social trainwreck ready and waiting.

Uh... I think the days when college students have been likely to participate in e-mail chains have been over for about five years.  (E-mail is for old people.) But I am interested in how these collaborative tools might be of use in the writing classroom, perhaps in the brainstorming and peer-reviewing stages.

One of my first dates with my wife was interrupted when I got a piece of beef stuck in my throat. I could breathe, but not swallow. When the paramedics arrived, I asked them to wait in the lobby while I walked out to my date, handed her my keys, and explained that I was about to go for a little ride in an ambulance.

I took some pills, switched my favorite summer beverage from lemonade to unsweetened ice tea, and my throat has been fine ever since.

Recently I was with my wife in an examination room, when she asked me to pick up this booklet from a rack. 

Here, a bespectacled doctor listens attentively, his pen hovering over a clipboard, while the patient describes the discomfort in her throat. I noted with approval that the models on the cover are ethnic and realistic, rather than photoshopped, technology-enhanced simulacra. 



Then I noticed something odd about another booklet on the same rack:


We see another side of the doctor, mid-snore, looking rather less professional and confident.  Lying next to him in bed, her head propped up on one elbow, is the acid reflux patient, now suffering from sleep deprivation, and apparently having second thoughts about their relationship.

My wife pointed out that the cover on the left *could* represent the doctor examining his own wife, but that's just a different kind of conflict of interest.

Soon after, Mario entered into the Mushroom Kingdom and proceeded to steal from their banks and museums with his brother Luigi in Super Mario Thieves. Throughout the game he is chased by Bowser, chief of police at the M.K.P.D. (Mushroom Kingdom Police department) and the Goomba's and Koopa Troppers in blue.

[...]

Bowser's chase of Mario eventually led to the successful spin off, Super Mario Getaway Kart, in which you had to drive to the bank job/safe house and make sure you beat the M.K.P.D. police cars there. You could also get numerous items that would help you get through the tracks. What's more, the game had a popular multiplayer mode, where whoever stole from the most banks won.-- GameCareerGuide.com

Thanks for the suggestion, Geoff.

Even as the use of electronic media has become common across fields for research and teaching, what is taken for granted among young scholars is still foreign to many of those who sit on tenure and promotion committees. In an effort to confront this problem, the MLA and a consortium called the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory have decided to find new ways to help departments evaluate the kinds of digital scholarship being produced today. The MLA ran a program for department chairs at last year's annual meeting in which chairs were given digital scholarship to evaluate, and that will take place again this year. -- Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed

It's that season of my life... I've got tenure on my mind.

The current summer 100 Days project gathers a group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers for one hundred days of creative effort.  Each artist's work will be unique yet build on the work of others in the collective.  Here we make, remake, shape and reshape.

• Steve Ersinghaus :: Story
• Carianne Garside :: Painting
• James Revillini :: jQuery
• John Timmons :: Sounds
• Jessica Somers :: Photos
• Neha Bawa :: Poetry
• Mindy Bray :: Photos
• Maggie Ducharme :: Meals
• Susan Ersinghaus :: Suburbs
• Denna Hintze-Yates :: Verbal Image
• Dave Pender :: Drawings

My former student Neha Bawa is among the participants. I have enjoyed learning from the new media pedagogy of Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I'm also particularly interested in James Revillini's scripting experiments.

Photopia unceremoniously dumped the idea of a 'puzzle-based' narrative in favour of what it called a 'story-based' narrative, a linear progression (linear in terms of interactivity, not time) from beginning to end that throws seemingly random fragments of a story at the player, which slowly start to weave into one another and create a cohesive pattern as the game progresses. The effect is akin to a movie like 21 Grams, which chops its linear narrative into fragments that slowly start to coalesce.

The debate centred on the fact that Photopia required very little from the player in terms of actual 'gameplay'. There were no 'puzzles', some reviewers said, and the experience was akin to watching a long cutscene (Metal Gear Solid comes to mind) and occasionally pressing a key to move it along. Most of the sequences, like the one in the beginning of the game, are timed to two or three responses before moving on, irrespective of what they might be.

Commentators seemed to regard Photopia as almost dispensing with the need for the gamer. It had a story to tell, and that was that. -- Krish Raghav, Express Buzz

I have assigned Photopia in the past when I teach interactive fiction, though lately I have shifted away from assigning specific texts for class discussion, and more towards asking students to use the IFDB to research games they actually want to play.  After students have tried programming in I7, and they have a better sense of the medium, I assign a few texts for the class to discuss.

This past year, about half of the students in my introductory new media course chose to create text adventure games rather than make web pages.  In the advanced class, some students chose an IF project because they were intimidated by Flash, which is not exactly the best reason, but which does show that text-adventure gaming is an appealing way to introduce programming skills to word-centric English majors.  (These days, Flash is such an important part of new media production that I will very likely require students to take the Flash course offered by the art department, so that they won't be working in Flash for the first time when they take "New Media Projects.")    

I teach journalism at a very small school, where staff members are also likely to be involved in the student activities on which the paper is supposed to report. I'm keeping my eye out for real-world conflicts of interest, so that my student-journalists can be informed when they make their own ethical decisions.

The union representing Los Angeles police officers is pressuring the owner of San Diego's main newspaper to change the paper's editorial stance on labor issues or to fire its editorial writers.

The  feud is rooted in the recent purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune by Platinum Equity, a private Beverly Hills firm.

Platinum relies on a $30-million investment from the pension fund of Los Angeles police officers and fire fighters, along with large sums from other public-employee pension systems around the state, to help fund its acquisitions of companies. As League President Paul M. Weber views it, that makes the League part owner in the flagging Tribune and League officials are none to happy with the paper's consistent position that San Diego lawmakers should cut back on salaries and benefits for public employees in order to help close gaping budget deficits. -- Joel Rubin

Connect the dots, and you can see the potential problem. The owner has already put the editors and the police union in an awkward position. The next time the paper uncovers a rumor of police misconduct, and the paper determines the rumor is unfounded, it will look like paper is soft-pedaling the bad news in order to appease the new owners.

If you're a fan of lifehacking, you'll already be familiar with some of these issues. I'm blogging this because it's a good example of doing justice to an opposing view, giving a good presentation of the strongest objections to multitasking. 

If the pundits clogging my RSS reader can be trusted (the ones I check up on occasionally when I don't have any new e-mail), our attention crisis is already chewing its hyperactive way through the very foundations of Western civilization. Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the "dumbest generation" is leading us into a "dark age" of bookless "power browsing." Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we've all become mentally obese. Formerly well-rounded adults are forced to MacGyver worldviews out of telegraphic blog posts, bits of YouTube videos, and the first nine words of Times editorials. Schoolkids spread their attention across 30 different programs at once and interact with each other mainly as sweatless avatars. (One recent study found that American teenagers spend an average of 6.5 hours a day focused on the electronic world, which strikes me as a little low; in South Korea, the most wired nation on earth, young adults have actually died from exhaustion after multiday online-gaming marathons.) We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane. (Shakespeare: "poverty hath distracted her.")

This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates' famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called "writing." (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It's too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles--no trivial matter--are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt. -- Sam Anderson

This essay clearly identifies a thesis, in the paragraphs I've quoted above. But then it spends a long section arguing precisely the opposite of the thesis.

My freshmen are often so used to getting their academic information through bulleted lists and bold keywords, so that they skim for the main ideas and only read the connecting text if they can't instantly get the gist of the page.  But the traditional essay requires readers to pay attention to a chain of ideas, leading from an opening question, through all the potential objections, to a conclsuion. Students who aren't familiar with this structure will often quote from the "con" part of an essay, mistakenly attributing to author A an idea that author A has cited only in order to tear it town.

I remember, as a high school sophomore, that some of my classmates were horrified by "A Modest Proposal," because they read it at the surface level, and didn't grasp the irony. (They also apparently didn't read the introductory summary or the discussion questions, but that's another issue.)

This article does a good job reminding us how the world of media has changed in the past few decades.

The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we're in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what's happening to us now: today's media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It's a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds - completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it's going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past. -- Steven Berlin Johnson

New media researcher and capital-letter-avoider dana boyd recently answered questions about teens and their use of social media. These folks will be in college soon, so it makes sense for us to learn about their media habits.

@mirroredpool: What borders to teens place of social networking sites and education? How would they react to using an SNS to do class work?

@annejonas: i'm curious if they want schools involved in social networks or if they like it as a social space outside the realm of formal edu.

This is messy. Many teens have ZERO interest in interacting with teachers on social network sites, but there are also quite a few who are interested in interacting with SOME teachers there. Still, this is primarily a social space and their interactions with teachers are primarily to get more general advice and help. In some ways, its biggest asset in the classroom is the way in which its not a classroom tool and not loaded this way. Given that teens don't Friend all of their classmates, there are major issues in terms of using this for groupwork because of boundary issues.

@shcdean: What future do they see for FB or Twitter.

They don't use Twitter. When asked, teens always say that they'll use their preferred social network site (or social media service) FOREVER as a sign of their passion for it now. If they expect that they'll "grow out of it", it's a sign that the service is waning among that group at this very moment. So they're not a good predictor of their own future usage.

Shackle yourself to your work, and set the timer.


Thanks for the link, Josh.

A touching tribute in images and words. Phillip Toledano

I recently submitted a conference proposal on cloud computing.

Google said in a blog post the outage came down to a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center. The search giant described the situation by using the analogy of a large number of airplanes being rerouted through one airport that was not equipped for a massive influx of traffic. But in Google's case, it wasn't airplanes looking for a place to land; it was cloud-based data trying to stay up in the sky. -- PC World

Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month.

One of the more unusual plays in this year's Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the creators of Adventure Quest have been kind enough to provide a brief "walk-through" that captures the genre's peculiar narrative conventions.

You are standing in the market square of the town of Despairington. There are several buildings here, including the potter's shop, the pie factory and the apothecary. Each appears to have been long abandoned. (Their owners were presumably among the many townspeople who joined the Octopus Cult last winter and killed themselves by drinking poisoned ink.) A large boomerang rests on a nearby crate of mangos.

You are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a magnifying glass.

The marketing text is a parody, not a tribute. The text on the site reads like a text adventure, but it plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel with a single choice on each page.  The color scheme is flat enough. (Where does the color cyan exist, except in the 16 color home computer palette?) But the pixels are much too small. The detail on the roof is far too fine. 

Both the words and images are off-base just enough to make me doubt that the play itself will be anything more than a silly pastiche. Still, I found the site amusing. via

Okay, I'm officially lame. I teared up a few days ago during Star Trek, and tonight I teared up during this song from The Magic Treehouse: The Musical, based on a series of easy-reader books by Mary Pope Osbourne. The touring show was in my town tonight; we had front-row seats. The song is a perky, sappy tribute to brotherly and sisterly love, and the lyrics perfectly describe my own kids.

Jack: You're so brave!
Annie: You're so smart!
Jack: You make me laugh!
Annie: I love your heart!
[...]
Annie: I'm the arrow, you're the bow.
Jack: I'm the tic-tac, you're the toe!
Annie: You're the engine.
Jack: You're the steam.
Annie: I'm the peaches!
Jack: I'm the cream!
Both: What would I do without you?

A tear actually slid down my cheek after the "steam" line, and I reached for my wife's hand so she could feel it.

I am so lame...

Now I'm going to listen to this song again.

The following search on our campus -- for a published mystery author qualified to teach creative writing -- has been extended, and will continue until filled. Candidates interested in this position should apply immediately, as we will be considering applicants over the summer. -- Mike Arnzen

A budding artist learns his real skill is not artistry, but the ability to critique. I'm blogging this for the next time I introduce iteration as an important cognitive skill -- something that requires dedication, time, and a willingness to take risks in order to learn from failures (something that doesn't often fit will with millennials who fear losing points for not "getting the right answer" on the first try).

Drawing what you actually see--that is, drawing the plastic bull that's in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that's in your head--is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

While other children were satisfied with their loosely connected conglomerations of orbs and sticks, I saw something that bore little resemblance to its subject. And so, in my own work, I attempted to make the necessary corrections. When that failed, as it inevitably did, I started over. Again and again and again, each time making minor improvements, but all the while still seeing all the many ways that I had failed to persuade my body to produce the correct line or apply the appropriate coloring. -- John Siracusa, Ars Technica

This reminds me of what Robert Heinlein says about being a writer. Paraphrasing: anyone can become a writer, but what's really hard is staying a writer.

The first time I taught a lit crit class at Seton Hill, students felt overwhelmed by the almost-weekly paper assignments. It wasn't fair, some of them said, that I graded them on the essays they wrote before the class discussions, since it was often only after the class discussions that they understood the topic they wrote the essays about.  This time around, I made an extra effort to front-load the idea that the essays are designed to improve the quality of the discussions. If everybody showed up at the discussions without having first tried to write a paper about reader-response theory or semiotics or formalism, then the discussions would not be very useful. 

I did give the students a chance to re-do one of their ten critical theory exercises, and in general the exercises were going so well that I relaxed a little and let the students write a creative hypertext or a letter to the editor if they wanted to. But the rigor of doing a short paper every week, and committing their initial ideas to paper, before showing up in class, really helped develop their critical thinking skills.  By the last week of classes, after I returned their rough drafts of their term papers, I got confident, satisfied smiles from the class.  They knew what they had to do, and they knew they could do it.  It was very rewarding.

That kind of confidence comes only with practice.

That's the space shuttle orbiter Atlantis, with the Hubble Space Telescope, in front of the sun. Wow!

It's difficult to imagine a more epic scene, but this photo has modest origins: amateur Astronomer Thierry Legault shot it with nothing but his own telescope, a solar prism and a Canon 5D Mk II. -- Gizmodo

High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper - for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong when you do something notable and spelling it correctly when you are seen as dishonorable. And it is the birthright of every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper. As love-hate relationships go, this is a pretty intricate one. An exchange of public money would pull both sides from their comfort zone and prove unacceptable to all.

But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued.-- David Simon, Hearing on the Future of Journalism, US Senate

How many of you make a point by asking how many people in the room already know it, and then praising everyone who does?

This fall, I'll be teaching my most content-heavy course -- "News Writing."   I have to teach a lot of vocabulary, along with research, interviewing, revision, and copyediting skills, in addition to crash courses in civics, criminology, psychology, and statistics.   

It's too early to think about what gets to stay in the syllabus and what has to go in order to make room for the "Print Journalism Meltdown of 2009" unit.  But I'm reflecting on ways to make the obligatory infodumps more palatable to 21st century students.

[C]ourse-management software has become a new kind of campus building--a virtual one where online classes are held and new kinds of "hybrid" courses take place. The unsettled question is who controls what these classrooms look like and how stable their foundations are.

Colleges don't want to just buy these online classrooms out of a catalog. They want to feel like partners in the design process.

Angel apparently got that part right, offering customers unusual responsiveness and access to much of its source code.

Blackboard, meanwhile, has developed a reputation for doing things its way, gobbling up competitors (this is its third acquisition of a competing course-management system) and suing rivals (it has filed multiple patent-infringement lawsuits against one competitor). That might make good business sense, but it casts the company as a hostile force in higher education. -- Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education

I'm not that happy with the course management system (CMS) product that we currently use, so I'm thrilled that our new IT director is a fan of open-source software. Here's hoping we will be Moodling soon.

Nowadays, layout editors can just expand the size of a photo or cheat the typesize to make a story fill a gap. But in the days before such digital magic, newspaper editors needed a steady supply of filler stories -- short items, just long enough to plug gaps of a few inches at the bottom of a page. The words "bus" and "plunge" both fit nicely in a one-column headline, and created a subculture of sorts among journalists.

"If a bus fell anywhere, they would cut that story from the wire and send it to the copy desk and put it in the paper, whereas earlier perhaps they wouldn't have," Siegal says. It was no longer a matter of how badly shorts were needed. "They became newsworthy in and of their own right because it was amusing to get the expression 'bus plunge' into the paper as often as possible."

Not all bus plunges were judged equal by the foreign desk, according to Siegal. "It was better when buses plunged in countries with short names," he says. "A bus plunge in Peru was infinitely easier to deal with than a bus plunge in Argentina or Paraguay."

Of course, it's callous to make light of anybody's tragic death. But by the gallows-humor standards of journalism, competing to publish bus-plunge shorts was fairly benign.

"It was more self-parody than anything else," Siegal says. "It was a very low-key, harmless parody of the stilted language characteristic of tightly formatted headlines." -- Jack Shafer, Slate

I'm blogging this because I'm amused... I had certainly noticed "bus plunge" stories, but it never occurred to me that the stories are a minimalist art form, inspired by the gallows humor of journalists. 

My favorite journalism anecdote is still the one about reporters routinely inventing a detail about a cat surviving a shipwreck.

Last night, I went to see the new Star Trek movie with a member of the computer science faculty. A math professor was hoping to come, but had a change of plans. The previews suggested it would be a bit intense for me to take the kids to see it, but now that I've seen the show, I think it will be OK.  You have to know your kids though -- the opening sequence pushes some buttons that I didn't expect to have pushed in action film, and the combination of tug-at-the-heartstrings and pulse-pounding action in the opening few minutes might be a bit overwhelming.

I haven't shown my kids the whole run of classic Trek, mostly because I'd rather do other things with them besides watch TV. 

They do know a handful of the best episodes -- the ones that are really worth taking time to see (such as The Doomsday Machine and The Trouble with Tribbles). They haven't seen any of the later incarnations of the show, nor any of the movies.  What with all my wife's old videotapes of Dr. Who, and the complete run of Babylon 5 (dutifully taped by my sister and mailed to us in batches), we already have a big enough backlog of good TV that we're not watching at the moment.

As for the remake... I don't mind at all that they redesigned the sets and models to look futuristic to a 21st-century audience. Communicators and phasers are still cool.  As if to atone for the snail-paced original Trek movie (thirty years ago... 1979), there were no talky briefing room scenes -- they handled all the exposition during the action sequences, and the turbolift is still a great location for two characters to have a private conversation.  All the various characters have been tweaked just a bit, so that we recognize their iconic nature, but also see them change.  The movie has more of an ensemble feel, which is something The Next Generation developed well.

My geek-boy katra can't quite grasp what the producer was thinking when he put Delta Vega that close to Vulcan.  The engine room set was a cop-out. I know they filmed it in a brewery, but I wonder just how much money they spent on the little tribute to Agustus Gloop... was it some elaborate reference to certain characters being wet behind the ears?

Speaking of cop... where have I heard the thrumming sound made by the flying motorcycle?  It feels like an old friend, but I can't place it. Blade Runner?

The amount of lens flare, especially in the bridge scenes, was noticeably distracting. I think the goal was to tie the bridge scenes in with the CGI sequences, since the space shots also featured lots of animated lens flare. The closing credits even features an elaborate CGI sequence that renders dust or some other kind of imperfections on the camera lens. But I found that whole concept -- the shaky camera cinema verite conceit -- bothersome. The original series used handheld cameras to occasional good effect... would occasionally march into the turbolift behind Kirk, or the camera would do a 360 around Spock while he is doing a mind-meld.  It used to be far too expensive to do special effects on a moving image -- that's why the actors in the original series stood still while the transporter beam dissolved them away.

When there's reason, within the story, to watch hand-held footage -- someone's recording from a hand-held tricorder, for instance -- then I'd say, bring on the shakies. But surely in the future there will be digital stabilizer. But when I see lens flare on a CGI shot, it hurts my ability to enjoy the scene, because I know the producers aren't trying to make me feel like I'm there, floating in space with a God's eye view of the battle. Instead, they're trying to make me feel like I'm watching documentary footage.

I completely understand the need to dirty down the models and make the props and sets more functional, but I found it distracting to be reminded so often that I'm watching a movie... I just want a direct sensory infusion of space opera goodness... I was annoyed by the amount of effort the producers put into simulating the constraints of modern movie cameras.  When the shaky camera trend has run its course, its overuse in this movie will make this Star Trek outing look dated.

Having picked my nits, I will say that there were a couple of beauty shots of the new Enterprise, some surprising revelations about character backstory (now we know why Spock never took the Kobayashi Maru test), and a bold and brash feel that was just thrilling to watch.

Several of my students created videos for class projects. 

EL200 Jessie Krehlik: Self Defense Videos (with Aero Windwalker)



Jessie Farine: Suis La Lune Review




Rebecca Marrie created this YouTube Channel, which I hope we can use to sort all the SHU student projects I hear about in the future.
I have one independent study project to evaluate before I'm really finished, so I should stop before I track down the other videos students have submitted in recent classes.

It's the first time I've given a final exam in a while. I usually mark final projects or final papers, which I've seen in numerous draft forms for the past month, so all I really need to do is read the student's final reflection, after all the hard work is over. But in a large-ish literature class (large by Seton Hill standards -- about 30), I gave a final exam in order to assess student familiarity with the works on the syllabus. I've already marked the identification questions and the short answer questions, but my brain has hit a brick wall as I mark the long essay questions.  So I hit the internet for a web surfing break, and found I solace in knowing I am not alone.

I was chatting to a business teacher who showed me a test generating program for business. He clicks a few categories - chapters and concepts covered, number of questions desired - and hits a button. The multiple choice test instantly appears on his screen. He hits print, and his test is written. He will photocopy it and give it to his students along with a form that the students use to select their choice of answer. He will turn in those forms to an exam office that will scan the form and give him a print out of student marks. His time on task? About two minutes.

I on the other hand will take two hours to write a test that is tailored to what I taught in English, and then spend about twenty to thirty hours marking it.  -- Steve Wise

I presume Steve wrote it, since it's in the first person and there's a photo of a man on the page. But the blog is credited to Steve and Pam Wise.

I still have revised final papers to mark in three more classes, but since I've seen drafts of all those papers before, the marking should go fairly quickly.

Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more...

This paper riffs on one of the most popular handouts on my website -- Short Stories: 10 Tips for Novice Creative Writers (originally written by one of my technical writing students in 2002, though I continue to tweak it), and applies it to mathematics.

[B]efore anyone can understand a piece of mathematics, they must first become interested in it. So, for a mathematician who wants to fully develop a piece of mathematics, discovery and proof are only the first steps on a longer road. The next step is getting people interested.

Unfortunately, mathematicians are not trained in this art. Indeed, their writing is famous for being "dry". There are exceptions, and these exceptions are worth studying. But it also makes sense to look to people whose whole business is getting people interested: story-tellers.

Everyone enjoys a good story. We have been telling and listening to stories for untold millennia. Stories are one of our basic ways of understanding the world. I believe that when we read a piece of mathematics, part of us is reading it as a highly refined and sublimated sort of story, with characters and a plot, conflict and resolution.

If this is true, maybe we should consider some tips for short story writers, and see how they can be applied -- in transmuted form -- to the writing of mathematics. These tips may sound a bit crass to mathematicians, or even readers of "serious" fiction. But they go straight to the heart of what gets people interested, and what keeps them interested, in a piece of writing. -- John C Baez (PDF | HTML by Google)

The cuteness of a tribble, the temper of a mugatu, and the ham of a Shatner.

I know that my bridge playset has long since gone to the big warp core in the sky, and I can't seem to find the shoebox where I kept my original Star Trek action figures from the 70s.  

Even as a kid, I remember being frustrated that the playset didn't really look all that much like the bridge, though the captain's chair is a reasonable replica. Those little stools never did much for me -- the action figures kept falling off them, so I replaced them with blocks from my beloved Alpha Truck (which did double duty as the shuttlecraft).

Anyway...

The Star Trek Bridge playset was, hands down, the best toy I owned as a child. I played with it for approximately 10,000 hours. Especially the whirly-twirly transporter cubicle. I loved the psychedelic cardboard viewscreens, the tippy chairs and furniture, the stick-on UI for same that was as inscrutable and ridiculous as the authentic show computers. This toy had the magic, a vinyl-covered, detailed, configurable kind of magic that made you want to play with it for hours and hours on end. -- Cory Doctorow

A masterful spoof of one of my favorite literary works, skewering a reference book I spent a lot of time with in my formative years..

'Tis hard to say, which promises more Loot:
Writing, or Telling others how to do't. -- Geoff Nunberg

A serendipitous click on a link brought me to this striking example of storytelling economy in a news story. 

"Three flower cars, wow!" said a pilgrim from Wisconsin who was just about to chomp down on a chocolate cannoli from Mike's Pastry yesterday morning.

The cheesehead was momentarily spellbound by the stately procession of black Cadillacs gliding toward him up Hanover Street, coming to rest at the venerable gates of St. Leonard's Church.

"Wonder who that is?" the tourist said to his wife.

Standing within earshot was a slight gentleman wrapped in a tailored black suit, black tie, black sunglasses and a perfectly coiffed head of white hair that seemed to glow in the sun.

The dapper gent studied the rube for a moment, then made his way across Hanover Street, where he began kissing the family and friends of Donato "Danny" Angiulo, a capo regime in brother Jerry's mob franchise, who expired Sunday night at the ripe age of 86. -- Peter Gelzinis

A big part of my work as a freshman writing instructor seems to be convincing students that I really do mean it when I explain that Googling to "find quotes" to support an opinion you've already committed to paper is not the same thing as doing academic research with peer-reviewed sources.  I also find that newbie journalism students have to be reminded that it's not a news article if you refer to what "some people may say".

Several years ago, it was common for bloggers to crow about catching lazy reporters, often from local TV news, who had fallen for obvious hoaxes. In 2002-2003, for instance, I blogged about suspicious stories involving bananas dying out, blondes dying out, and excursions to hunt naked women with paintball guns. Anyone with the slightest experience using the internet to research should have smelled a rat.

A rat like this guy...

My plan was without doubt simple, and maybe it was great as well. The death of the French composer Maurice Jarre was reported in true Sky News fashion in the very early hours of March 30th.

I immediately grabbed my laptop, went to Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page, clicked the edit button on screen and proceeded to lay the trap for my unsuspecting prey, the journalists.

"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," I wrote into the Wikipedia entry. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear."

This was a totally fake quote and neither Maurice Jarre, nor anyone else, has ever been on record as uttering these words.

[...]

Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre's death. I was shocked that highly respected newspapers would use material from Wikipedia without first sourcing and referencing it properly. -- Shane Fitzgerald

I dislike the term "digital native."

I mean no offense to Marc Prensky, who popularized it (along with its counterpart, "digital immigrant"), but the term is laden with colonial baggage, though as a humanities person I'm perhaps hypersensitive to that sort of thing.  More important, the term also misses an important point. Today's technologically savvy young people were born analog.

Apple's iPod completely changed the music industry; the iPhone all but eliminated a whole class of handheld computers, and Amazon's Kindle seems likely to have a similar effect on the publishing industry. While no single vendor has marketed a product that comes close to the full pontential memex, the emerging semantic web -- which attempts to learn from the RSS feeds, social bookmarking rankings, and reputation management tools -- is a more recent technological effort to magnify our collective cognitive powers. Anyone who uses the web on a regular basis should thank the creators of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and hypertext in general, because they were all far more interested in making it easy for information to spread, than they were in figuring out how to lock it down and charge a toll for every bit.

Internet service providers are making a steady income by charging to deliver the content that The Washington Post and CNN are putting online for free.  (I'm stunned that people will gladly pay 20 cents to send a text message, and another 20 cents to read a reply, but they won't pay anything at all to read a whole newspaper.)

In its early years, Google courted the goodwill of the online community with its "Don't Be Evil" policy.

In recent years, Google's reach has expanded into e-mail, street-level photo-enhanced maps, a mobile phone system, and its purchase of Blogger, YouTube, and the online advertising service DoubleClick. Those who are exceptionally trusting, or have nothing at all to hide, can opt to permit Google to archive their web surfing history and even the entire contents of their hard drives.

The company is now aggressively courting universities with a free suite of e-mail, calendar, and document tools, pushing user content off of university servers and into a Google-controlled cloud. In 2008, the end user license agreement (EULA) for Google's web browser required users to grant Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license" to archive, remix, and distribute any and all content that users create or transmit using the software.

In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky writes, "To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others... freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly" (171).

To Google's credit, the company responded promptly and sensibly to the public outcry. I'm not ready to don a tinfoil hat yet, but the presence of such language in a shipped product raises serious questions.

Vannevar Bush's hypothetical memex was an analog vision of how technology might help academics cope with the accelerating pace of scholarly publication. He imagined what we might call a photocopier on steroids, manipulating documents at the page level, but also capable of storing annotations and trading them with other researchers, thereby permitting users to collaborate in a kind of proto sneakernet cloud.

After investing a great deal of time and effort in learning a new way of relating to the world, kids learn to be digital. "This Little PIggy" helps familiarize babies with their own digits, and ABC-123 further atomizes the world, helping kids move from putting things into their mouths in order to learn about the world, to using language in order formulate questions, and abstracting knowledge from the answers. (I think my daughter was four before she realized that nobody else's fourth little piggy "wrote on her weblog.")

I recall deciding not to blog about an unpublished study that reported a correlation between lower grades and higher Facebook usage, though I did make a mental note of how some of the coverage was confusing correlation with causation.

A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days. However, the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not been published, or even considered for publication. This paper attempts to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14- to 22-year-olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14-23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non-users. -- Pasek et al., First Monday

While hiding from the stack of final papers, I took a break in the cafeteria. Some of my colleagues were talking about the new Star Trek movie, and the conversation shifted to what's on TV now.

My daily household duties include putting the kids to bed. My wife doesn't really do mornings, and homeschooling doesn't start until she gets up, so the kids tend to stay up late.  So I spend every prime time reading bedtime stories and supervising the brushing of teeth and the donning of pajamas.

I should point out that today's TV has evolved in order to compete with video games and the internet... Lost and Battlestar Galactica and ER all engage brain cells in a way that assumes the viewer is intelligent, and does not need laugh tracks or "waah-waah-waah-waaaah" trombone noises in order to respond emotionally to a complex story with many dramatic twists and turns. So I'm not ranting about the poor quality of TV.

I'm sure that, if we had cable, I would find something worth watching. But that's precisely the reason I don't want cable. Ever. I haven't really followed a TV show since Babylon 5.  I've never seen an episode of Lost or the new Battlestar Galactica, though I have read online summaries of the plot, and I can understand the draw of those shows. 

When I'm free for the evening, rather than make the next two hours disappear into the boob tube black hole, I'd much rather make a Blender3D animation and upload it to YouTube, or convert a literary work I've never read before into an audio file so that I can listen to it during tomorrow's commute, or edit a Wikipedia page, or update my blog, or just noodle around in my server logs and figure out why I suddenly got that burst of traffic from Ireland.

I'd rather DO something.

I recently came across a talk by Clay Shirkey, who uses the term "cognitiive surplus" to describe the creative potential that we're not using when we sit and watch consumable TV.

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years." -- Clay Shirky

The grammar offered an irresistible linguistic challenge. Klingon is difficult but not impossible, weird yet totally believable. Anyone can put on a pair of pointed ears or memorize some lines of dialogue, but learning to speak Klingon requires genuine hard work.

Most languages created for fictional worlds involve simple vocabulary substitutions, such as moodge for man in A Clockwork Orange, or meaningless streams of noise, like the high-pitched jabbering of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Klingon is something altogether different. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. -- Arika Okrent, Slate

I'm sitting in the back of a meeting where the speaker has spent 40 minutes tracking down a technical glitch interrupting his presentation. Happily, the room has wireless access...

Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (aka Rogue), created in the early 1980s[1] by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, is an intriguing game for many reasons. For one, it's still being actively played, ported, enhanced, and forked[2] two decades later -- a fact that challenges its description as just a "vintage" or "retro" game. Advertisement It's also among a scant handful of games that have achieved worldwide recognition despite originating on UNIX[3], a platform better suited for science and industry than computer games.-- Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice

The U.S. government could provide tax breaks for newspapers or allow them to operate as nonprofits to help the struggling business survive, Sen. John Kerry said Wednesday. -- Reuters

A great little indie game by Daniel Benmergui. The game is also a poem.

Today I Die

His ear was severed by a sword wielded by his friend, the painter, Paul Gauguin, in a drunken row over a woman called Rachel and the true nature of art. Gauguin lied about the incident and fled, two German art historians now believe. Van Gogh covered up to protect his friend and was placed in a mental institution.

[...]

Nina Zimmer, curator of a large Van Gogh exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Basle until September, is unconvinced. "Maybe they are right," she said. "But almost any theory is plausible because there are so few established facts." -- John Lichfield

Wonderfully technical discussion of interactive fiction programming issues, presented by Andrew Plotkin at Penguicon 7.  Coding is art, art is code.

As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming language -- a powerful and peculiar one.

Inform 7 gets a lot of attention for its English-like syntax. I'm not going to talk about the natural-language aspects of I7. I'm going to talk about the underlying programming model, the system of rules and rulebooks. That's less attention-grabbing than the flashy syntax; but, in my opinion, it's equally radical. And perhaps a more important development, in the long run.

To be fair, I also like talking about the rule-based programming model because I contributed some of its ideas, back when I7 was first taking shape. I'm not claiming authorship here, mind you. I got into a long and digressive email conversation with Graham Nelson and Emily Short, in which we all threw ideas around, and then Graham went ahead and spent six years developing his ideas. I shoved mine on the shelf.

This means that I will talk about I7 for a while, and then break into a wild flight of "but this is how I think it should be done!" And then finish up with all the reasons I haven't made it work yet. Such is a hacker's life.

"We're going to become a 24-hour, local news-gathering media company so we can more effectively gather content and distribute it among our different platforms: print, online and mobile," [Baltimore Sun] spokeswoman Renee Mutchnik said. -- Washington Times

Reporters are reporting on how other news organizations are reacting to changes in the field of journalism. It's an interesting time to be a journalism professor and student media adviser.  We've got a dedicated staff for the print newspaper, but for the past few years the last few online editors have worked mostly alone, shoveling the print version of the paper into a web template. We can do better, but to do so, we'll need a staff that thinks of the news first, and then thinks of the best way to tell the story -- in print or online.

Unicorns are much more fun when they move.

It took about two minutes for my daughter to do the drawing, about an hour and a half to make the model (while my daughter played at my feet), and another two hours to make the animation (long after she was in bed).

Yes, that's right, I've quit Facebook. After being a member for over three years--since its expansion to all colleges and universities in September 2005--I decided to deactivate my account. Why would I do such a thing? Hmph, funny you should ask. --Karissa Kilgore

When I finally got around to joining Facebook about a year ago, a message from Karissa was waiting there for me -- she had invited me to join over a year before that.

I'm not a particular fan of Facebook, but I have enjoyed getting back in touch with friends from high school, and it's a moderately useful way to stay informed about people I've met at conferences. But I don't really want to put much effort into creating content that strangers (the owners of Facebook) own.

Heard Any Good Books.mp3 (5min, 1MB)
When pneumonia wiped me out for about two months in the fall of 2007, for several weeks I could do little more than lie on the futon and worry about the work I was missing.  During the first week or so, when I still imagined it was just the flu and figured I'd be back on my feet soon, I worried about falling behind in my reading. 

I was slated to teach Jane Eyre, which I hadn't read since I was an undergraduate, and I could barely hold a book. Fortunately, I could just lie there and listen to a patient (if bland) computer voice reading whatever I asked it to read. 

During one of my lucid phases, I downloaded the Project Gutenberg edition of Jane Eyre, and converted it into an MP3 with the text-to-speech program TextAloud.   (The default voices that come with the program are tolerable, but I sprang for some professional voices that are worth the extra money -- much better than blustering bots who blurt "Stop the humanoids! Stop the intruders! The humanoids must not escape!") The whole thing cost about $55.

I pushed the whole Jane Eyre text through the program, resulting in a single file that probably took 11 hours to play.  It was rather tedious having to rewind to the last thing I remembered before I fell asleep and/or the batteries died. 

Since then, I've learned a few things about listening to computer-generated audiobooks.

This article from NCTE comes at a good time for me, since I'm scheduled to teach a "Writing about Literature" class in the fall. It's a PDF (booo!).

Of all types of writing, writing about literature may seem the least practical. Who apart from scholars and English majors analyzes poetry after the age of 18? Even book reviewers don't write the kinds of essays commonly assigned in school. Why do teachers devote so much effort to developing an arcane skill? Because writing about literature disciplines the mind. It challenges students to look closely into what they read and express clearly and powerfully what they find there. Meeting this challenge entails more than identifying correct answers to teachers' questions. It requires deep reading and analytical thinking--skills that will serve students well whatever their futures may hold. -- Carol Jago (136k PDF)