Jerz's Literacy Weblog tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009-01-15:/weblog//3 2009-11-05T15:03:12Z Movable Type Commercial 4.23-en 'Fakeosphere' latest Web trap for consumers tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11134 2009-11-05T15:00:32Z 2009-11-05T15:03:12Z Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry -... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry - and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago.

"I don't think people realize how big this has become, and how quickly," said Weintraub, adding that a popular top flog campaign can generate 10,000 daily sales. --MSNBC
I certainly realize it. Now that a lot of the conversations that used to take place on blogs are taking place on Twitter, I'm getting far more comments from spammers than from visitors. I'm glad to see someone's writing about this advertising trend.
]]> Hope or Hype on the Cloud tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11133 2009-11-05T11:02:36Z 2009-11-05T11:04:49Z At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud. Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud.

Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers does not necessarily mean it is moving in the right direction.

"I'm not sure why every conversation about cloud computing always has to do with 'When?' " Woo said. "Why aren't we asking, 'Why?' "

She cited recent Gmail outages and an anecdote from an organization she had advised who had said a cloud storage provider lost its data. "There are security risks, there are privacy risks -- where is that student data being stored? Where is that research data being stored? .... How is the private sector going to feel when when we can't guarantee that our research data our faculty are generating for them is safe?"

Dieckmann laid out the pro side first from an economic perspective, noting that economy has become a watchword as many IT departments seek to maintain a high level of service even as their budgets are pared down.
]]> Adobe is Bad for Open Government tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11132 2009-11-04T04:39:58Z 2009-11-04T04:42:06Z Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that's a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can't turn PDFs into XML.

Flash isn't off the hook either. Government has spent lots of time and money developing flash tools to allow citizens to view charts and graphs online, and while we're happy the government is interested in allowing citizens to do this, Government's primary method of disclosure should not be these visualizations, but rather publishing the APIs and datasets that allow citizens to make their own. Only after those things are completed to the fullest extent possible should government be working on its own visualizations. While Adobe may say in their open government whitepaper:

"Since the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology."

This is nonsense. --Sunlight Labs (via)
]]> I now pronounce you.... tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11131 2009-11-03T15:21:38Z 2009-11-03T15:25:43Z A man and a wife saw what happened and the man ran with the baby's mother to help her pick the child up from the ground, police said. CBS ChicagoI presume this was the level of detail in the police... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu A man and a wife saw what happened and the man ran with the baby's mother to help her pick the child up from the ground, police said. CBS Chicago
I presume this was the level of detail in the police report, so the journalist is just echoing what's in the report.  But "husband and wife" or "man and woman" would be more parallel. Given the context of this particular story, "two people" would also be fine.]]> Views: Kindle for the Academic tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11130 2009-11-03T14:28:13Z 2009-11-06T07:02:04Z The Kindle e-book reader frees academics from having to carry around a huge collection of chunks of matter, but flipping from main text to footnotes is awkward, and the highlighting tool doesn't replace the bracketing, underlining, and commenting that we... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu
In a few days, I expect to be the owner of a new Kindle DX (the full-page reader, designed for magazines and full-page PDF readings). I found the Kindle most useful when I was reading for pleasure.
I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them. --Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed

I hear students tell me that in some disciplines, individual textbooks cost $200. I don't think it's the Kindle that's done the alienating.

Update: MIke Arnzen invokes the Kindle in a good post on teaching creative writing in the digital age. His reflections parallel many of my own, as I contemplate my role as a teacher of journalism.

]]> Short Videos on Literature Papers tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11129 2009-11-02T23:19:02Z 2009-11-02T23:20:47Z http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/ Dictionary of Terms Allegory Metaphor Motifs Satire Subtext Symbols The Protagonist Themes How to Write a Paper 1: Get Psyched 2: The Thesis Statement 3: Organization 4: Proving you know what you're talking about 5: Your teacher is not... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/

Dictionary of Terms

Cover

How to Write a Paper

Cover

]]> Mickey Mouse comics drawn by concentration camp prisoner tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11128 2009-11-02T02:20:24Z 2009-11-02T02:22:20Z Avi sez, "'Mickey Mouse in Gurs' is a tragic 'comic' book made by Horst Rosenthal in 1942 while incarcerated at the Gurs internment camp in France. Rosenthal uses Mickey Mouse as a kind of subversive Virgil to guide us... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu


Avi sez, "'Mickey Mouse in Gurs' is a tragic 'comic' book made by Horst Rosenthal in 1942 while incarcerated at the Gurs internment camp in France. Rosenthal uses Mickey Mouse as a kind of subversive Virgil to guide us through the hellish experiences of the concentration camp. Horst Rosenthal was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942." --BoingBoing
]]> Commemorating the Holocaust tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11127 2009-11-02T01:39:11Z 2009-11-02T01:40:34Z A few of the many events scheduled in the Pittsburgh region."Of Faith and Kristallnacht," a panel discussion with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University; Sister Gemma del Duca, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University;... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu

"Of Faith and Kristallnacht," a panel discussion with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University; Sister Gemma del Duca, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University; and the Rev. Don Green, executive director of Christian Associates of Southwestern Pennsylvania; among others. 7 p.m., Wednesday, The Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Monroeville (412-421-1500).

"The Use of Comic Books in Teaching the Holocaust," a lecture by Beverly Harris-Schenz of the University of Pittsburgh German Department, on teaching the Holocaust to German students. 8 p.m., Thursday, Jewish Community Center (412-421-1500).

"Brundibar," a children's opera originally performed by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp, adapted by Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. Friday through next Sunday, CAPA Theater, Downtown (412-456-6666).

--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

]]> A Math Paradox: The Widening Gap Between High School and College Math tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11125 2009-11-01T14:01:58Z 2009-11-01T14:59:27Z My sixth-grader has scored very well on standardized tests for math, but he finds a blank page of math problems intimidating and boring. He spends hours -- literally hours -- wasting time at the kitchen table, not doing his long... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries and the last two bedtime stories we've finished have been kid-friendly biographies of Archimedes and Galen.

My son wants to be a scientist, but finds math boring. Clearly we have to do something about this!
Age-appropriate development and understanding of mathematical concepts does not advance at a rate fast enough to please test-obsessed lawmakers. But adults using test scores to reward or punish other adults are doing a disservice to the children they claim to be helping.

It does not matter the exact age that you learned to walk. What matters is that you learned to walk at a developmentally appropriate time. To do my job as a physicist I need to know matrix inversion. It didn't hurt my career that I learned that technique in college rather than in eighth grade. What mattered was that I understood enough about math when I got to college that I could take calculus. --Joseph Ganem, American Physical Society
One day, my wife put the book 10 Things All Future Mathematicians And Scientists Must Know: But Are Rarely Taught into the stack of books at my son's bedside. I glanced through the table of contents and got very excited.  The book mentions the Challenger disaster (managers ignored the engineers who warned that a low-temperature launch was risky), Dr. Snow's study of a cholera outbreak (he plotted deaths on a map and realized one water pump in the neighborhood was infected), and the principle of Occam's razor (which, in the absence of compelling evidence either way, favors the simple explanation over the complex).

Each chapter features a series of anecdotes that explain a big-picture concept (causation and correlation; bias; mistakes as an integral part of scientific inquiry; ethical experimentation), a cartoon mouse and cartoon Einstein comment on the stories, and the chapter ends with discussion questions that first require you to solve a word problem before you can weigh in with an opinion. This chapter is training young minds not to jump to conclusions, especially when all the information they need is right in front of them.

While I won't pretend this one book has solved all our math woes, I will say that at bedtime the other night, Peter was happily pondering this question:
A hot-air balloon can safely hold 1055 pounds. It currently has 6 people in it whose average weight is 128 pounds. In addition, it has a 4-foot by 6-foot metal floor that weights 8 pounds per square foot. How many 25-pound bags of sand can be safely placed in the balloon?
This question came at the end of a chapter that described the 2001 death of the up-and-coming singer Aaliyah. (A pilot initially said it was unsafe for her entourage and all their baggage to fly in a small plane; but the group refused to leave any people or any baggage behind. The pilot relented, the plane crashed soon after takeoff, and all nine people aboard were killed.) My son has a well-developed sense of morality, so he was pretty much furious at that pilot.  The emotion motivated him to answer the word problem number story.

I guided him through the process, of course, asking questions to make sure he remembered the various subtotals.

When my wife came past the door and saw that we were still up reading (and calculating), she ordered us to stop for the night.
]]> Cell Size and Scale tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11124 2009-10-31T14:23:03Z 2009-10-31T14:38:06Z Awesome Flash animation from the University of Utah, showing relative sizes from a coffee bean to a carbon atom.I wish it could also zoom out and show astronomical sizes, too, like this FSU slide show (not as smooth as the... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu relative sizes from a coffee bean to a carbon atom.

I wish it could also zoom out and show astronomical sizes, too, like this FSU slide show (not as smooth as the Utah one) or the famous Powers of Ten movie.

]]> Boo on HuffPo! Read more at: www.lame.css/fixed-location/link.html tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11123 2009-10-31T14:10:31Z 2009-10-31T14:17:06Z I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu
I had already included a link to the HuffPo. I had to spend extra time locating and removing this extra crap that appeared in my clipboard buffer.
<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>
I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.

The next time I think of driving traffic to The Huffington Post, I'll remember how their CSS trick messed up my layout, and I'll probably pass.
]]> As Goes Halloween, So Goes Childhood tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11122 2009-10-31T13:48:59Z 2009-10-31T14:03:35Z Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu
No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more.

Well, they did and dad was executed. That's Texas for you. Another boy died after he got into his uncle's heroin stash and relatives tried to make it look like he'd been killed by candy. And that's it.

Now look at how the fear that our nice, normal-seeming neighbors might actually be moppet-murdering psychopaths has turned the one kiddie independence day of the year into yet another excuse to micromanage childhood. --Lenore Skenazy, Huffington Post

Razor blades in apples! Poison in home-made cookies! Hospitals offer to X-ray your candy for you (while passing out brochures featuring smiling doctors in front of gleaming new equipment). In 2003, The Onion memorably spoofed the Halloween candy fear in "Generic Candy Corn Will Give You AIDS."

]]> $160,000 Per Stimulus Job? White House Calls That 'Calculator Abuse' tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11121 2009-10-31T01:45:50Z 2009-10-31T01:47:16Z These numbers are a bit sad.So let's see. Assuming their number is right -- 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu

So let's see. Assuming their number is right -- 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?

Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that "calculator abuse."

He said the cost per job was actually $92,000 -- but acknowledged that estimate is for the whole stimulus package as of the end of 2010. --Jake Tapper, ABC

]]> Landscape of open source games tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11120 2009-10-29T21:11:40Z 2009-10-31T14:06:06Z While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4,... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

]]> It's All (About) Fun and Games tag:jerz.setonhill.edu,2009:/weblog//3.11119 2009-10-29T19:41:54Z 2009-10-29T19:43:09Z Peter Mawhorter offers up a reading list on games:For anyone curious about what I've been reading, here's the list of what I've read to get an introduction to this area: "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without... Dennis G. Jerz http://jerz.setonhill.edu reading list on games:
For anyone curious about what I've been reading, here's the list of what I've read to get an introduction to this area:
  • "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story" by Nicole Lazzaro.
  • "GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games" by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth.
  • "An Experiment in Automatic Game Design" by Julian Togelius and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
  • A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

One other thing that I've not yet read but am interested in is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It's not targeted at games, and in fact looks at fun from a psychological perspective, but it's cited by most of what I've read so far, and is the product of some very thorough research.

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