The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying time, emotion and reasoning as it bleeds through a wood pulp page is almost gone. We are going to lose something there, as we have already lost so much. --Jason Scott

A wonderful tribute to an enduring (and endearing) medium for capturing thoughts.

Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. "Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?" No. In our house, it'll always be: "Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?"

And I'll pass it, because I know exactly which piece he means. Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building.

"Dad, I'm building a roof for the medical pod, but I need a hinge-y bit to make it open up. You know, one of those four-er flat hinge-y bits." --Giles Turnbull, The Morning News

During a scheduled internet outage at work, I took a stack of papers from my "I'll probably never need this stuff but I need to go through it one more time before I chuck it" stack, and headed to the copy room, where there's a big recycling bin.

A colleague did a double-take as he walked by, then poked his head in the door.  "What are you doing?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Just throwing some stuff away."

He staggered.  "You!??"

I paused, in mid-chuck.  "The internet's down," I reminded him.

I really didn't think I was that bad... yes, the stack of "I'll throw this away as soon as I go through it one more time" got so high that I had to start a second stack next to it, but I've shaved off a good 18 inches in the past few days.

Anyway, this de-cluttering advice gives me a heart-warming goal:

Somewhere, keep an empty shelf.

A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and it has resulted in two groundbreaking papers published in the journals Ethology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, Glocker's series of experiments demonstrated that the act of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

"It's in the midbrain," Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, "which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli."

Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting. --Vanity Fair

To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child's play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.--Clay Shirky

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

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; 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

In several of my classes this week, I asked the students to estimate how many children had been poisoned by Halloween candy in the last 20 years.  Guesses ranged from one per year to one, but nobody guessed zero.

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."

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 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.

What can be learned from Fitzgerald's tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger--as if he were a grocer--a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money--at least until his wife Zelda's illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue. --William J. Quirk, The American Scholar

Our decision to homeschool began when we moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania with a five-year-old, and found there was no option for half-day kindergarten. We decided the move was stressful enough, and since school attendance wasn't mandatory until age 7, we decided to handle the afternoon naps, storytimes, and playing-with-blocks ourselves. As long as our kids continue to thrive, we'll continue to homeschool.

It's been more than two decades since Robert Fulghum published the oft-quoted (and oft-mocked) essay "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." The piece describes a bucolic world of wonder, a place for cookies and afternoon naps.

That world is long gone.

Earlier this year, the nonprofit advocacy group Alliance for Childhood, based just outside Washington, D.C., issued a report titled "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in Schools," drawing from nine new studies of public school classrooms around the country. Kindergartners in the studies spent four to six times as much of the school day being drilled in literacy and math as they did playing.

Recess has been truncated or has disappeared entirely in some schools, a double whammy, since children are stressed out by the demands and also deprived of their major stress reliever. The report cites study after study showing increasing stress, aggression, and other behavior problems, and even breakdowns.

Roz Brezenoff taught kindergarten in the Boston Public Schools for 36 years, retiring five years ago. "I have heard stories of kids having what they call psychotic breakdowns in kindergarten, kids who are distressed because they are 'kindergarten failures' because they can't read and they can't write," she says.

To be sure, many children thrive in an academic environment, and some parents seek out institutions like the Edward Brooke Charter School in Roslindale, which bills itself as "unapologetically college preparatory." Teachers there assign nightly homework in kindergarten. But many children that age are not ready for that kind of work, and all are being held to new standards. --Patti Hartigan, Boston.com

From Awful Library Books.

For more schadenfreud, see Cake Wrecks, Photoshop Disasters, and Fail Blog.

Great stuff from Mark Marino... not only is the content fascinating, but the blog-sized presentation, for discusison, of a fundamental theoretical concept is a great example of what the blogging medium can do for (and to) scholarship.

Item for today: =

In Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo's article on the history of computers, the note the moment at which = moves from equivalency to assignment. Here is a moment where mathematical notation and code separate on the basis of assignment, where it moves from a real that represents abstractions to a realm that controls memory locations.

For all intents and purposes
Algebra: x = 0; and computer code: x=0;
seem to mean the same thing.

However, on the most fundamental levels, they are not. The one establishes equivalence of signs. The other tells the computer to store the value 0 in the location represented by x.

In CCS, we have not just a mathematical system, for surely much of algorithms is mathematical. However, when critics talk about the materiality of these performative declarations in programming languages, they are talking about this latter notion of x=2.

Again, I don't want to rule out the possibility of critically analyzing mathematics. I just want to talk about this moment of the separation, where the computational instructions gain additional semantic meaning because there signs are not just representations, but commands with material ramifications. --Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies

I assigned book one of Maus: A Survivor's Tale to a "Writing About Literature" class, the designated writing-intensive course for our English majors.

The students discussed the abrupt ending, the use of ethnic stereotypes, and of course the comic book medium itself. One student's "Hearing through Yiddish... Seeing in Ink..." is particularly thoughtful.

About a third of the class went on to read book two, even though it wasn't on the syllabus; one student read the book aloud to her nine-year-old sister.

This weekend, Seton Hill is home to a conference sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.  I'm canceling all my classes during one day of the conference.

Don't hate on the TV media just because they helped the nation fall for the Balloon Boy Hoax. Back in the day, the print media were the obvious target.

On April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article in The New York Sun, chronicling how Monck Mason, leaving England for Paris drifted off course and had traveled across the Atlantic in three days, landing safely on Sullivan's Island near Charleston South Carolina, while riding an ``egg-shaped gas-filled balloon'', named the Victoria.

The story caused such a stir that an excited mob quickly gathered outside of the editorial offices of the Sun, hoping to land a copy of the historic edition. Not until two days later did the New York daily publish a correction, noting the story was pure fiction. The published correction read: ``We are inclined to believe the intelligence is erroneous.'' -- The Morning Delivery

Although I explained how I track and archive my students' Twitter activity, I didn't describe what they actually do on Twitter.

That's because I wasn't sure myself what they do.

I mean, of course I've reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn't considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter. That lack of reflection on my part echoes my initial guidelines to the students: my instructions were only that students should tweet several times a week at a minimum. I was deliberately vague about what they should tweet about. I didn't want overly specific guidelines to constrain what might be possible with Twitter. I wanted my students' Twitter use to evolve organically.

Now, six weeks into the semester, clear patterns are discernible and I can begin to analyze the value of Twitter as a pedagogical tool.

My most surprising find? Twitter is a snark valve. --Mark Sample

I'm not quite sure why anyone would be surprised to find snark on Twitter, but I think Sample's greater point is that snark requires some level of engagement. A student in my journalism class tweaked me for publishing an editorial a few years ago that didn't follow all the guidelines I provided to the class. The result was an opportunity for me to model an appropriate response to criticism, and I ended up revealing a bit more to the class about my reasons for writing that editorial.

BTW, I would not say the student was being snarky; his oppositional stance does, however, demonstrate the kind of energy that an opposing view brings to the discussion, which is part of the reason Sample recognizes and celebrates snark... not to encourage meanness and the knee-jerk rejection of nuance, but rather in the line Matt Barton's celebration of plagiarism as a means of forcing those of us who teach writing to confront our own limitations as authors and our need for power structures to wall of what counts as unacceptable stealing of ideas, so that we can continue the very different kind of stealing of ideas that we can masque with citations and present as acceptable academic discourse).

I've asked students in my "Writing about Literature" class to write a book review, in order to establish a connection to the literary world outside the classroom.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a brief handout, Writing a Book Review, which begins by explaining the difference between a "book report" (written for the teacher who assigned it, by a student who is trying to prove he or she read an assigned text) and a "book review" (written for an interested reader who has not yet read the book, and who is in fact trying to decide whether to invest the time and money).

I remember reading about a professor who recently stopped offering a course in how to write book reviews, on the grounds that there was no longer a real market for people to become professional reviewers. The name of the professor escapes me...

Anyway, after a half hour of sifting through sites that are trying to sell custom book reports to lazy students, I found a few how-tos that looked valuable.  So here you go, internet hive mind, take these links and add them to your algorithm.

Note on Jargon and Genre

If you are familiar with the fan following of any work, you might be used to talking with other people who share your background knowledge of the genre. Rather than 1) using obscure genre-specific terms without any explanation, or 2) interrupting your essay frequent interruptions, so that your reader knows the difference between a k'tharn (a sword used by the Plains nomads in the realm of the Unknown Times, with a core of cursed blood taken from a clan enemy's heart) and a ba'tti'kak (kind of like a small k'tharn, only way awesomer), reduce your reliance on jargon. (If the jargon is especially well-handled, or especially confusing, it's worthwhile to note that in a section on its own.)

How to Write a Book Review (Bill Asenjo)

• Hook the reader with your opening sentence. Set the tone of the review. Be familiar with the guidelines -- some editors want plot summaries; others don't. Some want you to say outright if you recommend a book, but not others.
  
• Review the book you read -- not the book you wish the author had written.
  
• If this is the best book you have ever read, say so -- and why. If it's merely another nice book, say so.
  
• Include information about the author-- reputation, qualifications, etc. -- anything relevant to the book and the author's authority.

Book Reviews (Colorado State University)
A review is a critical essay, a report and an analysis. Whether favorable or unfavorable in its assessment, it should seem authoritative. The reviewer's competence must be convincing and satisfying. As with any form of writing, the writer of a book review is convincing through thorough study and understanding of the material, and opinions supported by sound reasoning. (See this document on reviewing nonfiction, poetry, and other types of books, including travel and children's)

Slashdot Book Review Guidelines
(These are written for the benefit of highly technical readers who know a lot about the subject but may not have much experience writing for a general readership.)

The style tips apply pretty well to any informative writing.) 

• Avoid cliches (this book, which is better than sliced bread, cuts through the clutter to break down to the nuts and bolts of the real brass tacks at the heart of the matter). Write plainly.
• Go easy on the exclamation marks and glib hyperbole ("This book belongs on every developer's desk!" sounds too much like "You're not going to pay a lot for this muffler!")
• Be cautious in general about suprelatives [sic] and strong adjectives. Don't say a book is "unsurpassed" or "the best available" on a given topic without doing some actual comparisons to likely contenders. Some other words of praise or derision are often used with too little backing evidence: rather than just calling a book "excellent," "sloppy," "boring," etc., provide concrete examples from the text that demonstrate these qualities.
• Watch your background. Even if each one is sensible by itself, too many adjectives in a sentence (or a review) makes it look like adjective soup. In particular, intensifiers like "very" and "extremely" in most cases can be excised to everyone's benefit.
• Rhetorical questions are fine in small doses, but not large ones. More than a few rhetorical questions in a review can make it sound breathless and silly.

Yesterday in my journalism class, I asked everyone in the room to take out a coin and flip it twice, and raise their hand if it came up the same.  Then I asked the ones whose hands were up to flip again, and keep their hand up if the coin came up the same yet again.  As it happened, the ones with their hands still up were women, and they both had a big shoulder bag on the table right in front of them.  So I made up a headline about a connection found between women carrying handbags and magical coin-flipping abilities. 

Beware of activists bearing statistics, I told them.  The activist sincerely believes that the statistics prove the issue, and has only the best intentions in mind when he or she uses numbers to answer your questions.  If an activist walks into a room and finds fifteen scientific studies on a desk, and 12 of them are inconclusive, and two of them contain evidence that contradicts whatever's on the hand-painted protest sign he or she is carrying, and one study supports the cause, which study is the activist going to try to get into the journalist's hands?

The same goes for governments bearing statistics, corporations bearing statistics, and, for that matter, statisticians bearing statistics.

The public prefers its science news cut-and-dried. Over the past few years, I've tracked the global warming debate as it appears in the media. According to this BBC article, the hottest year on record was 1998, and temperatures have actually been dropping for 11 years.  The Pacific Ocean seems to be headed into a cool cycle, which will likely affect global temperatures.  Is this a brief natural cooling cycle, only temporarily offsetting the effects of carbon emissions, or was the rise in global temperatures that set off the "global warming" panic just the upswing of a natural temperature fluctuation? 

Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.

It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely. --BBC

I've blogged on this before.

Our students are transcendentalists, but they don't know it.

Speaking metaphorically, Thoreau writes "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."  Rather than treating children as wild creatures that needed to be tamed and civilized, Thoreau seesorder and meaning in nature, which is threatened, worn down, and buried by civilization.

At a time when being educated at Harvard meant reciting verbatim from establishment experts, Bronson Alcott in his Temple School taught through dialogue with his young pupils, asking them to express themselves by answering gently (but relentlessly) probing questions that nurtured their creative capacity, without shutting it down by training them to settle for answers. (Isn't that what we do in our seminars? Isn't that what part of the allure of being part of a small college, where you'll never be taught by a graduate student?)

I captured an example of Socratic dialogue a few weeks ago, when my 7-year-old daughter suddenly brought up free will and animism during an afternoon of birdhouse-building.  I didn't tell her what to think, I asked questions that encouraged her to think things through for herself.  (When she was six, she would sometimes stamp her foot and scream, "You can't punish me!  I haven't yet reached the age of reason!")

The last time I taught Thoreau's Walden, I noticed just how much time I was wasting matching my socks, so I bought a set of 12 identical black socks and a set of 12 identical white socks.  Presto change-o, I spend a lot less time sorting socks. 

I'm curious to find out what my students have to say about this book, since it's not a novel, or a biography. It's more than a collection of hastily composed, inter-connected and competing thoughts, but there's a level of spontaneity and emotional serendipity that might seem familiar to them.

This time around, I couldn't help but think of Mitch Maddox, who during the calendar year 2000 changed his name to DotComGuy, and retreated to a wired and webcammed home, where he lived the simple life cyberstyle, dispensing with all this tedious travel and engagement with the outdoors, and instead aiming to live by selling advertising space on his website, and ordering all that he needed online.  (Walter Kirn of Time wrote, "Like a switched-on Thoreau at a virtual Walden Pond, he devised the stunt to teach mankind that the age of e-commerce is here--and that it is good."  But the dot-com crash happened during the year 2000, and the bloom was off the cyber-rose by the time he finished his experiment in advertiser-supported and venture-capital-funded digital self-reliance.)

One last detail.  In 2004, Eric Eldred decided to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Walden by driving his Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond Reservation and handing out free copies of the book.  A state park supervisor ordered him to stop because he hadn't requested a permit, on the grounds that his free copies would interfere with sales from the gift shop. (Boston Globe)

Old joke... when's the best time to air a radio drama? 1937. 

Radio is still around, but the salary of TV personality Katie Couric " is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined." (so says Michael Massing).  If you knew nothing about the internet beyond what you learned about it from the TV news, you'd probably think it was full of child predators, weirdos, and clips of babies dancing to pop music.

But not too long ago, TV was the strange new medium that changed the way people spent their leisure time, and the way advertisers spent their marketing budgets, despite the wishes of the established old media titans.

Network TV lost vast amounts of money in its early years. It was only because the existing ­radio networks were willing to subsidize TV that it survived--leaving CBS and NBC at the top of the heap in the '50s and '60s, just as they had been in the '30s and '40s. The old media of today have a similar chance to prosper tomorrow if they can survive the heavy financial losses that they're incurring while they develop workable new-media business models.

Established radio performers such as Benny and Hope, who embraced TV on its own visually oriented terms, flourished well into the '60s. Everyone else--­including Fred Allen--vanished into the dumpster of entertainment history. The same fate awaits contemporary old-media figures unwilling to grapple with the challenge of the new media, no matter how popular they may be today.

Americans of all ages ­embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. That's the biggest lesson taught by the new-media crisis of 1949. Nostalgia, like guilt, is a rope that wears thin. --Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

Ms Watts, from Islington, north London, said: "I asked why I couldn't borrow a pair of scissors and she said, 'they are sharp, you might stab me'.

"I then asked to borrow a guillotine to cut up my leaflets but she refused again - because she said I could hit her over the head with it!"

She added: "It's absurd - there are plenty of heavy books I could have hit her with if I wanted to.

"I hardly look very threatening - it's really sad she could not make a commonsense judgement." --BBC

Thanks for telling me about this bizarre, sad story, Robert.

Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man)

If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?
If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it's the most exciting. Videogames and movies are the most exciting forms of entertainment. But a videogame in a way is more imaginative, it has more variety. In a movie you stick to the plotline, in a videogame you go in a million different directions. I have no idea how they're able to do that. It's like a miracle.

What advice would you give to a newcomer?
Well it's like anything else, if he or she wants to be a writer they should first study writing. Don't study comic writing, study writing - read literature, read the best writers you can find. Learn the language, learn how to use it. If you want to be an artist, you've got to study the best artists in the business and try to draw as well as they do. But too many people try to become artists in comics and they're not as good as the ones that are presently drawing the comics. --UK Guardian

It's a safe bet none of the world leaders meeting Thursday for the first day of the G-20 summit are aware that it's also National Punctuation Day. Rubin founded it in 2004 after he got fed up with seeing misplaced apostrophes and other transgressions by people who should know better -- newspaper reporters and editors, book publishers and billboard advertisers.

"No one cares," he says. "That's my pet peeve, that a lot of people who are doing this don't care. Where's their pride? Where's their self-esteem? Where's their drive to get it right?"

Falling on Sept. 24, National Punctuation Day promotes literacy by encouraging schools and businesses to conduct activities, programs, games or contests related to the almighty comma, period and apostrophe. It's listed in two directories published by McGraw Hill, "Chases Calendar of Events" and "The Teacher's Calendar."

Rubin also created a Web site, www.nationalpunctuationday.com, which lists the proper usage of punctuation marks and invites visitors to post photos of incorrect road or restaurant signs. --William Loeffler, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

This is a rather weak example of tying a local story to an international news event, but I do enjoy obsessing about the details of language.

Thanks for the link, Mike.

I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain.

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men ... have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the '70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there's a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause. --Mark Liberman, Language Log

[L]ast fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign "Mockingbird" -- or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson's adrenaline-fueled "Maximum Ride" books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the "Captain Underpants" series of comic-book-style novels.

But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: "I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own."

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America's schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on. --Motoko Rich

This sounds like a much better approach than having students at this age watch the movie so they have something to contribute to the discussion of a book they haven't read. 

In the "Literature and I" assignment that I ask my English majors to write in "Writing about Literature," several students reported that they loved reading when they were younger, but that school turned them off.  Of course the canon is an important part of our shared literature culture, and if students are all reading their own separate lists, there would be little to discuss.

Of course the classics are important, but I'd be satisfied with giving students in middle school a little more choice, and certainly letting high school students pick from among current best-sellers in an advanced English class.

My son (age 11) loves reading, and usually dashes off joyfully when I tell him to go to his room and read whatever he wants. He chooses nonfiction for his own reading pleasure, often a Popular Science, PC Gamer, or a military history book.  My daughter (7) prefers to work with her hands and body rather than to sit still, but the last few days I've been reading her The Hobbit, and she always asks for more (even though the chapters aren't a kid-friendly length).

Last week, I spent a little while doing the rounds, trying to drum up some advertising customers for the student paper. Ordinarily there's a student who carries the role of business manager, but when we're in between student workers, or outside of class time, I try to push things along.

There were twenty different things I'd rather have been doing at that time, but the money goes directly to support the school's educational mission. We recently replaced our six-year-old hand-me-down computers with a couple of new ones, and over the years we've students to training workshops and conferences in New York and elsewhere.

So here I am, going door to door, mentioning that I'm trying to sell ads, and watching eyes glaze over. 

"I can give you two minutes," said a guy in an apron.

It was a humbling experience -- being blown off by a guy wearing an apron.  I didn't even have two minutes of stuff to say -- I just mentioned that his competition down the street just bought an ad of X size, and leaving my contact information. 

But it was a good experience, too. 

I'm used to walking into a chattering room full of students who immediately settle down and wait for me to start talking. A small handful of students who feel very comfortable around me will politely mime a wristwatch check when I've run over time; most just sit there and wait for me to finish. Of course, it's my goal in the classroom to let the students do most of the talking, but on the first day of classes, the students are perfectly happy listening as I go over the syllabus. I also spend part of my week working on committees with other faculty and staff members, so it's not as if I expect the world to revolve around me.

I wasn't mad at the busy employees who didn't even look up from their desk during my pitch, who didn't give me their name or accept my card, who didn't take the copy of The Setonian.  Instead, I was feeling guilty for all the times I have blown off a sales representative, thrown a sales pitch directly into my spam folder, or avoided eye contact with someone wearing a "Vendor" nametag.

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed offers a gentle rebuke to the edupunk movement, which celebrates do-it-yourself technical solutions over the pre-packaged corporate products. If a few admissions and hiring decisions had gone a different way in the past, I might very well be peddling educational software or textbooks to busy professors.
 

The Golden Rule for Ed Tech Vendors

• Many of the people in the for-profit world in fact come from the non-profit educational world. You will be surprised that their backgrounds, interests, and passions will so closely match your own. For this reason, they tend to identify too strongly with their customers, and will be unhappy when they think their companies actions are not in the best interests of the colleges and universities that they work with.
• If you talk to your ed. tech. vendor representative you may be surprised to the degree that they believe in the profit-motive as a motivator for innovation. They have often left the slow and hidebound cultures of academia precisely because of the slowness of traditional institutions to change and innovate. They like that their success or failures can be measured by bottom line evaluations, in hard profit and loss numbers. They will believe, and they will be correct, that it is the for profit educational technology world that is responsible for much of the innovation in higher education. --Joshua Kim
  

I bought my Olympia Monica S in Croydon, south London, from an office supply shop when I was 20. It was a decisive moment. I wanted to write and a typewriter was the essential tool of the trade, an instrument every bit as vital as a paintbrush is to a painter or a guitar to a guitarist. Longhand was never an option. Acquiring a typewriter, particularly if you had no plans to become a secretary, was a sign of identity, a declaration of commitment and intent. .. [T]he computer has never been a dedicated writing tool -- writing is the least of it -- and everyone uses them. They are somehow both more marvellous and more ordinary. That's why there isn't a shred of romance in the idea of a writer and his or her personal computer.--Rick Poynor

A reprint of a good article that has since disappeared behind the Technology Review subscription firewall. Probably too dated to assign to my news writing students this year, so I guess I'll just refer to it in lecture.

The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone's lost kitty.

It also explains why TV news seems so archaic next to the advertising and entertainment content on the same networks. Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns. --John Hockenberry

Any college professor knows the depressing feeling that comes when you stay up late marking a stack of papers, and a high percentage of students don't even bother to pick them up.  One instructor made an art installation out of abandoned student essays. 

As an instructor of art for the past 7 years, I have had the disheartening experience of encountering illiteracy at the college level with a frequency that far exceeded my expectations. Having taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fresno City College; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, FL; and Bakersfield College, I decided to collect the hundreds of student essays written for my classes that were abandoned by their authors (the fact that these students did not find the retrieval of their work to be important was in many ways discouraging enough). I decided to archive these student essays as documentation of the growing illiteracy problem, for what I found in the contents therein mirrored and sometimes surpassed the following data.


--Look Like If The Words Are Bleeding

I suppose, too, that there's some self-selection involved -- perhaps the students who care least about their writing are the most likely to abandon their essays, while the best writers were proud of their work and wanted to pick it up. A lively discussion on the comments page.

The context in which the students' intellectual property is used -- as evidence of the nation's illiteracy -- is problematic, as is the fact that the students weren't given the opportunity to consent to their work being used this way.

Interesting pair of essays in The Chronicle Review. I may use this in my journalism class for a unit on statistics, advocacy, and the importance of open-minded skepticism in the reporting of the news.

Christina Hoff Sommers, in her essay "Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship" (The Chronicle Review, online edition, June 29), criticized Nancy K.D. Lemon, a lecturer in domestic-violence law at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law, for publishing errors in the popular textbook she edits, Domestic Violence Law, and for not taking seriously her continuing criticisms of the book. "One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack," Sommers charged. Following is Lemon's response to those criticisms and Sommers's rebuttal. Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.