Wired gives Star Wars a good drubbing, focusing on the ending:

There are somewhere between 20 and 30 one-man fighters in the assault, right? And of all of those guys, only Luke, Wedge and some guy in a Y-wing make it back (and Han and Chewie, of course, but they weren't part of the original team). So that means that in this fight, despite its amazing success, the rebels lost somewhere between 17 and 27 of their very best, bravest pilots. Yet all they can do is cheer as Luke descends the ladder of his X-wing. Luke cheers, too, hugs Leia, and is absolutely ecstatic ... until he realizes that R2-D2 got badly damaged in the fight, at which point he is nearly distraught. Losing fellow human beings, including a good friend of his, that doesn't matter; possibly losing a cute but replaceable machine, now that's sad. --GeekDad

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)

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.

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

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 the link and the link itself illegible.

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.

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

I'm gearing up to introduce my journalism students to a news project that requires a basic knowledge of math. I don't want to make it too frustrating to them, but I do want to emphasize how easy it is to be misled by the math.

Margin of Error deserves better than the throw-away line it gets in the bottom of stories about polling data. Writers who don't understand margin of error, and its importance in interpreting scientific research, can easily embarrass themselves and their news organizations. --Robert Niles

via

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.

A fascinating twist to the complex story behind the legal battle behind the iconic Obama "HOPE" poster.

New filings to the court, he said, "state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used...and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images." 

In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster.  In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.

After Fairey's admission, a spokesman for the Associated Press issued a statement saying that Fairey "sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used."

Fairey said that his lawyers have taken the steps to amend his court pleadings to reflect the fact that "the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken." --Los Angeles Times

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 don't use APA style, but this article about nine pages of corrections to the APA style manual caught my eye.

"It's egregious," said John Foubert, an associate professor of education at Oklahoma State University, who bought two copies of the book - one for his office and one for home - when it was released in July. "These are the standards for how we write our manuscripts and how our students write their papers .... The irony is so thick."

The corrections include four pages of "nonsignificant typographical errors" and five pages correcting errors in content and problems with sample papers in the book. The APA also released four corrected sample papers in their entireties. One correction is "Page 88 - Change last line under 'Exception' to read 'Spacing twice after punctuation marks at the end of a sentence aids readers of draft manuscripts.' " Another is "Page 64 - First paragraph, line 2, insert a comma after 'e.g.' " --Inside HIgher Ed

The AP recently raised eyebrows last year when it announced its intent to charge bloggers who quote from an AP story, and again more recently when it announced vague plans to track the spread of AP stories through secret embedded codes.

The AP's position is that if search engines are making money delivering customers to AP content, then the AP should get a piece of the action.  Here's a suggestion that might actually work, without trampling the fair use doctrine in the dust, and without relying on magic digital pixie dust tracking technology.

Financial wires have long charged higher rates for the timeliest delivery of such information as stock quotes, so the approach is not without precedent. As more and more news organizations wrestle with the need to create premium products, the AP's experiments will emerge as valuable case studies in high-stakes bets.

Time-based pricing could take any number of forms, including early access to an index of stories that would enable participating search engines to begin crawling the news sooner than the other guys.

Another option under discussion is the earlier release of actual stories, in effect setting up some AP customers as places that users would come to rely on for the earliest look at AP content.

What's interesting about these ideas is that they could generate much-needed revenue without jeopardizing journalism's civic purpose of wide distribution of news. --Bill Mitchell (Poynter)

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.

Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of "newsgroup" postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.

In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995.

[...]

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.  --Kevin Poulsen, Wired

On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown's claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are "expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment." Such works are protected by the First Amendment. --Kotaku

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.

In all media that boasts your byline remain impartial, and don't do anything stupid. But is it in the best interests of the paper? Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander points out the the Post (along with just about every other mainstream publication) has at times come under fire for being partisan. These guidelines aim to cut off those accusations before they can be made (and already senior post editor Raju Narisetti has closed his account). But in this age of self-branded journalists, where power and readership loyalty is often the result of an audience's personal connection with the writer is it really a good idea to remove all evidence of personality from the reporter's product? --Glynnis MacNicol

Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator,

I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug. -- Stephen Granade riffs on the Nigerian e-mail scam (see 419 Eater).

Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news. --Michael Massing, Columbia Journalism Review

Of course, the situation was just as bad when the top three anchors were all men, but Massing does have a point.

I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon -- that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight -- are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something like this: "Yeah, this was a crazy thing that worked for awhile, but eventually they will see the light and realize that top-down control is the only thing that works."

Will the new, more gentle tool, be more widely used than protection was? I certainly hope so. We are always looking for ways to help responsible people join the Wikipedia movement and contribute constructively, while gently asking those who want to cause trouble to please go somewhere else.

Faced with the choice of preventing you from editing at all, versus allowing you to edit even though you might have bad intentions, we have erred consistently for the latter -- openness. The new tool, by making it a lot easier to keep bad stuff from appearing to the general public, is going to allow for a much more responsible Wikipedia that is, at the same time, a much more open Wikipedia. --Jimmy Wales, Huffington Post

It's a transparent ploy to get Google rank via incoming links, but it's also a great piece of investigative reporting. By Chandler Phillips.

"We would hire you here at Edmunds.com. Then you would go out and get a job as a car salesman and work for three months."

"Selling cars?" I asked unnecessarily.

"Right."

"Where would I work?"

"Wherever you can get hired. That would be up to you. We were thinking you should work at two dealerships. The first would be a high-volume, high-pressure store. Then you could quit and go to a no-haggle dealership. You could tell them you didn't like the pressure at the first place and you'd probably get a job on the spot."

The editor explained that they wanted me to write a series of articles describing the business from the inside. Of course I would learn the tricks of the trade, and that would better prepare me to write advice for Edmunds.com. But the benefits of the project would be greater than just information. I would live the life of a car salesman for three months. That would give me an insight and perspective that couldn't be gained by reading books or articles or interviewing former car salesmen.

"So what do you think?" the editor asked. "Interested?"

Kanye West has tried to apologize twice, once on his blog and once on Jay Leno. He blew it both times. In each case he referred to having stolen Taylor's moment. West doesn't understand that what he did was wrong, threatening and self-centered. He simply acknowledged that his completely narcissistic behavior cut into another celebrity's moment of self-centeredness!

Ms. Williams, having nobody famous to whom to apologize, has yet to properly acknowledge the implications of threatening a line judge with bodily harm. Like Mr. West, Ms. Williams fails to understand that it doesn't matter how much pressure she was under, it's not about her! She was wrong and she should simply say that, apologize for it and shut up. The storm would pass and she would be forgiven. But that seems to be beyond her.

Apparently, it's beyond Joe Wilson also. He apologized to the President and he has no plans to apologize any more, not to his colleagues and not to anyone else. Like Kanye West, Wilson seems to think that his words caused a personal hurt to the President and he is willing to apologize for that, but not for anything else. --Brad Hirschfield

Last night I came across the text of the statement by Serena Williams, which a headline writer had identified as an "apology," but the statement begins by praising Serena for her passion, it repeats the claim that the judge's call was unfair, it confuses the concepts of "passion and emotion" and "foul-mouthed tantrum, and it imagines that the continued adoration of her "fans and supporters" -- rather than any change on her part -- will help her to "move forward and grow".

Last night everyone could truly see the passion I have for my job. Now that I have had time to gain my composure, I can see that while I don't agree with the unfair line call, in the heat of battle I let my passion and emotion get the better of me and as a result handled the situation poorly. I would like to thank my fans and supporters for understanding that I am human and I look forward to continuing the journey, both professionally and personally, with you all as I move forward and grow from this experience.  --Serena Williams Issues Apology Statement

Factual errors in live TV reports led to a security incident on the Potomac river today.

Erroneous live cable news reports on CNN and Fox had said that the Coast Guard was firing shots on the river. CNN reported the Coast Guard had fired 10 rounds at a suspicious boat, and showed vessels circling in the water -- near the bridge President Barack Obama's motorcade crossed on the way to a memorial at the Pentagon earlier Friday morning.

The Associated Press reported that an exercise was under way in the river and did not report that shots were fired.

In a statement released by the Coast Guard, officials said the problem arose when media reporters overheard radio calls made during the training exercise. --CBS

I didn't watch any of the footage, but I'd bet one of the reporters said the smoke was delicious.

A technology win from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Rather and Potter emptied the victim's pockets of his cell phone and wallet and told the victim to "get out of here," police said.

The victim ran off while Rather and Potter headed toward Fifth Avenue, police said.

When officers showed up at the victim's home, he was simultaneously canceling his bank and credit cards, and using a computer to track the location of his cell phone through its GPS, police said.

Dude! Your shirt looks just like the blue walkway and the brown sand! How do you do that?

From the MailOnline, via.

Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes -- experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else -- altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.

That right was never absolute, and the policy changes are an extension of earlier struggles between control and openness.--Noam Cohen, New York Times

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
  

Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., recently introduced a grade called FD to deal with cheaters. The letters stand for failure with academic dishonesty. --Calgary Herald

FD for cheaters? Why not FU?

(Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.)

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.