Penguin recently posted this video to YouTube, explaining that it was an internal training video that was a big hit with the sales force. On YouTube, I posted a comment saying that if it worked on their sales force -- that is, if their sales staff didn't get the gimmick before the midpoint, that actually says quite a lot about their industry.



It's nice enough, but the style of the scrolling text directly echoes The Lost Generation, which implemented the same rhetorical trick better,  about 2 1/2 years and 12 million YouTube hits ago:


And the idea of using scrolling text as a palindrome has a history... this is apparently from 2006:

"Oh yeah! Scientists I've talked to say you cannot overestimate how important HeLa cells have been."

Yet no one in the Lacks family had been informed by Johns Hopkins of the existence of their mother's cells, until a researcher called in the early 1970s wanting to test the family.

"Henrietta's husband basically got a phone call one day," Skloot said, "and the way he understood it was, 'We've got your wife, she's alive in a laboratory, we've been doing research on her for the last 25 years.' The only cell he'd ever heard of was the kind in a prison, and he literally thought, 'Okay, so, they have her in a cell? They have part of her in a cell?'"

The news left the Lacks family confused . . . and scared.

"When you look at this in the context of the family story, you know, at 25 years after her death, not only were her cells still alive, but there were enough of them that if you could pile them all on a scale, they'd weigh 50 million metric tons," Skloot said. "That's 150 Empire State Buildings. You know, it's just inconceivable that that could even be true, and it was."  --CBS News

I remember mentioning this case in my 7th grade biology class. I must have seen a report on this in Time Magazine or maybe 60 Minutes. A few years ago I actually Googled for this story, but I must not have spelled the name right, because I found nothing on it.

I've never played this game, but in the last week or so, my attempts to play multiplayer games with my kids (Uru and Dungeons and Dragons Online) have been thwarted by the fact that my modem blips out for a few minutes every couple hours, which freezes up games that exchange information over the internet. 

Rather than risk losing all his progress in the middle of a quest, my son has occasionally opted to play a one-player game while his sister and I, sitting in the same room, continue to wrestle with the multi-player game.  But I see that Ubisoft requires an internet connection for its recent single-player games, not because the internet adds anything to the gameplay, but simply as a digital rights managemen (DRM) procedure.

Hackers broke the latest copy-protection scheme within 24 hours, and shortly after that, the servers went down, so that (at least until the servers come back up) only the people who own cracked copies of the game can play it.

Do you think some hackers maybe "helped" the DRM servers to crash, just a little bit, in order to generate news stories like this? The story arc perfectly fits the anti-DRM warnings.

Ubisoft's DRM servers were overloaded over the weekend, rendering the recently released PC version of Assassin's Creed II unplayable for many legitamate owners of the game.

In an attempt to combat piracy, Ubisoft announced an extreme method of DRM whereby games required a constant internet connection.

Assassin's Creed II, released last week, was the one of the first games to support the policy, and its first weekend has been plagued by server issues with posters on the official forums

"Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform," said an official response on the forums, "This does not affect customers who are currently playing, but customers attempting to start a game may experience difficulty in accessing our servers. We are currently working to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience."--IGN

telling of connection outages.

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction."

Hold on there, AP reporter Dylan Lovan.  (The link will expire eventually, so that's just a Google search that is at least likely to turn up excerpts.)

On the rare occasions when I let my home-schooled kids out of their prayer closets, I usually have a few minutes to spare, before they start crying that the bibles I've chained around their necks are chafing them through their penitential sackcloths, so I take the opportunity to teach them the critical thinking skills that would prevent them from making the huge leap necessary to connect the dots from "want to give their children 'religious or moral instruction'" to "Bible-based version of the Earth's creation."  (The school system that educated me did not make me smart enough to see the connections Lovan appears to see.)

It's probably a bigger story that 17 percent of home-school parents apparently offer no "religious or moral instruction" at all.  Without the proper ideology, how will today's kids learn the new Rs -- respect, relationships, and recycling?  Can the flying spaghetti monster protect us from the shame? Scandal!

The article continues:

"The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians," said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program."

Those who don't, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs.

The article is trying to focus on the home-school families that don't fit the stereotype, so the intention is commendable.  But the first paragraph I quoted is very sloppy, showing the kind of writing (and thinking) that makes stereotypes so hard to combat.

I don't teach the Bible as a replacement for scientific knowledge.

A character in the TV show Babylon 5 once said (and I'm paraphrasing from memory): "Faith and reason are the shoes on our feet. You can get a lot father with both than with just one or the other." 

(Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski identifies himself as an athiest, but some of his best storylines involved a respectful treatment of  religion in both human and alien societies.)

A fan-produced Kings Quest sequel is shut down. What a way to treat your brand's most loyal followers.

Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.

As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.

We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.

Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.

"We've become a close-knit unit you might say. Some of us, we always come back to talk about the year, what happened," one visitor told Channel 4 Action News' Tara Edwards.

The malformed possessive in the above quotation is a mistake -- we all make mistakes like that. But I blogged this web version of the WTAE story  because of the way the website shoehorns the name Tara Edwards into the story, as if it's more important than the name of the visitor who made this statement. Anonymous sources are fine with Channel 4 Action News.  I always thought the byline was where you give credit to the author of the story.  What does it mean, when instead of an article "by Tara Edwards" that quotes an anonymous source, we see instead an anonymous article quoting what an anonymous person said to Tara Edwards?

Another quote from a veteran seems to make TV journalism the hero:

"It's a big tragedy. It was heartfelt in my home when I saw it on television," said veteran Mike Hampton.

Remember to love your TV, because nobody loves you like your StormTV FearCast NewsFriends!

There are no sidewalks where I live, but if there were, my sidewalk, and my conscience, would be clear. Here's the first stanza of a five-stanza poem by TImons Esaias.

Originally there were eleven Commandments
Moses, perhaps confused by the unfamiliar
snow, ice, and sidewalk,
botched one, and left it out.

Google Buzz combined the openness of Twitter with the "whoo-hoo look at me!" aspects of Facebook. The result? A total face plant. --PC World

"People thought what they had was an address book for an e-mail program, and Google decided to turn that into a friends list for a new social network," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington. "E-mail is one of the few things that people understand to be private." Mr. Rotenberg said that his organization planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the Google's use of e-mail conversations to build a social network was unfair and deceptive. --NYT

There's a dissertation in here. All I have the energy to do today is imply a connection.

Using a police state to market technology in 1984:


Using a police state to market technology in 2010:

I usually carry a digital voice recorder with me.  In most states it's legal to record a conversation if all parties consent, although Pennsylvania law requires that all parties to a conversation be notified that a conversation is being recorded. "It is always legal to tape or film a face-to-face interview when your recorder or camera is in plain view" (RCFP, "Consent and Its Limits"). When I worked for a radio station, the first thing I would say after pushing the record button was, "The tape is rolling. I'm speaking to [so-and-so] for a story on [topic]."  If the person kept talking, the assumption is the subject consented to the interview.

It is a felony of the third degree to intentionally intercept, endeavor to intercept, or get any other person to intercept any wire, electronic, or oral communication without the consent of all the parties. 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703(1).

The statute is set to expire in December 2008, but could be amended and remain on the books. [Note -- it still seems to be on the books. --DGJ]  Under the current statutory language, consent of all parties is required to tape a conversation. 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5704. Consent is not required of any parties if the parties do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for their non-electronic communication. See definition of "oral communication," 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5702.

Anyone whose communication has been unlawfully intercepted can recover actual damages in the amount of $100 per day of violation or $1,000, whichever is greater, and also can recover punitive damages litigation costs, and attorney fees. 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5725.

A person commits a misdemeanor if he views, photographs or films another person in a state of full or partial nudity without consent, under circumstances where the nude person has an expectation of privacy. 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 7507.1.  --Reporters Committee on the Freedom of the Press, "Pennsylvania"

What are the laws about recording interviews where you live? (Here's a list that outlines the recording laws for each US state. Wikipedia has an article on "Wiretapping.") 

See also "Photographer's Rights," and this:

The law in the United States of America is pretty simple. You are allowed to photograph anything with the following exceptions:

• Certain military installations or operations.

• People who have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That is, people who are some place that's not easily visible to the general public, e.g., if you shoot through someone's window with a telephoto lens.

That's it.

You can shoot pictures of children; your rights don't change because of their age or where they are, as long as they're visible from a place that's open to the public. (So no sneaking into schools or climbing fences.)

Video taping has some more gray areas because of copyright issues, but in general the same rules apply. If anyone can see it, you can shoot it.

And yes, you can shoot on private property if it's open to the public. That includes malls, retails stores, Starbucks, banks, and office-building lobbies. If you're asked to stop and refuse, you run the risk of being charged with trespassing, but your pictures are yours. No one can legally take your camera or your memory card without a court order.

You can also shoot in subways and at airports. Check your local laws about the subway, but in New York, Washington, and San Francisco it's perfectly legal. Airport security is regulated by the Transportation Security Administration, and it's quite clear: Photography is A-OK at any commercial airport in the U.S. as long as you're in an area open to the public.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. --Andrew Kantor

I have watched none of the TV coverage of the Haiti earth quakes. That's not to say I haven't been following the story -- I just prefer to get my news online. So I'm blogged this story which discusses what appears to be a trend in TV coverage.

The aftermath of the Haitian earthquake is one of those stories that alters the guiding principle of journalism - that reporters are here to observe and document. Their job is not to be part of whatever is happening, but to be the eyes and ears for readers or viewers who want to know and can't be there.

But from the moment the first correspondents in Haiti transmitted their first reports on this earthquake, it was clear this was not a traditional situation where reporters could come in, take a spin around, talk to a few locals for their reaction, then file a story.

There are still people trapped under slabs of concrete. There are people with shattered limbs who have waited days for medical attention. Food and water are almost unavailable in many places. There is so little functioning infrastructure that supplies can't be moved a few miles to people whose lives they would save.

It is still theoretically possible to pass through this landscape, take notes and file a story. But most reporters can't do that, and equally to the point, we wouldn't want them to. --David Hinckley, NY Daily News

Two Seton Hill sources are mentioned in this local story.

Millennials appreciate professors who bring technology into the classroom, whether it's YouTube, PowerPoint or posting grades online after assignments, said Theresa Conley, 27, a junior at Seton Hill University in Greensburg.

"That way, you can see where you're at and what you're getting, so you're prepared," said Conley, a communications and creative writing major.

[...]

Seton Hill professor Mike Arnzen puts his texting policy in the course syllabus: If students place his class in the background by texting, he marks them as absent.

"Because they're not attending," explained Arnzen, 42, chair of the school's division of humanities. He has even experienced students answering cell phones in class.

"It's very rare, but I see it as rude. I take it as an insult," he said. "I tell them to take it in the hallway. Then, after class, I'll talk to them. Teachers find themselves policing basic civility more than we used to." --Mike Cronin, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Violent video games have triggered substantial controversy due to highly publicized incidents of youth violence that have been allegedly inspired by the content of such games. Several jurisdictions have passed legislation penalizing the distribution of violent video games to minors and used psychological research to support the justification for such laws. However, courts have consistently found this research to be unpersuasive and have struck down restrictive video-game legislation on First-Amendment, Freedom-of-Speech grounds. This article explores our Constitutional right to free speech, along with its underlying psychological assumptions. It reviews the reasons that courts have found current research on the effects of violent video games to be unconvincing as evidence in a legal context, and presents a number of methodological recommendations that would make the research on this topic more probative in future cases.--Turner and Elwork

From my perspective as a humanities prof, this abstract seems vague, for instance teasing by saying it "reviews the reasons" rather than actually giving the paper's opinion on those reasons. But GamePolitics.com boils down some of its key points:

The research then delves into a history of restrictive videogame legislation and the different applications of psychological studies as applied to these cases. The duo then analyze why existing research has lacked persuasiveness in these legislative battles:

Our first impression from this review is that the research results on the effects of violent video games have been inconsistent and equivocal.

Our second conclusion is that none of these studies meets the minimal research criteria that the courts have established as necessary to be probative in a legal context.

For example, there has been no research to address the question of whether violent video games are more harmful than other forms of violent media. In addition, no research has been done on whether violent video games cause long-term or short-term effects.

The pair thinks that substituting an applied minded approach to research, versus theoretical, would help:

... the primary goal of applied research is to solve a real-world problem; its contribution to theory is also incidental. For example, one might study the effects of violent video games on minors in order to answer very specific legislative questions that may or may not be important to psychological theory.

Other suggestions for researchers include: create studies that answer legally relevant questions, use conditions that are representative of real-life conditions (external validity) and to include statistical validity, so "research findings can be attributed to an actual relationship between the scores being measured, as opposed to a chance occurrence (random variability)."

Google just got slightly less evil in my eyes.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China. --Google

Hero. No question about it.

Miep Gies, who ensured the diary of Anne Frank did not fall into the hands of Nazis after the teen's arrest, has died. She was 100.

[...]

"More than 20,000 Dutch people helped to hide Jews and others in need of hiding during those years. I willingly did what I could to help. My husband did as well. It was not enough," she says in the prologue of her memoirs, "Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family."

"There is nothing special about me. I have never wanted special attention. I was only willing to do what was asked of me and what seemed necessary at the time." --CNN

While reviewing proposals for a new games journalism assignment in my video game culture and theory course, I found myself thinking about Floyd the Robot, from Planetfall.

Some students were commenting excitedly about the emotional impact of the airport scene in Modern Warfare 2 (you are infiltrating a terrorist cell, and the game requires you to go along with a raid on an airport, or else you get shot in the face).  I haven't played the game, but I understand this scene is pretty brutal. On a much smaller scale, though I felt some of the same emotions when I was playing Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, and decided I might as well get this over with and start shooting the students.

The first few levels of SCMRPG! involved gearing up and setting up.  One tedious level has you evading several hall monitors to plant bombs in the cafeteria. When one catches you, you have to do a long sequence all over again.  This level was so annoying that I started to hate those little pixels.  That was really a brilliant design move, since it forced my attitude (as a non-violent person who was just as horrified by the Columbine massacre as anyone else) to align, even a tiny bit, with the attituide of the killers I was portraying.  A little later, when it was clear the game was expecting me to start shooting, I delayed for a long time, looking for any possible way to avoid the violence that the game insisted was inevitable.  Of course, I could have just stopped playing, but my goal was to study the game, so when I found a lone student in the parking lot, I clicked on him.  (I won't spoil the game for you.. what happens next is a small thing, but it was yet another brilliant complication.)

But this idea of how moral angency changes in an interactive medium has already been raised, notably in the Infocom text adventure Trinity (1986), which requires the player to kill a skink (lizard). Since the whole game centers around the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, the game makes a powerful comment on death.

One of my students mentioned the sacrifice of the player's companion pet in Fable 2 (2008), and I thought about the very similar effect that Stephen Granade accomplished with his text-adventure game Losing Your Grip in 1998 (in an early scene you name a pet, and then later, well...), which in turn invokes the player's relationship with Floyd in Planetfall (1983).

I've already introduced some of my students to text adventures in another class (it's part of an introduction to programming), but other than one or two games to sample, I haven't really made room in this course for a close study of a classic text game. If I ever do, perhaps Planetfall would be a good choice.

At any rate, I found a few Floyd-related resources that were new to me:

"The emotions I (and others) felt with this supporting character is legendary,"  wrote one gamer on MobyGames, 16 years after Planetfall was originally released. "This has to be experienced to be believed. I don't think anyone has come as close in any other game today."1 In 2001, another gamer on Slashdot.org posted, "Are you kidding? Losing Floyd was probably the most emotional moment I'll ever have playing computer games."2 In listing his favorite titles on an adventure game newsgroup, another gamer posted "Planetfall - Floyd, need I say more?"3

 Perhaps a decade ago, nothing more needed to be said. But as computer games have progressed from diskettes to CDs to DVDs, a smaller and smaller percentage of gamers have played any text adventures at all. The features that made Floyd an endearing character are no longer widely known or immediately obvious. In today's graphically- centric medium, character design is intrinsically linked with questions of physical appearance, costume design, and animation - all of which are aspects that Floyd wholly lacked. Writings about Planetfall tend to focus only on gamers' reactions to Floyd's death, but while that shows us the end result of his characterization, it does not explain how the bond between Floyd and the player comes to be.  "Floyd Here Now!" A Study of Planetfall's Most Enduring Character (PDF)

And here's an informative reflection by Steve Meretzky, who created the game (and character)

My goals with Floyd were to make him cute and endearing, in the way that children and pets can be. My biggest surprise was that, unintentionally, Floyd also turned out to be a very humorous character. As some players began to point this out as the aspect they most enjoyed about Floyd, I played it up even more. For instance, when you save the game, normally an outside-the-gameworld activity, Floyd would respond:

>SAVE
Your game has been saved.
Floyd's eyes light up. "Oh boy! Are we gonna try something dangerous now?"

Having made the decision to create such a single, deep character, I thought there would be the potential for emotional resonance with the player, which I could take advantage of...

The Baltimore Sun is offering a year's subscription to its weekend papers for one cent, in an effort to boost circulation numbers and attract more advertising revenue. Even if you only want the coupons from the advertising flyers, it sounds like a great deal.
 

"But," my brother-in-law, Robert Frezza, writes, "I would be killing trees." 

He continues:

Even if I recycle papers to keep from clogging up the landfills, the environmental costs of washing the ink out of the newsprint and reusing it are incredibly high. Even for a penny, I am not sure that buying a print newspaper is an environmentally responsible thing to do, especially if I don't really plan to read it.

Sigh! Help me in my unbelief.

Robert gave me permission to quote from his e-mail.

Here's how I responded:

I don't think that even "selling" subscriptions for a penny is going to prop up the business model of print journalism for very long. Many of my journalism students think of TV as the "default" format for news, or so I gather when they say they are not up on current events because they don't have time to "watch the news."

My father would pick up The Washington Post at the bottom of our driveway on his way to work, and bring it back at the end of each day.  I remember John sitting in the chair in the living room, carefully sifting through each section and dropping it in a pile on the floor.  But when we moved to Pennsylvania a few years ago we accepted a promotion for a few free months of free weekend papers, and I asked myself why I was bothering to look through it, since I already had read most of it online.

If you want to support good journalism, and a cause, what if you got a group of like-minded friends to agree, instead of birthday gifts or next year's Christmas cards, to buy each other photos from The Sun's coverage of a particular issue that you care about?

(A photo is about $15-20 on The Sun's site... A box of 12 greeting cards with a front page of your choice on the cover is about the same. Not cheap, but more ethical than wasting hundreds of dollars of printing and delivery expenses. The cost might be worth the message it sends to the paper, that there's an audience for quality reporting on the issues you care about.)

Or write a letter to the editor praising a particular journalist or columnist's work.

What do you think? Is a year's worth of future landfill worth a penny?

I just got an e-mail from the university saying that Bob Mendler, a regular guest speaker of our National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, has died.

At age 13, he was forced into Nazi slavery, and survived the death of dozens of his immediate family members. In 2008, a blogger posted a detailed account of Mendler's story.

"I am a Holocaust survivor," Mendler stated, baring his arm bearing its permanent number on it. "I want you to know I am not a number and I am not a statistic. I am a human being. I had parents a long time ago."

Rhetorician and ethicist Stephen E. Toulmin has died.  While I haven't been able to fit his full system into my freshman writing courses, I did create a brief handout on the Toulmin method.

Arguing against the absolute truth advocated in Plato's idealized formal logic, Toulmin said that truth can be relative. Historical and cultural contexts, he said, must be taken into consideration.

He concluded that absolutism fails to consider the field-dependent aspects of argument. Advocating a universal truth, absolutists believe that a standard set of moral principles -- regardless of context -- can solve all moral dilemmas. But Toulmin purported that many of these standard principles cannot be applied to day-to-day life in the real world.--USC News

It's an open debate whether the plan to scan millions of books and make them searchable online will prove the benefit to humanity that Google promises - or hand it a monopoly over certain digital works, as opponents allege.

But the consensus is the company fomented an avoidable backlash by forging ahead with its controversial plan without consulting the parties with the most at stake. Authors and publishers responded with lawsuits alleging copyright infringement.

Google "had the power to do it and so thought 'why not?' " Enderle said. "That's the core of how a company goes from being seen as friendly to being seen as evil." --SF Gate

From the explanation of a map showing differences in press freedom around the world.

We recognize cultural differences, diverse national interests, and varying levels of economic development. Yet Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.

The operative word for this survey is "everyone." All states, from the most democratic to the most authoritarian, are committed to this doctrine through the UN system. To deny that doctrine is to deny the universality of information freedom--a basic human right. We recognize that cultural distinctions or economic underdevelopment may limit the volume of news flows within a country, but these and other arguments are not acceptable explanations for outright centralized control of the content of news and information. --freedomhouse.org

I managed to find my own refuge in acting. The stage was a far safer place for me than anything I had to live through at home - it offered escape. I could be someone else, in another place, in another time. However, whenever the role called for anger, fury, or the expression of murderous impulses, I was always afraid of what I might unleash if I surrendered myself to those feelings. --Patrick Stewart, Guardian

The space that used to belong only to men grows ever smaller. However, the statistics about who is portrayed in the media as knowledgeable "talking heads," about who is credited with writing the most influential books and who gets bylines in the most respected intellectual magazines seem to change very little. In a year that saw new books by Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, Jayne Anne Phillips, Helen Benedict and Barbara Ehrenreich, Publishers Weekly, or PW, came out with a list of top 10 books that was all male. --Caryl Rivers

My 7yo daughter has a fiery personality, and while she feels the pull of Disney princess stories, she loves adventure stories. It's much easier to dress up and play Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker than it is to dress up and play Marian Ravenwood or Princess Leia, and she goes through phases where she says she wishes she were a boy, which I find very sad. After I read her a few chapters of Anne of Green Gables, she asked for something else. (Perhaps we already encourage the scope of her imagination enough that she doesn't identify with a talkative little girl who lacks it.)

In the realm of fantasy, The Paper Bag Princess, A Dragon's Tail: Jane and the Dragon and The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland all offer strong female heroines.

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.