Jerz's Literacy Weblog

The grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon have been grist for the moon conspiracy theory mill for decades.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in archive footage--by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

To the later horror of researchers and scientists, it was those tapes that went missing.

But now, according to the Daily Express, the original high-quality recordings have been found. (It looks like NASA was planning to surprise the world a little closer to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.)

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition--including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead--evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language. -- Jamais Cascio, The Atlantic

I spent a few hours cleaning up my e-mail archives yesterday. I was amazed of the amount of space that was taken up by 4MB flyers for events I did not attend, 2 MB PDFs of one-page forms that I could have printed out from a 3kb HTML page, and batches of photos (@1MB each) that students sent me to chronicle their participation in group activities.

If someone is sending me a document because they want my feedback on the design, or if I want to add a family photo to an archive, then of course the high bandwidth is justified.

But I can't be the only one who's annoyed when someone sends me a 500kb Microbloat Word file that contains nothing but a 20-word thesis statement, or a list of URLs.

In our everyday routine, disk storage is cheap and plentiful. It's good that we don't have to worry about what to keep and what to toss. I bought a 16 GB memory card for my 30GB tablet PC - it was dirt cheap to add that much extra storage. But there are times when an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I'll never work with data at the file-compression level, but I learned quite a bit from this very clear explanation from someone who knows about such things.

In physics, we know that matter and energy are interchangeable.  In computer science, we know that time and space are interchangeable.  Usually, we can find a way to make things faster by using more space, or make things smaller by taking more time. -- Eric Sink

The personality profile is a staple of intro to journalism classes, but newspapers don't tend to collect all their profiles in one place, so I often have trouble finding models.

Entrants in the Hearst Journalism Awards have to supply a profile as part of their application process (which also includes general news and on-the-spot reporting).  While the website doesn't seem to aggregate the winning profiles on a single page, here are links to some of the recent winning profile entries.

2007-08

• First Place: John W. Cox (Three times a week, a truck putters 45 miles south from a farm in Sonoma County, headed for Berkeley's North Shattuck neighborhood, filled with plump, corn-bred, nine-week-old ducks.)
• Second Place: Andrew R. McGill (There's a story about agrarian author Wendell Berry that food buffs and literary types like to pass around. According to popular legend, when an out-of-state fan asked Berry to travel and speak at a conference, the writer responded with a 14-line poem. It read in part: "In the labor of the fields longer than a man's life I am at home. Don't come with me. You stay home too.")
  
• Third Place: Matthew Baker (Alice Waters' appearance isn't the flashiness you'd expect from a world-class chef. Aside from a dark, striped scarf, she wears little color and little jewelry.)

2006-07

• First Place: Halle Stockton (Thousands idolize Mimi Silbert for her contagious spirit and persistent belief in self-sufficiency. / Her following includes ex-convicts, former gang members, heroin and crack addicts and prostitutes.)
• Second Place: Daniel C. Ford (Gary Dockery looked around the courtroom soaking in his last few moments of freedom./He was out of chances and standing before a judge seconds away from a life sentence that would write the final chapter to his short, but violent, sad and hate-filled life.)
  
• Third Place: Megan G. Boehnke (Gary Dockery looked rigidly uncomfortable sitting in his black patterned suit and red tie. Tattoos peeked out from behind the stiff fabric. There were flames on his hands, letters on his knuckles, and other symbols on his neck./ But when he started to tell a story about his savior, the 29-year-old former convict, who was facing life in prison for a hate crime only a year and a half ago, relaxed.)

The journalism class that I'm preparing to teach this fall is a writing course, but it's also very content-heavy -- lots of specialized vocabulary, lots of unique professional practices to teach.

This fall, I'm not using a big $100 journalism textbook. Instead, I'll be spending more time with several smaller texts.  In place of assigning chapters for students to read passively (out of a sense of obligation that I need to "cover" loads of specialized topics), I'm going to treat it more like a writing course, which means more writing (and pre-writing, and peer editing, and revision).   I already teach my freshman writing courses this way, but I guess I had to teach this journalism course a couple of times before I could make the shift. 

The best way for students to learn how to do journalism is to work on the student paper, so there's only so much I can expect from any course. Nevertheless, in the years when "News Writing" is not offered, the student editors report they have a much harder time developing the newbie staff members, so clearly this course does have an impact on the quality of the student paper.

The last time I taught this course, I came down with pneumonia just a few weeks into the term, so I had to rely -- far more than I had planned to -- on assigning chapters and workbook pages.  After I was physically capable of coming back to the classroom, it was fairly easy of me to fall back on lectures and book chapters, but I could feel my mental energies draining whenever I tried to evaluate a paper at any level beyond marking grammar mistakes, or when I tried to moderate a class discussion at any level between lecturing and replying to specific questions.

This year, I've signed up to particpate in a pilot project using "clickers" -- wireless hand-held response gadgets that students can use, in the middle of a lecture or workshop, to respond to spot quetsions.  I'll go into the classroom with an agenda, and a set of loaded questions that are designed to get the students thinking, "Hey, I noticed that, too... I wonder why it is?"  (Which is preferable to "I'd better write that down in case I have to spit it back for a quiz.")

I'm preparing my syllabus with a list of what clicker questions I'll need to prepare for each day's topic.  I've got a fairly decent, very brief handout on newsworthiness, and a more detailed podcast on newsworthiness, but rather than assign these texts first then quiz students on their ability to spit back cognitive chunks (thus placing myself as the source of knowledge to be memorized, and training the students to expect that I will do all the filtering and heavy lifting for them), I will instead try to introduce the concepts through questions:

Which potential story is more interestiing to you?
A) a power outage that affects 20 families. 
B) a power outage that affects 10,000 families.

Which potential story is more interesting to you:
A) President Obama enjoys tea with the Queen of England
B) An ostentatiously tatooed and pierced children's librarian who married the impeached former mayor of your home town enjoys tea with the Queen of England.

...and follow up with discussions that move towards synthesis and evaluation, with links and page numbers for the students to refer to (for review, or for further examples, or for more depth).  (The idea in this case is not simply to get them to spit back the characteristics of a newsworthy story, but rather to help them recognize that the metrics of "newsworthiness" are derived from human nature, rather than a bunch of arbitrary values.)

I'm always on the lookout  for interesting stories that one can tell with statistics -- and cautionary tales about misusing statistics in order to create news where there isn't any.

Via MetaFilter -- this OK Cupid article breaks down responses to user-generated dating profile questions. Green states were more likely to answer "yes" than the national average (yellow), and red states were more likely to answer "no".  Note that this doesn't even come close to representing a statistical average of the population -- just the answers collected by the OK Cupid dating service.

Would you date someone just for the sex?

data set: 448,000 people answered

The answers to the question about daily showering are also worth a look.

"What if I had a check on my desk for $5,000? And what if I rewarded the writer whose introduction most caught my attention, who most effectively made me want to continue because of a solid and clear thesis, with a check for five grand? Would your introductions improve even more?"

Cries of "Absolutely!" filled the room -- to which I replied, "Then you always could do it. You just couldn't be bothered."

Silence followed. -- Bob Kunzinger, Chronicle of Higher Education (paid subscription)

After working with students on their thesis, Kunzinger has his students write the introduction to their papers in class, and gives them a separate grade on each section of the paper. He points out that students know their professors have to read anything they write, and that professors will allow rewrites, so they don't put much effort into their drafts. (He notes that this isn't malice on their part -- they've been trained through high school that a good assignment is a finished one, and he argues that poor performance in wiriting classes has more to do with students choosing not to make any significant effort, rather than students being unable to write.)

The first few panels of a 12-panel cartoon.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

Teen tries out a Walkman for a week.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette. --Scott Campbell, BBC

This is from the online version of a paper being presented at Hypertext09.

I already knew the general shape of the history, and I'm not sure that the author is actually providing us with a new take or a new insight (the introduction simply establishes the facts, rather than emphasizing how a new archival discovery, historical or critical approach, or point of view shapes and organizes those facts).  Nevertheless, I was impressed with the references that carefully walk through events from the dawn of the blogosphere.

Today's blogosphere with its wealth of discursive practices is, in Jay Bolter's phrase, a writing space.^[1] It did not start this way. The blogosphere had an immediate historical predecessor, the weblog community, in which the weblog held a rhetorically ambiguous and contested status between a writing space that answered an author's expressive needs and an access structure^[2] through which an editor was meant to aggregate and annotate the Web's undiscovered riches. The conflict between access structure and writing space appears under a number of different names in the writings of Rebecca Blood, the weblog community's foremost apologist and chronicler, who describes it as an antagonism that split the community at its core: those who, like herself, believed that weblogs performed a "valuable filtering function"^[3] and aimed to be "dependable sources of links to reliably interesting material"^[4]:54 increasingly found themselves opposed to - and outnumbered by - an "influx of short-form diarists" who wouldn't link but posted "entry after entry of blurts and personal observations,"^[5]:149 thus "inverting the primary values of the community."^[5]:154 -- Rudolph Ammann

My favorite "winner" in this year's Lyttle Lytton Contest, which awards writers who can, in one sentence, imitate the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night" novel opening.

Alex turned to Gertrude, in much the same way Martin Landau turned to Barbara Bain in the opening of Space: 1999. -- Alex Dering

I can't say I understand my creation, but it sure was fun making it.

A high school secretary has been charged with illegally changing grades in a school computer system to improve her daughter's class standing and with lowering the grades of two other girls. --Elanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I just supervised a teaching demonstration in the Writing Popular Fiction program here at Seton HIll, and the experience inspired me to touch up an old handout on developing ideas for short stories.

A short story is tight -- there is no room for long exposition, there are no subplots to explore, and by the end of the story there should be no loose ends to tie up.  End right at the climax, so that the reader has to imagine how a life-changing event will affect the protagonist.

[...]

While readers of genre fiction (such as horror, fantasy, or mystery) have certain specific expectations, in general the reader's enjoyment comes from identifying the crucial revelation -- what James Joyce described as an epiphany -- that defines the moral significance of the protagonist's actions.

• Your goody-two-shoes protagonist happens upon an envelope from a cancer testing lab.  It's addressed to her arch enemy.  The story ends with the protagonist tearing the envelope open. [What's inside the envelope is not as important as your character's decision to snoop.]
  
• A husband comes home from work early, carrying flowers and a diamond bracelet.  He he hears her singing a romantic duet with someone else. He might first check to see that he's got the receipt, or he might set his jaw and open up the display box, or he might first stick the bracelet in his wife's gas tank.  [We don't actually need to see his wife's reaction -- his decision to knock on the door means he's chosen a confrontation rather than walking away.]
  
• The protagonist is in the upstairs hallway of someone else's house.  She hears snoring in the next room, pulls out a rope, and reaches for the switch in order to turn off the light. [Obviously the story would need to give us a little more detail about who this person is and what she wants, but once she makes her decision, the story is over.]
  

Drawing on real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are looking for a "personal essay" topic. But simply describing powerful emotional experiences ("She would never forget the wonderful feeling..."  "He was more furious than he had ever been...") is not the same thing as generating emotional responses in the reader.

Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user's choices. -- Jakob Neilsen

Set phasers to "meh"! 

My wife arranged a visit to The Franklin Institute a couple of weeks ago. We didn't actually know that this Star Trek exhibit was there.  I was ready to pass, in favor of the more educational exhibits, but my wife made it a Father's Day treat and shelled out enough gold-pressed latinum for the four of us.

No photography was allowed in the exhibit, which was annoying, so I wasn't going to blog it at all because, well, sometimes words are boring.  But this YouTube clip, in between the chatter and the promos, shows some of the collection.



Despite her ability to channel William Shatner, my seven-year-old quickly got restless. My son enjoys reading every single line on every single card in every single display, so we took our time working through the place.  I kept hoping maybe there would be a ball pit full of tribbles for the girl, or a dress-up area where she could try on different forehead bumps.  No such luck.  My wife had to take her out early.

Chris Anderson is best-known for championing the long tail (marketing to the niche customers who fill out the trailing end of a demographics chart, rather than trying to create products to please the mass market) and has been promoting a book on the topic.  One of the early reviewers for his book identified great swaths that were taken, without citation, from Wikipedia.   

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources...

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions... Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. -- Chris Anderson, in an e-mail to Waldo Jaquith (VQR)

A highly visible internet economy expert, and the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, working with an editor on a print project (not blogging in the heat of the moment) chooses to drop citations altogether, rather than dig a little deeper to find out information that any freshman comp student is expected to know?

Anderson is certainly doing the right thing by taking responsibility right away, rather than hoping it will blow over (it won't).

Jaquith (who broke the story on the Virginia Quarterly Review's blog) is careful to note that "All ideas that form of the core the book are credited, and his own thesis that he builds upon that showed no signs of being anybody's but his own."

Since, as I understand it, copies of Anderson's book have been floating around in draft form for some time, it's theoretically possible that some of Anderson's own writing might have been inappropriately pasted into Wikipedia articles.  (Just now, I put a segment of Anderson's text into Turnitin.com, and the service marked it all as having appeared on Anderson's blog, where in fact an excerpt from the book was recently published.  Turnitin.com didn't drill down any deeper than that.)

If Anderson had maintained a habit of properly citing every use of Wikipedia text, it would be easier to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that uncited passages were appropriated by Wikipedia users.  But Anderson's reply takes responsibility for failing to cite, even though the "I didn't know how to do it" excuse holds little weight.

The "long tail" meme has its critics, so I expect there will be a lot of chatter about this.  I certainly have no desire to purchase this book now.  I'll buy one from a different author -- someone out there in the long tail.

Woah! Trying to charge bloggers who quote more than 5 words was bad enough (I no longer quote from or link to AP stories).

But the most contentious element in the new policy, which the union also decried as "vague," gives this instruction to employees using Facebook: "Monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn't violate AP standards: any such material should be deleted."

"That's the part that makes us cringe," Winton said, adding that the union is "reviewing it with legal counsel."

That means AP reporters, and all other AP employees, are held responsible for any comments posted by their friends to pictures or links on their profiles. -- Wired

I've never been a phone guy.  My voicemail recording advises people to e-mail me rather than wait for me to remember to check my messages. 

Around 2004, I told a class of students that I didn't use instant messager because I would have nobody to talk to.  I got a generous "awww!" of pity from the class. 

I didn't mean to imply that I had no friends; rather, for years I had already been keeping up with friends and family via e-mail and telephone, and with professional contacts through e-mail, blogs, and Usenet.  I had no personal or professional need to hang out in chat rooms, so I've never done it (just as I have never gone para-sailing, or owned a ferret).

If you spread my handheld computer investment across the 12 years I've used a PDA, I've spent a very reasonable $4/month.  I will probably want my next PDA to have WiFi, but I'm never more than a few steps from a computer when I'm at work or home.  I just don't feel obligated to pay the phone company so that, if I'm out on an errand or playing with the kids in the backyard, I will be available to high school students with grammar questions or SEO prospectors asking me for reciprocal links.

While liveblogging a talk at Computers and Writing 2009, I overheard people talking about the back-channel discussion that was occurring on Twitter.  In the registration room, there was a projection stream displaying the Twitter feed for #cw09. 

For the first time, I found a reason to tweet. 

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means -- individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites -- were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists' access to events, the protesters have used Twitter's agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or "tag," each of their tweets with the same bit of type -- #IranElection -- so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth. -- Noam Cohen, New York Times