Jerz's Literacy Weblog

Part of an Ars Technica review of Google's new operating system.

Longtime Ars readers may be familiar with my periodic rants about the increasing disutility of the "volume/directory/file" metaphor for modern networked machines. Saving files, copying them, syncing them--this is all pointless clerical work that I want my computer to do for me.

Bravo.

I guess I won't be linking to any many more NYT articles.

NYT has disabled their special access for webmasters

One of my students posted this on her blog... she'll be presenting it tonight in class.  I'm looking forward to it!  Here's a parody, by Meagan Gemperlein

At the beginning of the semester, I had blogged about hating blogging, but really in the end it wasn't that terrible. I came to see how it can be useful in a classroom setting and help promote classroom discussion. So the song parody is a realization that blogging can only help you understand something and not hurt you.

BLOGGING IN THE USA

A Song Parody of "Party in the USA" sung by Miley Cyrus

I started reading Huck Finn mid October with a hope to understand the text

But then who's this dude who's talking weird

Woah, gotta be a dialect

Figured out it's Huck an he's the main character

The book's his adventure down the Mississippi River

But this is all so crazy

Cause I can't understand a word he's saying

My head is hurting and I'm feeling really confused

Too much reading and I'm uptight

That's when I mark the page and just move on

I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it later on, I'll just blog it late on

CHORUS:

So I sign on to my blog and I write my thoughts away

My classmate comment like yeah

And I get new ideas like yeah

So I sign on to my blog

Now I'll write a thesis that will be OK

Yeah, I'm just blogging in the USA (more)

I've had a Kindle DX for a few weeks now. I've been using it as I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland to my daughter. I haven't yet used the Kindle to buy any books, but I've stuffed it with out-of-copyright classics and academic PDFs.

It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to set up the text files, break them into chapters, and set my text-to-speech program to generate the MP3s.  Depending on how long the text is, it might take 20 minutes for the MP3s to generate, but there's always something to do while I'm waiting.

Over the past couple of years, I'd gotten rather accustomed to using Text Aloud's file splitter utility to break a long e-text into separate chapter files, converting each chapter in to a separate MP3, and setting my voice recorder to require me to push "play" to start a new file.  I lie there in bed, with my finger over the "play" button, like a train engineer with his hand on the dead man switch. When I fall asleep, the recorder doesn't go on to the next chapter, so when I wake up in the morning I can jump back to the previous chapter, and in between snooze alarms, fast-forward to the last part I remember.

The Kindle has a very useful text-to-speech option, and in the past few weeks I've used it to listen to The Wizard of Oz and A Christmas Carol, both of which I've read several times the conventional way.  I'm teaching them as light after-Thanksgiving books in two different classes, and I've found that listening to a familiar text forces me to think about it in a different way.

But when I fall asleep listening to an e-Book on the Kindle, I wake up the next morning and the Kindle has advanced chapter-by-chapter all the way to the end of the book. It only takes a few minutes to find the table of contents and figure out what was the last chapter I remember before dozing off.  It's not a big complaint, but it is something I'd like to be able to control.

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

Via Jay is Games

We are pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we're calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme "escape". It's text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full details are below, so fire up your Z-code compiler and get to writing!

• Design a one-room game of interactive fiction in Z-code that incorporates the theme: "escape".

• 1st place:
  • $1,000
• 2nd place:
  • $500
• 3rd place:
  • $250

The deadline for entries is
Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 11:59PM (GMT-5:00).

unfriend - verb - To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, "I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight."

"It has both currency and potential longevity," notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year. Most "un-" prefixed words are adjectives (unacceptable, unpleasant), and there are certainly some familiar "un-" verbs (uncap, unpack), but "unfriend" is different from the norm. It assumes a verb sense of "friend" that is really not used (at least not since maybe the 17th century!). Unfriend has real lex-appeal." --Oxford University Press blog

Sadly, I haven't had time to play any of the IF Comp games this year, but here are the winners.

Vote Summary
Place	Game	Avg.	Std. Dev.	No. Votes
1	Rover's Day Out	7.96	1.65	92
2	Broken Legs	7.39	1.72	92
3	Snowquest	7.37	1.41	101

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.

Beatiful graphic visualization of CYOA books.  Not just in the abstract -- these are visualizations of specific CYOA titles.

At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page. A smaller number of pages tell a conclusion to the story and represent an endpoint with no further jumps. We can subdivide these 'narrative' and 'endings' groups further based on the number of choices offered or the goodness of the ending. To visualize this, imagine color-coding every page in the book and then laying the pages out next to each other:

In this example book, page one is a 'branching' decision, meaning there are at least two choices offered to the reader. The second page is a 'story' page, meaning that it was either a text page that had a single forced choice (e.g., 'To continue, turn to page 30'), or an illustration page outside of the stream of the story. The brightly colored pages are endings of various degrees of direness. Great endings come in the middle and at the end of this selection of pages. The first ending in the book is an unfortunate one -- a common trope in these stories. --Samizdat

Do not miss the animations representing paths through the novel. A beautiful site! Thanks for the recommendation, Danielle!

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

Many have defined the problem -- people are abandoning old media for new in droves -- but nobody has come remotely close to figuring out the formula to monetize this audience in a way that ensures the range and level of news and periodical content and offers the rich experience advertisers will pay a premium to be part of.

Pulling it off would take characteristic Apple hardware/software flair -- and a bit of uncharacteristic magnanimity. But the "X" factor is Jobs himself. Whatever you believe about his health, Jobs will not live forever. We're guessing that he, like all high achievers, believes that yesterday's accomplishments, however fantastic, are also yesterday's news. If he is looking for One Last Thing, saving journalism would be the Holy Grail. --Wired

Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry - and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago.

"I don't think people realize how big this has become, and how quickly," said Weintraub, adding that a popular top flog campaign can generate 10,000 daily sales. --MSNBC

I certainly realize it. Now that a lot of the conversations that used to take place on blogs are taking place on Twitter, I'm getting far more comments from spammers than from visitors. I'm glad to see someone's writing about this advertising trend.

At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud.

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

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

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

Dieckmann laid out the pro side first from an economic perspective, noting that economy has become a watchword as many IT departments seek to maintain a high level of service even as their budgets are pared down.

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.

The Kindle e-book reader frees academics from having to carry around a huge collection of chunks of matter, but flipping from main text to footnotes is awkward, and the highlighting tool doesn't replace the bracketing, underlining, and commenting that we do between the lines.

In a few days, I expect to be the owner of a new Kindle DX (the full-page reader, designed for magazines and full-page PDF readings). I found the Kindle most useful when I was reading for pleasure.

I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them. --Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed

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

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