Recently in the Philosophy Category

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

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

I shrugged. "Just throwing some stuff away."

He staggered.  "You!??"

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

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

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

Somewhere, keep an empty shelf.

A few years ago, my daughter was thrilled to receive a hand-me-down fanny pack. (See the price tag hanging on my spiffy new one?)
Earlier this month, when my wife took the kids on a family visit for about 10 days, my daughter cried for me at night.

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

Tom Wolfe (author of space program biography The Right Stuff (which incidentally was the movie I took my first-ever date to see back in 1983) ) describes how the Cold War derailed the grand adventure of space exploration. Shockingly, the decay started while the Apollo program was still underway.

[I]n October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program's launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus's Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.

Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA's irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists -- irreplaceable! -- there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn't just run an ad saying, "Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert" ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

Keats can keep his urn with its leaf-fring'd legend. I've got a much better slice-of-life to share. When I called my parents tonight, my father reminded me of an exchange he had with my daughter when she was about four.

My Daughter (to her grandfather): This is my teddy bear.

My Father (to his granddaughter): I like it. Can I keep it?

My Daughter: (No answer.)

My Father: Can I have it when you're done with it?

My Daughter: You'll be dead by then.

My Father: (No answer.)

My Daughter (helpfully): When I'm done with it, I'll put it on your grave.

My Father: (No answer.)

(Later)

My Father (to me): I didn't tell her I want to be cremated. We'd have to get a little urn for the bear.

As I was putting my 10-year-old son to bed tonight, as usual we had a long, free-ranging, unrushed conversation. Somehow I mentioned the missing Doctor Who tapes.

Peter got very thoughtful.

"If I had a time machine, I could go back to the moment those tapes disappeared. And I could bring them forward in time, so that they wouldn't be lost. But there would be one problem. By going back in time to the moment the tapes disappeared, and keeping them from being lost, wouldn't I be responsible for making them disappear? But I wouldn't have ever gone back in time unless the tapes had disappeared."

I told Peter he had stumbled across a closed causal loop -- a concept that I introduce when I teach the play Oedipus Tyrannos. (In that play, the protagonist hears a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, leaves the court of his foster-father in order to escape the prophecy, kills a stranger who just happens to be his real father, and ends up marrying a widow who just happens to be his mother.)

Bring on the bongo drums and the black turtlenecks -- this looks like fun. Students in a poetry class were asked to write their poetry on a piece of fruit, and then share their text with the class.

Melanie stood holding her Cassaba melon like a globe or Yorick's skull in her left hand and read it slowly rotating it to see all the lines; she then passed the Cassaba around and everyone read a line; amazingly, there were exactly 13 circular lines on the melon; she then cut it open with a sharp folding knife of illegal dimensions (on an airplane, certainly) and passed slices that everyone ate like communion, there being present also an eerie, nearly sacerdotal silence. And so it went, fruit after fruit, read, performed, eaten, in an order that could have not been more perfect if Noah's monitors had been there. We thus learned that: a) poetry can be edible (and perhaps it should be); b) fruit is a sexier medium than paper or pixels; c) school could be fun, d) "intermediate" could mean that even though the medium had not been quite reached (advanced), the closeness to experience itself (beginning), made it worthwhile, e) it's not so easy to write on fruit without good magic markers, and f) T.S. Eliot need not be memorized. --Andrei Codrescu, Inside Higher Ed

Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are killing our own chances to have readers in the future or be remunerated for the scholarship we do. It's not only about the modest royalties that faculty authors may or may not receive, it's about the principle of valuing each other's scholarship and editorial work. I order good, attractive and useful paper-and-binding books or textbooks for my classes because I want there to be a system in place to support my work as an author and editor in the future.

If the paper and binding book vanishes as a dominant commodity, as it seems to be, maybe the new virtual system of book distribution, reproduction and delivery will allay some of the problems I describe in relation to photocopies and PDFs. It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? -- Christopher Conway, Inside Higher Ed

A researcher who studies World of Warcraft likens leading in-game raiding parties to teaching a class.

Raiding has taught me that being a good teacher requires laying down strict guidelines while simultaneously demonstrating real care for your students. The stronger the ties of trust and respect between teacher and student, the more weight they will bear. In the past I've cringed when my raid leaders cheerfully announced that we would spend the next four hours dying over, and over, and over again to a boss who seemed impossible to defeat. But I've trusted them, done my job, and ultimately we have triumphed because they insisted on perseverance. The visiting raid leader who took us through the Kael raid lacked that history with us -- he was too much of a stranger to ask us to dig deep and give big.

A willingness to take risks can also be shored up by commitment and drive. Our guest leader drove my guildies nuts, but impressed me with his professionalism. Does this mean that after graduate school even generous doses of sadism seem unremarkable? Perhaps. But it also indicates that I was willing to work hard to see Kael dead, even if it meant catching some flack. For them, it was a game, and when it stopped being fun they lost interest.

What I learned that night was that I believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. Obviously, I don't think they are teaching methods that should be used often, or be at the heart of our pedagogy. But I do think that there are occasions when it is appropriate to let people know that there is no safety net. There are times -- not all the time, or most of the time, but occasionally and inevitably -- when you have to tell people to shut up and do their job. I'm not happy to discover that I believe this, and in some ways I wish I didn't. But Warcraft has taught me that I there is a place for "sink or swim" methods in teaching. (Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed)

The headline immediately caught my attention.  I went to Catholic high school, and while most of my teachers were laypeople (that is, not nuns or priests), my freshman year I had an octogenarian Latin teacher (a priest) who would threaten to throw erasers at us -- but always with a twinkle in his eye.  He was actually very patient and charming, but he used the eraser threat as if he were parodying the stereotype of a strict teacher. 

My Algebra II / Trigonometry teacher was not a parody, she was serious. Usually, the only praise she ever gave was moving on to the next student after you'd survived your grilling. After a quiz, she would say "Everyone who got an A, bring your paper up.  Now everyone who got a B, bring your paper up.  Now, all the rest of you."  That was a sort of reverse humiliation, since the rest of us saw that someone was able to earn an A. She called us "Sir Jerz" or "Lady Ryan," which I suppose was vaguely appropriate, since our mascot was a knight, but I'm sure her goal was to take us down a peg or two and remind us who was really in charge.  If we answered her question with a "yes," she'd say "Yes, what?" And we'd say, "Yes, sister." 

I've had plenty of other teachers who were more personable, and made me feel happier while I was in the classroom, but she really stands out in my memory. But boy, she really made me want to study.

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Donald Justice (1925-2004)

I turned into a bobble-head doll, nodding, nodding, nodding, while reading this excerpt. I've already requested it for the library.

We are at a crossroads. There are two possible paths before us--one in which we destroy what is great about the Internet and about how young people use it, and one in which we make smart choices and head toward a bright future in a digital age. The stakes of our actions today are very high. The choices that we are making now will govern how our children and grandchildren live their lives in many important ways: how they shape their identities, protect their privacy, and keep themselves safe; how they create, understand, and shape the information that underlies the decision-making of their generation; and how they learn, innovate, and take responsibility as citizens. On one of these paths, we seek to constrain their creativity, self-expression, and innovation in public and private spheres; on the other, we embrace these things while minimizing the dangers that come with the new era.

Fear is the single biggest obstacle to getting started on that second path, the one where we realize the potential of digital technology and the way that Digital Natives are using it. Parents, educators, and psychologists all have legitimate reasons to worry about the digital environment in which young people are spending so much of their time. So do corporations, who see their revenues at risk in industry after industry--recorded entertainment, telephony, newspapers, and on and on. Lawmakers, responding to this sense of crisis, fear that they will pay a high price if they fail to act in the traditional manner to right these wrongs. The choices that we are making now will govern how our children and grandchildren live their lives in many important ways: how they shape their identities, protect their privacy, and keep themselves safe.

The media feeds this fear. News coverage is saturated with frightening stories of cyberbullying, online predators, Internet addiction, and online pornography. Of course parents worry. Parents worry most that their digitally connected kids are at risk of abduction when they spend hours a day in an uncontrolled digital environment where few things are precisely as they seem at first glance. They worry, too, about bullying that their children may encounter online, addiction to violent video games, and access to pornographic and hateful images. --Palfrey and Gasser

Last year a colleague in the English department described a conversation in which a friend revealed a dirty little secret: "I use Wikipedia all the time for my research--but I certainly wouldn't cite it."  This got me wondering: How many humanities and social sciences researchers are discussing, using, and citing Wikipedia? -- Lisa Spiro

When the subject is pop culture, political rumors, new internet trends, or if the author is clearly citing something way out of his or her subject domain (such as an engineer citing the literary origin of the term "robot" or a humanist explaining a geek joke) then I would prefer that the body of the paper identify that the source is Wikipedia, in which case I would register the link, absorb the fact that the author has just signaled that this point is simply explanatory and not crucial to the main argument, and I would move on.

But if a growing number of academics are using Wikipedia in their published scholarly work, then the "No Wikipedia, Ever!!" mindset requires re-examination.

The headline writer was having an off day, but the content -- a thoughtful examination of the trolling subculture -- is excellent. NYT Magazine.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling -- for provoking strangers online -- have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

Interesting observations on the internet's response to the death of Randy ("The Last Lecture") Pausch.

You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet. --Alexis Madrigal

When you die, would you rather be remembered as a technology hack who annoyed millions and forced them to waste time by weeding through torrents of junk e-mail, or a brilliant teacher who inspired millions to treasure every moment of the time they have left?

According to police, Edward Davidson, the "spam king" whose wife helped him break out of a minimum security prison, has killed himself, his wife, and a child yesterday. He was famous for getting rich off of the stupid people who respond to unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements.

According to various news reports, Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University became a YouTube sensation, has run out of time in his battle with pancreatic cancer today. He was famous for giving the rest of us a model for how to face our final days.

The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV:

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car -- or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up -- and see if you're tempted.

But not just tempted. Not just amused or excited by the possibility of becoming a dark hero of the criminal underworld. You need to determine if you're actually willing and able to act on those temptations. You need to determine whether it's possible for you to change from whoever you were into someone completely different, someone who no longer recognizes the conditions and regulations of a society that, until you played the video game, were all you knew and believed in. That is, you need to find out just how stupid you really are.

Chair: Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems, USA)

Information Flows and Social Capital in Weblogs: A Case Study in the Brazilian Blogosphere (Long Paper)

Raquel Recuero

Qualitative study. Perception is that bloggers are just wasting time, but people have strong personal reasons for blogging. Went quickly through the obligatory background slide... I wonder that this audience might include so many quantitative researchers that she might have spent a bit of time explaining more about ethnography. Again, I'm used to scholarship with a long discursive introduction, so I always feel out of place when presenters rush through their introduction. I'm generally far more intersted in the related research and the motiations for study than in the mechanics of the model, but that's a feature of my disciplinary training.

Ethnographic study of very personal connections in a small web network of Brazillian bloggers.  Motives for blogging include creating personal identity, social interaction.  Popularity is a strong draw; getting more comments, being the center of a network; a blog is a "publicity strategy"

Age range 15-50 years. Some 32 of [did she say 40 some?] bloggers in the community responded.  Tracked "interaction memes" (everyone does it; publish the meme to belong) and "informational memes" (an opportunity to create authority and popularity by being the first to post a meme).

Interaction memes -- send a questionnaire or the equivalent of a chain letter, bond with your gorup by answering these questions creatively.

This is different from publishing information that there's a new online journal or YouTube link -- these kinds of links aren't repeated.

Interactional memes are connected to creating a personal space. Informational memes are connecting to creating authority and knowledge. What social capital does the blogger want?

Interactional memes -- visibility, interaction, social spupprt. (Relatively more emphais on maintaining new ties.) [This is about modding and mutating the meme, so that it maintains its novelty, not passing it along.]

Informational memes --  visibility, reputation, popularity, authority. Bridging (creating new ties) rather than maintaining and strengthening existing ones. [It's likely that bloggers who regularly come up with new ideas probably have at least some "long" connections with people who aren't tightly connected within their groups.]

Making Revisions Hyper-Visible (Short Paper)
David Kolb

14 years ago, published "Socrates in the Labyrinth."  How do you revise a hypertext?  Mentioned some philosophers who published retractions and revisions; scholars publish both versions.  Notes that Auden and other poets revised their works when collecting them for many reasons, both internal and external.

Revising literary works and revising expository or argumentative works. Consider that Joyce revised "afternoon, a story" -- if you mark them they seem like part of the text. There are very few reasons to emphasize revisions in a literary hypertext. In an argumentative work, you might make those revisions and the reasons for them explicit.

Not just the revised text, but also the meta-comments about the work.

Print -- you have two volumes, with the later one footnoting the earlier one. The new version generally replaces the old version, since print operates on an economy of scarcity. Hypertext has an economy of abundance.  Wikipedia and Word hide the revisions. In hypertext, you will link the old and new versions. You could leave the old structure and add notes. But a significant update would include new links; the revision will embrace the original (or large parts thereof) but add complexity.

Revision of an argumentative hypertext will lead to a new hypertext with an more elaborate link pattern. [I'm following this closely because I'm working on the development of the map to Colossal Cave Adventure, and all this talk about nodes and paths is sparking lots of ideas.]

Why revise hyper-visibly? Helps scholars clarify what was meant; helps readers identify the changes; helps readers judge whether the changes are useful; provides more chance for the author and reader to think together about the issues.

Audience comment: This is a subset of a more general problem -- we don't have rich enough object models in which the objects were all accessible in versions, this problem would go away. [I can't help but think again of the variable implementations of Douglas Adams' H2G2 -- TV show, radio play, IF game, movie...]

Audience comment: When we change words we often intend to change the whole work [but the example was poetry, rather than David's example of expository.]

We're All Stars Now: Reality Television, Web 2.0, and Mediated Identities (Short Paper)
Michael A. Stefanone and Derek Lackaff

Derek began by echoing Raquel's paper. Why would someone post the cursed rabbit confessioal meme? What happens to identity when it gets mediated. Invoked the post-coporality promised by Turkle and others. [I'm reminded of My Tiny Life, where Dibbell notes that the best writers got the most virtual "action" -- while people were no longer limited by their bodies, the were, in a textual environment, defined by their ability to write. I think it was insightful for a writer like DIbbell to percive that a world that doles out rewards according to writing talent is really no more fair than a world that rewards looks or riches.]

Reality TV recently voted 2nd worst invention of all time, but it's very popuar. Rise of Web 2.0 represents ability of people to participate. [I note that "youtubing" has entered the lexicon... ]

Observational learning -- requires a model, a learnable behavior, and a context that conduces people to model behavior. [Reminds me of the Frontline video, "Merchants of Cool," that tracks trends through the various forces that combine to manage what the "mooks" and "midriffs" of the world think are cool.]

Hyphotheses -- Reality TV consumption related to time spent on social networking sites, breadth of networks including online only friends, and photos shared online. Asked participants to self-report.

People who watch TV news, fiction, documentaries has little effect on network size, connectness, or photo sharing; rate of watching Reality TV is significant.

Takeaway - we have empirical links between traditional media consumption (watching TV) and the "really cool things that are going on online."  Definite change in the understanding of social space. People talking about the social networks that they're part of in new ways. Having an identity online is increasingly banal.

Look at specific media genres -- not TV as a whole, but what kind of TV being watched. [The reality TV genre really got its start during a writers strike in 1989. COPS, Americas Funniest Vidoes... also a resurgence of sitcoms based on figures who could provide their own content, such as Roseanne Barr, Tim Allen... probably building on the success of The Cosby Show.]

Future directions -- attention as power, validity of articulate network structures.

Audience comment: Note that professionals and academics put up lots of information about themselves; we do a different kind of self-promotion, but is it really different from youth social networking?

Response: The scale of social networking sites is greater... novel in the scope.

Mark noted that it could be social networking that gets people interested in reality TV.

The Revenge of the Page (Long Paper)
David Kolb

The little paper on revision you heard a little while ago was the paper he had intended to write... the issue of complexity began as a footnote, then became an appendix.  The dream was complexly linked hypertexts with long, complicated hyperlinks; patterns of links that demand rereading and demanding contemplation beyond the boundaries of the next link.

Quote from Mark B invoking the concept of complex linking... Moulthrop's Victory Garden. Complex literary effects to be achieved from this idea.

14 years later, "Let's face it, there aren't very many complex hypertexts like that."

Wikipedia's links are all single-step links, going from one self-contained mini-essay to another; links are "you want more information? Here's some more."

Reality: Google Analytics looks at Kolb's own example of a complex hypertext: Kolb's Sprawling Places. [I have got to follow up on this for my work on Colossal Cave.]

Kolb notes that Google Images is sending most of his visitors attracted by words in photo captions. Almost nobody visited a large number of pages. Most people navigate through the site by clicking the menu bars rather than the inline links.

Trivial number of people encountered his text in the way he hoped reading would develop. Does it make sense to continue to support the idea of expository and argumentative texts with complex linking patterns.

There are some assertions that can't be made well in a single page; understanding of some concepts requires complexity. [I would add that complex sites can also meet the needs of multiple users, giving newbies a way to explore unfamiliar terms, and advanced users more depth, generalists more breadth, etc.]

The page metaphor -- we expect a page to contain a little mini self-contained essay. We browse things we expect to be relatively self-sufficient. Web-writing tools are optimized for the creation of pages. The link becomes the link between pages rather than part of a chain of links.

But there's a deeper reason. Node and link hypertext itself is one node at a time. We expect one node to replace the other. Maybe we need to do more than we've done if we want complexity. Maybe hypertext is more than nodes and links.

Collage/montage? Make the individual pages more complex. You could use the collage effect of a page to create complexity within the page.  Pages are becoming more than pages -- embedded rich media.

You might also make more than one node visible. You can have a web page spawn another window, but that's seldom done.

Replace complexity of linkage with complexity of spatial juxtaposition. [That's a return to the model of the highly annotated illuminated medieval manuscript.]

More sophistication in the relationship between tet and graphics. Images aren't simple illustration. [That's an interesting connection to the idea about links..  an image that merely illustrates is like a Wikipedia link that simply offers more information. A link can also offer an alternative opinion, provide context, refute opposition, etc.]

layertennis.com -- color commentary on two graphic artists competing with each other to generate images in the same file on different layers. The play of images and text is a way to bring complexity into web habits of reading.

Audience comment: Shocked that the invention of the web browser is a done deal and there's not much else to do with hypertext.  The web browser chains hypertexts in the same way that the book when it was first invented was chained to the wall. [But hold on... the illuminated medieval manuscript was chained to the wall because the value of the labor and materials that went into the production of that book was probably higher than the value of the building to which the book was chained. How does the "browser as chained book" metaphor map to the present information economy? The pen that's chained to the desk in the bank isn't there to prevent people from writing, it's there so that people who are in the bank can count on having a pen there for them to use.   I don't see the chianed book reference hanigng together beyond a surface analogy that the medum of the browser is like a chain, but the chained public book was chained so that more people could consult the book and not hide it in their private collection.]

As long as those pesky neighborhood kids stay off of Joseph Epstein's lawn, the rest of us can read his Weekly Standard essay about the generation gap in education. I went to a Catholic high school, where I figured out that the whole point of requiring uniforms and "Yes, Sister... No, Sister" was to give the kids something concrete but harmless on which to focus their rebellious energy.  I could come to school in mismatched socks and a garish tie, and nowhere in the student manual did it say I was doing anything illegal.

I always pictured the sisters snickering behind their office doors. "Young Jerz thinks he's hot stuff because he managed to get ahold of a stack of signed hall passes." (I used them to get out of class so that I could work on the sets for the theater productions, but of course the teachers wouldn't have let me out of class if they thought I would cause trouble or fall behind.)

Epstein makes a good point about the role of feelings in literary analysis. I always cringe when a student dismisses a text because "It didn't hold my interest."  (Bad book! How dare you challenge my world view or create an occasion to reflect on something outside my personal interests?)  Since Seton Hill University markets itself as a caring place, and I chose to work at an institution that would reward me for expressing a personal interest in my students, Epstein would probably see me as part of the problem that he's identifying here.

What do you think... does he go too far? Am I defending the coddled millennials because I identify more with them than I do with Epstein's generation?

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn't become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint--and maybe a touch of the fear, too--that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were.

So often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to--but did not--write: "D-, Too much love in the home." I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality. Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement.

Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I've got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear.

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you've got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It's a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We'll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it's going.

Then, there'll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

Times Online:

In December 2005 a study in the journal Nature offered the observation that the circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, which sustains the Gulf Stream, had weakened by up to 30 per cent over the previous few decades. This figure and its juxtapositioning alongside the melodrama of films such as The Day after Tomorrow were amplified through the cooperation of scientists and media to result in headlines such as "Alarm over dramatic weakening of Gulf Stream" ( The Guardian, Dec 1, 2005). The urban myth that emerged from this episode was that we were closer to a mini Ice Age in the UK than had previously been thought. Eighteen months later, however, and unremarked by the media, two studies in equally reputable journals pointed out that such a trend was within the range of natural variability and may signify nothing at all.

A second example concerns the claim that, "by the end of this century, climate change will have killed around 182 million people in sub-Saharan Africa" (Christian Aid, May 2006). This number - 180 million African dead - has become one of the most widely cited numbers in the litany of doom that accompanies talk of climate change. In this case, however, the number 180 million was sexed-up science. Christian Aid took the worst-case climate scenario, the highest population scenario and the scenario with the least public health intervention and conjured the number into being. And here it has stayed, a number detached from its receding scientific origins in which assumptions were overlain on scenarios that captured uncertainties.

So... according to the headline, we should only *sometimes* accept exaggerated and bogus numbers as scientific fact?

Structure, Sign, and Play

An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida

"There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: "Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an 'event', if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect."

The concept is clever, though the implementation is a bit shaky... for example, one room mentions a spiral staircase, but when you type "climb staircase" the game says "You don't see any such thing."

Clive Thompon is not writing from the same world where I live.

Thirty-six hours? How in god's name had I managed to spend almost four hours a day inside this game? I should point out that this was not the only game I'd been playing during that time. I'd also been hip-deep in BioShock and Space Giraffe, so I'd been planted like a weed in front of my consoles for hours more. This is a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it. So the question of the column, and possibly the question of my eternal soul, is: Is this good thing? How much does it change the architecture of your life to spend that much time playing games? The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We're often gripped by what I call "gamer regret" -- a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.

I vaguely remember what it was like to spend a whole weekend playing a video game. Last weekend I was up until 3 or 4 am Saturday and Sunday mornings, because I knew that would be the only blocks of unbroken time that I would have in order to solve some MT4 installation problems. Last week I scheduled consultations with students in my basic comp course, and while I thoroughly enjoy talking with each student, I hadn't realized just how quickly all my other work backed up. I sure wish I had the time to lament spending too much time on video games!

If we teach our children that school is a prison, then summer school is extra punishment for the worst offenders. The sting of humiliation and failure adds to the pain of having to go to school when your friends are free.

That's too bad, because summer school isn't a punishment, it's an opportunity. In terms of education, summer vacation isn't a well-deserved rest; it's the time students forget much of what they learned.

[...]

Summer vacation persists because of tradition, inertia and the desire of some businesses for seasonal labor. The school calendar may have agrarian roots, but there's nothing natural about it. The good lord may have decreed that plants sprout in the spring and are harvested in the fall, but he never said kids were supposed to stop learning in the summer. --Holmes: Send them all to summer school (Daily News Trivia)

Sheesh. When I used to teach a two-semester freshman writing course, I was shocked at how much backsliding there was over Christmas.

After I returned the first assignment in January and said something like, "This is not high school anymore, and I won't expect to have to repeat material that should still be in your notebooks," the next assignments were much better.

Gamers are unequivocal: "Dying gives a game meaning", say posters on the PC Advisor forums. Markus Montola, a researcher at Tampere University in Finland, takes this further: "You have a motivation - to avoid being annoyed by dying. Motivation is what makes the game meaningful."

Pete Hines - vice-president at Bethesda, the developer behind the role-playing game Oblivion and its expansion pack, Shivering Isles - agrees. "Having your character die or fail is important because your actions have to have some meaning in the game, and to you."

But is the death of your character the right way to give a game meaning? Peter Molyneux of Lionhead, the developer of Fable, Black & White and The Movies, says: "A fight has to cost the player something, or it loses its meaning. Previously, that cost was time and tedium [in replaying a level]. But is that the right cost?" --Kate Bevan --Why do we have to die in games? (Guardian)

An ideal example of abandonment is the relationship between Linus and The Great Pumpkin. Every Halloween, Linus faithfully waits by a pumpkin patch, in the hopes that he will be blessed with the holy experience of a visitation by The Great Pumpkin. Of course, The Great Pumpkin never shows up, and He never answers Linus' letters. Despite this, Linus remains steadfast, even going door to door to spread the word of his absent deity. Does The Great Pumpkin exist? We can never know. But from an existential point of view, it doesn't matter if he exists or not. The important thing is that Linus is abandoned and alone in his pumpkin patch.

[...]

Why does Charlie Brown tear himself into knots over the little red-haired girl? The very possibility that he could go over and talk to her is far more distressing than its impossibility would be; he must take ownership of his failure. When she is the victim of a bully in the school yard, Charlie Brown's despair threatens to leap right off the comic page. He isn't suffering because he can't help her, but because he could help her, but won't: "Why can't I rush over there and save her? Because I'd get slaughtered, that's why..." When Linus helps her out instead, thereby illustrating his freedom of action, Charlie Brown only becomes more melancholic. --Nathan Radke --Sartre & Peanuts (Philosophy Now)

Of course, Charlie Brown does keep trying to kick the football, so he is not completely immobilized. He is also the manager and pitcher of a hopeless baseball team, but he (and his teammates) keep playing anyway. Radke interprets these incidents as a sign of disconnectedness with the past, and the possibility of change.

Lucy's own psychological problems make her a fairly suspect voice of reason in her role as Charlie Brown's therapist. But in Schroeder's veneration of Beethoven, we do see a largely positive representation of humanist faith.

"In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge 'as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth." --Richard Rorty, 1931-2007 (Telos Press)

I had signed up for his course on American Pragmatism, for what would have been my fourth semester in the MA program at the University of Virginia. But I finished my degree after my third semester and withdrew from all my U.Va. classes in order to work full-time.

As a tender young MA student, I found Rorty's philosophy a bit hollow, and his relativism too far along the slippery slope of postmodernism. He was the respondent when Fredric Crews gave a lecture on Christian Humanism. I learned quite a bit about the profession by watching these two learned gentlemen disagree with each other intellectually, yet remain personable and even jovial throughout the evening. I signed up for his course because I thought he would either help me to take the plunge and overcome my fears of postmodernism, or help me more clearly articulate where I disagreed with it.

Now that I have taught courses in aesthetics and critical theory, I wish I had taken that class. Advanced scholars have had far more opportunity to understand and account for their own personal biases than tender young MA students. I have learned that researching critical theory isn't terribly useful when I was only grazing through the literature looking for quotes to support the argument I had already formed even before I started writing the paper.

That is, of course, why I didn't like pragmatism -- it argued that there is no universal truth, there are only useful conventions that society clings to as long as the conventions fulfill a need. That's the kind of statement that shakes one's bedrock beliefs, but in later years I've realized it also clears the way for a fascinating examination of the humanist approach to morality, which is very important when you are asking students from diverse cultural backgrounds to assess issues of morality and universality in a text -- and, by extension, in the real world.

Last year I was a Sunday-school teacher for fourth graders, and I found myself prefacing every doctrinal statement with "The Catholic Church teaches..." and trying to encourage discussions, rather than simply giving them a list of received truths to memorize. I covered the material, of course, and from an orthodox perspective, often asking them to talk with their parents when they brought up touchy subjects like the fate of babies who die before baptism and how seriously they should take artistic representations of heaven and hell. I've never told my own children that they will go to hell if they are disobedient, for example; I have told my five-year-old that until she reaches the age of reason, it's Mommy and Daddy's job to help her listen to her conscience, and that includes punishing her when she gives into temptation. My nine-year-old knows that we have greater expectations for his ability to reason, so that if he and Carolyn make the same mistake in judgment, the consequences for him are more severe.

I might get faster responses from my children if they feared that demons would drag them away if they were disobedient, but that kind of obedience doesn't build character or develop moral intelligence.

On the last day of Sunday School, I was hoping to encourage their desire to learn more about the world, so after I said goodbye, I told them "Never stop asking questions!" Most of them kind of stared at me blankly. When one kid asked, "Why?" they all froze in their seats waiting for me to explain myself. I didn't.

While my wife and I are raising our children in the traditions of our Catholic faith, we are working hard to avoid the "Because I say so" and "Don't ask questions" approach to authority. My son has internalized the Socratic method so much that when he wants to get mouthy and talk back, he does so with rhetorical questions, thus drawing me into a conversation that (he hopes) will buy him time to figure out a way to avoid doing whatever he doesn't want to do. It's not exactly disobedience, but he is testing limits, making me supply good reasons for why he should obey.

Pragmatic? In the short term, it can be stressful and annoying. But I hope that always maintaining a close association between reason, authority, and morality will benefit my children in the long run.

DeSena presented solutions for teachers to prevent the plagiarism plague engulfing a Web-based culture. "All too often teachers emphasize the content (the information) students will cull and hopefully learn. But it is our obligation as teachers to encourage them to respond to the expert or scholar, to answer his or her underlying claim," she wrote. To do this, teachers need to emphasize primary sources over secondary, to embrace students freewriting, honing in and transforming the first draft into formal writing, cultivating a thesis, creating an outline, and learning how to paraphrase. --Meghan Gill
--Sparta teacher fights plague (Straus Newspapers)

There is little new in this article; nevertheless, I appreciate a pedagogy-based discussion of the root causes of plagiarism, rather than a commercially-supported, detection-and-punishment-based solution.

When we refuse to "budge an inch," excoriate "rotten apples," or admonish slackers to "sink or swim," we speak in his voice. Although the arts sections of newspapers teem with products from self-anointed "artists" who will not survive their publicity budgets, Shakespeare after roughly four centuries still pleases general audiences, challenges intellectuals, and provokes academics. How can we not presume that such a stupendous orchestrator of character and insight operated with a coherent, multifaceted theory of human nature?

On the other hand, our ignorance of Shakespeare the man - he left no diaries or letters in his short life of some 52 years - and the clashing multiple versions of some of his texts, have always dovetailed with a contrary belief that his greatness arises precisely from utter openness to the varieties of human behavior, emotion and thought, his ability to render in concrete scenes and daring metaphors more non-reductionist nuances of the heart and mind than an army of writers centuries later.

This Shakespeare soars as the universal artist because his plays and poetry offer a kaleidoscope of the human condition while speculative bios, short on fact and long on inference, end up too dull an instrument to cut him down to size. He's a channeler rather than a source of wisdom. --The readiness to deconstruct is all (Philadelphia Inquirer)

I wish this article had come out a week earlier... I would have discussed it in my Lit Crit class. (It's still a good read.)

Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance. From some mix of our frontier past, our Little House on the Prairie heritage, our Thoreauvian desire for solitude, and our amazing wealth we've derived a level of independence never seen before on this round earth. We've built an economy where we need no one else; with a credit card, you can harvest the world's bounty from the privacy of your room. And we've built a culture much the same -- the dream houses those architects build, needless to say, come with a plasma screen in every room. As long as we can go on earning good money in our own tiny niche, we don't need a helping hand from a soul -- save, of course, from the invisible hand that cups us all in its benign grip.

There are a couple of problems with this fine scenario, of course. One is: we're miserable. --Bill McKibben --Old MacDonald Had A Farmers' Market -- total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal (In Character)

A group of Buddhist monks in Malaysia is appealing for help to solve a problem with ants.

Buddhism forbids devotees from harming any living creature.

So the monks are looking for a creative and non-violent solution to deal with the insects, which are biting worshippers. --Malaysian monks face ant dilemma (BBC)

Rosemary, who sent me the link, writes "Nudge, nudge, wink, wink" after calling attention to the the last line in the story.