The extremely cool Penguin Podcast, a blog of Penguin-sponsored book podcasts, currently offers Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in five parts, read wonderfully by Geoffrey Palmer. nHumanities is listening while we grade finals, and it's keeping us from muttering Bah! Humbug! and burying the stack of papers with a stake of holly through its heart.
nHumanities loves Wikipedia. In fact, we speed-dial it from our browser with a little search engine plug-in. Student scholars, however, need to approach Wikipedia with caution and use it appropriately . . . which means not at all in formal research papers.The only reason that a wiki works is because the community of people who work on it make it work. The community adds all of the content, edits everything and polices the content to root out problems. When the community is functioning well, it can produce a tremendous amount of content that gets better and better over time.But when the community is not working well, the result can be inaccurate, one-sided, or--sometimes--maliciously misleading information. Earlier this month, Wikipedia's credibility came into question when some spoof entries were uncovered. On the other hand, a recent study by Nature magazine which compared the quality of science article entries between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica found that "the difference in accuracy was not particularly great":
Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. ("Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head")Student researchers should not hesitate to use either Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica to get an overview of a topic; neither, however, is an especially good source for a formal research paper. Students make a novice's mistake when they rely almost exclusively on Wikipedia for their research--that's just plain lazy or ill-informed. Remember that the library provides fabulous, free online resources.
It's that time of the semester for tying up a few loose ends. Some students suddenly remember that pesky class they've had a hard time making, and some faculty members unearth a few sets of essays that properly might have been returned a wee bit little earlier in the semester.
There's an interesting interview with Annie Proulx online: At Close Range with Annie Proulx: Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer Shares Insights in Short Story, Film Adaptation of "Brokeback Mountain," by Matthew Testa, writing for Planet Jackson Hole."No, it is not difficult to move around Wyoming anonymously. Women of a certain age are invisible. And most Wyoming people don't give a damn whether you write novels or knit mittens." --Annie Proulx
Capstone Presentations for HUMN 2440, Dialogues in the Humanities, will be held on Wednesday and Thursday, Dec. 14th and 15th, in FAB 70. This semester's Dialogues course focused on the nature and uses of propaganda. Needless to say, there was no shortage of material for students to examine.
If you've procrastinated--say, on that term paper or final project--you're in plentiful company. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that at "the hothouses of procrastination known as college campuses," about 70% of students admit to it. The downside of procrastination is anxiety, self-loathing, and lower grades. The upside is that there does not seem to be any connection between procrastination and intelligence. If anything, students at highly selective colleges are more prone to procrastination than students at less selective ones.
With a sink of our holiday spirits, nHumanities watched a brief email skirmish erupt this past week over the proper and improper acknowledgement / explanation / celebration of seasonal holidays in Northwest College's Hinckley Library. The situation started with the Library Director's request for a dreidel to include in an exhibit on Hanukkah and Kawanzaa, went on to a flurry of exchanges over Christmas nativities, and . . . well, you can imagine where it went from there.Christmas is not only a Christian festival. The celebration has roots in the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, the festivals of the ancient Greeks, the beliefs of the Druids and the folk customs of Europe. -- "The History of Christmas"
One reads books in order to gain the privilege of living more than one life. People who don't read are trapped in a mine shaft, even if they think the sun is shining. Most New Yorkers wouldn't travel to Minnesota if a bright star shone in the west and hosts of angels were handing out plane tickets, but they might read a book about Minnesota and thereby form some interesting and useful impression of us. This is the benefit of literacy. Life is lonely; it is less so if one reads. --Garrison Keillor
Today in Literature reminds nHumanities that "on this day in 1821 Percy Shelley's 'Adonais,' his elegy to John Keats, was published in England. A cornerstone of both Romantic poetry and the myth of the Romantic, the poem paints Keats as Adonis in pursuit of Beauty and Truth, brought down by those less noble and talented. This was a fate Shelley predicted for himself, and he died before Keats's gravestone had been erected." (At left, Keats's death mask.)
Our readers know that nHumanities is foolishly fond of trebuchets, the medieval seige weapons used to batter walls and toss projectiles over them. (See previous posts Trebuchet of the Day and More on Trebuchets.)
Pandora--a new online music discovery service--provides you with suggested listening on your own stations. If you've ever had a friend who has said something like, "Okay, if you like The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," then you probably will like The Byrds' 'The Times They Are A-Changin''" . . . then you've got the basic concept of how Pandora works.For almost six years now, we have been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. It's the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Together our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.The result is a cool interface--Pandora--which keeps the music coming on your computer. nHumanities tried it with our '60s pops favorites, and we're happily bopping along in the past.
We've now created an interface to make this available to music lovers so they could use this musical 'connective-tissue' to discover new music based on songs or artists they already know.
Take a peek at Northwest College!
Big Ideas Come Out of Big Pencils is a Canadian web site sponsored by Leo Burnett Worldwide. Leo Burnett, who was listed by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, " . . . launched today's visual assault on the senses by proving that images, not words, were the nuclear power of advertising." His was the creative force behind many of the last century's most beloved product images, such as the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, the Pillsbury Doughboy, and Tony the Tiger.
Former U. S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins (left) says, "If you're majoring in English, you're majoring in death," in an interview on NPR's All Things Considered (06Nov05).
Google has extended its search to the full text of library books today by adding the initial batch of scanned books to its index. Called Google Print, the program is a cooperative effort between Google and five major libraries, including Harvard and Stanford.
Cathy Belben, staff writer for the popular UPN series "Veronica Mars," shares insight into her craft Nov. 5 during a two-part program sponsored by the Northwest College Writers Series and the Rosebud Film Group in Powell. The program begins at 10:30 a.m. in Room 70 of the Fagerberg Building. Belben will explain how a television script is generated and the dynamics that apply to group writing. She'll show clips from "Veronica Mars," explaining how writers' ideas and words translate to television.
A light lunch will be provided at noon, followed by a second session featuring a screening of "Veronica Mars" with commentary provided by Belben.
For more information, read the article UPN series writer to speak in Powell in the Billings Gazette.
Links:
Warner Brothers site for Veronica Mars
CBS site for Veronica Mars
UPN site for Veronica Mars
Secrets of the Dead is a fascinating program on the subject from PBS. The show presents the work of Dr. Stephen O'Brien of the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. His work took him to Eyam, a small village in central England, where records showed that during the plague years over half the population survived an infestation which should have wiped them out.
Attack of the Zombie Copy, by Erin Kissane, talks about undead prose on the internet . . . but the advice the article offers is good for anybody's writing. Here's a snippet:
If you use MS Word as your word processing program, then listen up: you can speed up your keyboarding and save your poor carpal-tunnel tortured wrist by using shortcut keys.
Shortcut keys allow you to perform common word processing functions in one easy step, instead of several point the mouse and choose from a menu and click steps. See? Even the name is shorter: shortcut keys.
You can find a nice, one-page guide to the most used shortcut keys, courtesy of CADCourse.com (PDF:21KB,1p).
Here are a few of the shortcuts I use most:
It was a rootin', tootin' evening when Paul Zarzyski brought his brand of cowboy and western poetry to the Nelson auditorium.
It's open season on research-based writing for college classes. The secret to writing correct bibliographic entries is to use a reference book such as Diane Hacker's A Writer's Reference (5th ed., with 2003 MLA update) or the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (Joseph Gibaldi, 6th ed.) and find the appropriate model or models for the source you are using. Sometimes you must combine elements from a couple of models.
Here are four MLA bibliographic citations that cover the sources most students use in their research papers: the scholarly article accessed via a database, the document from a government web site, the webpage from a larger web site, and a short work from an anthology.
If you are using Hacker's A Writer's Reference as your guide, then you will wish to follow model no. 31 (360). To write this citation, you provide all the information that's available for the print version of the article, and then you add the necessary information about how you accessed it online. Example:
Koumans, Emilia H., et al. "Sexually Transmitted Disease Services at US Colleges and Universities." Journal of American College Health 53.5 (2005): 211-217. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. Hinckley Lib., Northwest Col., Powell, WY. 31 Mar. 2005 ‹http://www.epnet.com›.
Within the body of your paper, you would use the following intext citation: (Koumans et al. 212).
When a webpage comes from a government-sponsored web site--such as the CDC--then you need to identify the government as the "corporate author" of the document. You would use Hacker's model at the top of page 366, the second example for no. 49. Example:
United States. National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HIV and Its Transmission. 22 Sep. 2003. 31 Mar. 2005 ‹http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pubs/ facts/transmission.htm›.
The intext citation for this source would be (United States); for subsequent citations, you could use an abbreviation (US). If you had more than one document from this same web site, then you need to add more information so readers can find the citation easily in your Works Cited list: (United States, HIV).
The model for a webpage (or a short work) from a larger web site is no. 28 in Hacker (358). Here's an example for a webpage without an author:
"HIV/AIDS: Antiretroviral Therapy (ART)." World Health Organization. 2005. 31 Mar. 2005 ‹http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/arv/en/›.
The appropriate intext citation for this webpage would be ("HIV/AIDS").
The model for a work in an anthology is no. 10 in Hacker (352). Here's an example for a short story from an anthology:
Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." Literature: Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. Robert DiYanni. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004. 73-79.
The appropriate intext citation for this webpage would be (Faulkner 74).
The Northwest College Writers Series and the NWC Rodeo Team are joining forces to sponser nationally acclaimed poet Paul Zarzyski on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 7:30 p.m. in the Nelson Performing Arts Center Auditorium.
First Friday, the Humanities Division's open microphone poetry and prose reading, returns on October 7th at noon in the Hinckley Library. 
Completing the top ten are Jaws (John Williams, 1975), Laura (David Raksin, 1944), The Magnificent Seven (Elmer Bernstein,1960), Chinatown (Jerry Goldsmith, 1974), and High Noon (Dimitri Tiomkin, 1952).
Gmaps Pedometer is a "little hack that uses Google's superb mapping application to help record distances traveled during a running or walking workout."
In case you are not familiar with maps.google.com, you can place your cursor on the map and drag it until you get the spot you want centered. You can zoom in or out, and you can switch from map view to satellite view to hybrid view.
For the second straight year, the Northwest College Trail has been named a finalist in the Associated Collegiate Press national Pacemaker Award.
Celebrate the Freedom to Read!
Liquid Sculpture is the web site of photographer Mark Waugh, featuring his pictures of liquid droplets at the moment of impact. The photo at right is of colored water, but his collection includes various colored and viscous fluids as they form frozen fountains, coronets, and other sculptures.
Waugh's work reminds me of the first such photo I ever saw. When my elder brother went off to MIT, he sent back a postcard of a coronet of milk--amazingly frozen in time against a red background (1957). It was the work of MIT's Institute Professor Harold E. "Doc" Edgerton. An earlier Edgerton picture of a splashing milk drop was so beautiful that it was featured in the New York Museum of Modern Art's first photography exhibit (1937). More images included athletes frozen in competition; bullets piercing balloons, apples, and playingcards; and hummingbirds in mid-flight.
Such images may seem common today, but they were a miracle in the 1930s when Edgerton invented the stroboscope which was used to create ultra-high-speed and still (or stop-motion) photography.
Interesting links:
Writing for BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin offers a post on BlackMetal for Dummies. An excerpt from her post illustrates the dangers of facile definitions--an object lesson for all young scholars:
"Musical characteristics include superfast guitars and shrieky, bummed-out vocals. Fashion characteristics include spiky shin guards, medieval accessories(swords, chains), and generous use of corpse paint.
"But as the comparative graphic above shows, identification can be tricky. At left, Dani from the band Cradle of Filth is wearing lots of corpse paint. He is Totally Black Metal. At right, Louie the pug -- who is owned by television news producer Jeremy Blacklow from a Certain News Network -- is not one bitBlack Metal, despite facial markings that strongly resemble corpse paint."
A recent New York Times science article on cursing shakes its head in bemusement at the current American political trend of penalizing obscenity on the air:
. . . researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, somevariant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television.
In fact, the article says, "Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, 'higher' regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, andthe older, more 'bestial' neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions."
Professor Kate Burridge at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, concludes, "People can feel very passionate about language . . . as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravitiesof barbarians and lexical aliens."
. . . don't bury the lede. Get the details and context packed into that first sentence or two whenever you can. Don't be afraid to write an actual “topic sentence” that clarifies a) what this is about, and b) what response or action you require of the recipient.Since the Larry Tate meeting on Monday has been moved from the Whale Room, could you please make sure the Fishbowl has been reserved and that the caterer has been notified of the location change? Please IM me today by 5pm Pacific Time to verify.This isn't the place to practice your stand-up act. Keep it pithy, and assume that no one will ever read more than the first sentence of anything you write. Making that first sentence strong and clear is easily the best way to interest your recipient in the second sentence and beyond.
Thursday, the 22nd, Jerred Metz will be giving a reading from his book The Last Eleven Days of Earl Durand at 7:00 p. m. in FAB 70. The reading is the first in a series sponsored by the Northwest Writer's Series.
Cory Doctorow, author and BoingBoing contributor, offers some good advice on writing: get rid of the throat-clearing and move your main idea from the end of your paper to the top of it:
"On this day in 1672 Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet of the American colonies, died. Bradstreet enjoyed a relatively privileged life in England, but at the age of eighteen she, her husband, and her parents sailed with John Winthrop for the Puritan settlement at Massachusetts Bay. Her first book of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was published back in England in 1650 -- by her brother-in-law and apparently without her knowledge, Bradstreet expressing embarrassment that the world should see the 'ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain.' These first poems are sometimes candid and immediate, but more often they are conventional in style and on accepted topics -- her love for husband, children, God, etc. Later poems can show a different attitude, one far from embarrassment:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;
For such despighte they cast on female wits:
If what i doe prove well, it wo'nt advance,
They'l say its stolen, or else, it was by chance."
News@Nature.com reports that "Aerobic exercise is the best way to keep your memory healthy."
The Rosebud Film Group Opens the 2005-06 Season on September 9 with a showing of Since Otar Left at 7:30 pm in Fagerberg Bldg. #70
The winners of the 2004-05 academic writing contest have been published in Northwest College's online writing magazine Writing in the Academic World (click on link to view winning essays). nHumanities is happy to say that the students of the Humanities Division are well-represented:
Tutor Available! Starting Wednesday, September 7th, Carla Niederhauser will be the drop-in English tutor available at Hinckley Library, 7:30-9:30 pm, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.Writing Idea! All Known Idea Generation Methods lists every brainstorming technique Martin Leith has encountered in the past 15 years. A "co-creation consultant" in the United Kingdom, Leith has consulted books, management journals, websites, academics, consultants and colleagues for these ideas.
Avast! September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, mateys. So polish your brass, haul on your yardarms, and get ready to walk the plank as a pirate would. Arrrrgh!
American magazine illustration enjoyed a celebrated period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when beloved illustrators were the stars of their time and households anxiously awaited their next offerings. Some of the names from this period remain familiar: Howard Pyle, Norman Rockwell, Rockwell Kent, Edward Gorey, Maxfield Parrish, N. C. Wyeth, Frederic Remington, John Held, Jr., and more. They worked for magazines such as McClure's, Harper's Monthly, Good Housekeeping, Saturday Evening Post, and Collier's.
nHumanities is the web log of the Humanities Division at Northwest College (Powell, Wyoming).
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ms.dsk is reading Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert (trans. Barbara Mellor)
Rob Koelling is reading Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
S. Renee Dechert is reading Storey's Guide to Raising Turkeys: Breeds, Care, Health, by Leonard S. Mercia
Mary Ellen Ibarra-Robinson is reading The Memory of Water, by Karen White
Bill Hoagland is reading Trash Fish: A Life, by Greg Keeler
Jennifer Sheridan is reading The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker
Robyn Glasscock is reading poetry by Marianne Moore
Susan Watkins is reading Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer
