Podcast :: A Christmas Carol

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.

The free downloads are available until January 3 at http://thepenguinpodcast.blogs.com/ .

Online Generators

With the advent of digital cameras, the internet, and special effects in movies, the old adage "pictures don't lie" has virtually disappeared from the language.

While we are always a little sad to see a word or phrase shifted to the archaic category in the Oxford English Dictionary, it is fun to take advantage of new technology. One way to do that on the internet is to take advantage of some of the online generators which are available for free.

Obviously, the photo of Enstein has been altered. The good news is that you can write your own text on the board. Just go to hetemeel.com . Fill in the blanks, and a new image with your message will apear. Right click and save the image to your drive. That's all there is to it.

Here are a couple of other online generators which are fun:
Church Sign Generator -- place your own message on a church sign
Magazine Cover Generator -- design a magazine cover with your own photo & text.

Wikipedia Warning for Student Scholars

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.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is built on the theory that the community is smarter than any one of us alone. Anyone can write, revise, or edit a Wikipedia encyclopedia article and articles are anonymous. That's the problem: there's no way to judge the credibility, authority, and reliability of a Wikipedia article, unless the reader already knows something about the subject.

If you're not familiar with wikis, you will enjoy looking at Marshall Brain's explanation at Howstuffworks. As he says,

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.

Interesting links:

• NPR's Talk of the Nation: Wikipedia, Open Source and the Future of the Web
• Wikipedia's page on External Peer Review
• USA Today: A False Wikipedia 'Biography'
• Salon.com (AP): Man Apologizes After Fake Wikipedia Post
• NPR's Talk of the Nation: Wikipedia to Require Contributors to Register
  
• Guardian Unlimited: Can You Trust Wikipedia?
  

---

See follow-up blog entry dated 26Mar06. --ms.dsk
See Wikipedia & Wikiality dated 03Aug06. --ms.dsk

Tying up Loose Ends

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.

In the spirit of tying things up, we recommend a lovely little web site entitled I Will Knot! It's simple, but oh so nice. The site consists of instructions for tying 12 different knots. What makes it so nice is that instructions for tying each knot are presented in a series of flash videos. Just click on the image and you can actually watch the knot being tied. It is simple, direct, and effective.

Link

What NOT To Do During Finals

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports the following:

The president of the sophomore class at Lehigh University has been arrested on charges of pursuing an illegal extracurricular activity -- bank robbery -- instead of studying for final examinations.

According to the police in Allentown, Pa., Gregory Hogan, 19, gave a local bank teller a note on Friday afternoon demanding money and indicating that he had a weapon. He left the bank with $2,871, the police said.

Police officers arrested Mr. Hogan on Friday night at his fraternity house, Sigma Psi Epsilon. He was released from the Lehigh County Prison on Saturday on $100,000 bail.

Brokeback Mountain

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.

Annie Proulx (pronounced Proo), the award-winning author of The Shipping News, is in the headlines for writing the short story "Brokeback Mountain," which has been turned into a highly praised yet controversial movie. The story "Brokeback Mountain" first showed up in the The New Yorker in 1997 [New Yorker 13 Oct. 97: 74 (11 pp)] and, later, in Proulx's anthology of Wyoming stories called Close Range.

"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

"Brokeback Mountain" explores the pain of discovering love, losing it, and enduring the consequences. What makes the story different is that its lovers are two ranch kids--both male--who grow into lives where they have to hide their love for each other. Their problem has seismic effects on everyone in their adult lives.

A recent story in the Casper Star-Tribune sampled a variety of responses to the movie. One response came from another Wyoming writer: "Kaycee playwright Sandy Dixon doesn't care to open her mind to the story line of 'Brokeback Mountain,' she said. A lifelong Wyomingite, Dixon said she has never encountered a gay cowboy, and doesn't think it's right for Proulx and Hollywood to portray Wyoming as a state with gay cowboys."

In contrast, an article in Salon.com reported,"Curtis Monk, who leads an AIDS-awareness program and also coordinates events for Wyoming Equality, tends to disagree. 'I alone personally know 15 gay cowboys who come to our dances'" (All Quiet on the Western Gay Front).

nHumanities doesn't think of the movie as a cowboy movie--after all, these guys were herding sheep when they met. Nor do we think of it as a gay movie--it's about the need for love, and love crosses a lot of boundaries.

That appears to be the way director Ang Lee and Focus Films think of it, too. Lee says the movie is "not a Western. No gunslingers. I don't want to undermine the sanctified image of the American Western man. It's a love story of real people in the West." When James Schamus, co-president of Focus Films, was working on the poster for the movie, he "didn't research posters of famous Westerns for ideas. He looked at the posters of the 50 most romantic movies ever made. 'If you look at our poster,' he says, 'you can see traces of our inspiration, "Titanic".'"

Word of the Year

NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday reports that Merriam-Webster has the editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary have identified infosnacking as their word-of-the-year for 2005.

The concept of infosnacking has developed in response to all-the-time broadband internet access. Office workers spend time goofing off on the internet stop what they are doing to infosnack--check a sports score, look up a headline, compare prices, write on their weblog, check their email, etc.

UPDATE: Merriam-Webster chooses its word-of-the-year based on the number of online look-ups a word receives on the company's homepage. Being chosen word-of-the-year does not guarantee that infosnacking will appear in the next edition of the dictionary; that distinction occurs only when the editors decide a word has wide enough currency.

The editors of Merriam-Webster have chosen the much more prosaic word integrity as their word of the year for 2005, based on users' online lookups of the word. nHumanities wonders why so many people didn't already know what integrity means.

Humanities Capstone Presentations

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.

Presentations will range from consideration of important propaganda theories to considerations of specific uses of propaganda such as staged events and atrocity propaganda. Several presentations focus on propaganda in certain historical periods, such as Britain's use of propaganda in WWI and Hitler's use of propaganda in his rise to power after WWI. Others focus on propaganda from specific countries, such as Russia and China. Still others focus on the art and presentations of propaganda posters.

We have 16 presentations, so we will run on a fairly tight schedule. The format is as follows: a 10 minute presentation, followed by a 5 minute question and answer session, followed by a 5 minute transition and setup for the next presenter.

In the time honored tradition of capstone presentations, some of these presentations are still evolving, so there may be some slight changes to the schedule which follows.

Wednesday, Dec. 14th

• 2:05 Cecil Moon Contrary to Popular Belief: Jacques Ellul, Education, Propaganda, and the Technological Society
• 2:25 Annie Workman The Role of Positive Propaganda
• 2:45 Jenny Gilmore Negative Uses of Propaganda
• 3:05 Angie Spann Propaganda and Political Polling
• 3:25 Jaimee Szlemko Selling World War I in Britain
• 3:45 Graham Skinner Staged Events: The Stimuli of the Masses
• 4:05 Maria Anderson Advertising and Propaganda: Two Sides of the Same Coin
• 4:35 Sabrina Tseng Propaganda and Posters in China
• 5:05 Erin Lovelady Heart Mountain Relocation Center & the Effects of WWII
  

Thursday, Dec. 15th

• 2:15 Robert Constein Infomercials: A Modern Reflection of Aristotle’s Rhetoric
• 2:35 Stephen Mayo Propaganda and 9/11
• 2:55 Katie Roemmich Women in Propaganda Posters of WWII
• 3:15 Amanda Enriques How Hitler Took Over the Minds, Ideals, and Morals of the German Volk
• 3:35 Lindsay Bischoff Atrocity Propaganda: Persuading the World to Hate
• 3:55 Juris Jasans USSR Propaganda Posters: A Reeducation Tool
• 4:15 Lisa Chestnut Propaganda posters
  

Procrastination :: "I'll Think about That Tomorrow"

Hamlet. Leonardo da Vinci. Saint Augustine of Hippo. Scarlett O'Hara. Procrastinators all.

In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara deals with several intractable problems by saying, "I'll think about that tomorrow." She is what psychologists would call a "chronic procrastinator," someone who habitually puts things off until tomorrow, or next week, or whenever.

Procrastination . . . the word comes from the Latin verb procrastinare -- "to defer until morning."

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.

According to Joseph R. Ferrari, co-editor of Procrastination and Task Avoidance: Theory, Research, and Treatment, it may be that education institutions are enabling procrastination. Accepting students' fibs about late work, bending deadlines, and being overly flexible may teach students to eschew responsibility. The result is often destructive, and many institutions offer courses and counseling to help students reduce their procrastination.

If you've delayed starting that final paper, here's something to think about. You may fall into the category of "arousal procrastinators" who believe they work best under pressure and tend to delay tasks for the thrill. Indeed, a few composition studies have indicated that procrastination works successfully as a pre-writing device for some people. These students may be motivated, well organized, and happy to write a paper in one sitting.

The authors of A Short Guide to College Writing suggest you who have procrastinated on papers sit down--right now--and try some of these techniques:

• Take a piece of paper and start writing
• Try some invention strategies
• Focus what you have to say into ever-more specific categories of subject, topic, thesis
• Plan when you'll stop writing
• Revise later (do you detect some irony in this advice?)
  

Write Poems, Get Lucky

According to a news item from Nature.com, "Creative people have more sexual partners than the rest of us." A pair of British psychologists surveyed 425 professional poets and artists, amateurs, and regular people and discovered that "active artists had had an average of five or six sexual partners; those without artistic ambitions had had nearer four."

That's the good news.

The bad news is poets and artists seem to share this trait of sexual success with schizophrenics. Oh . . . and the other piece of bad news is that a person has to be a successful poet or artist to experience this effect. Just going to your room and scribbling won't do.

"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

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.

Let nHumanities rush in where angels fear to tread! (Please note this is not a endorsement of any religion or sect's perception of angels, but rather a proper, prim, and pedantic literary allusion to Pope, although when it comes to angels, we'll take Milton's nine orders of angels from Paradise Lost every time: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.)

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"

Here are a few interesting online resources on winter holidays:

• The History of Christmas, from the BBC's Religion & Ethics website
• BBC's multifaith calendar
• Solstice Celebrations From A to Z by J. T. McAlister
• Candlegrove's Ancient Origins of the Holidays has some good links
• Celebrating the Holidays in an Interfaith Family
  
• Holiday Blues
  
• Fall-Related Injuries During the Holiday Season --United States, 2000--2003
• Ways to simplify the holidays from New American Dream and Conscious Choice
• Tips for Holiday Shopping, from FTC Bureau for Consumer Protection
• NPR's Holidays 2005 web site
• Wilson "Snowflake" Bentley, Photographer of Snowflakes (one of his snowflakes graces this post)
  

On Reading Books . . .

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

The Real "Dead Poets Society" (and the Odd Body Part, Too)

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.)

Keats died from TB in his room above the Spanish Steps in Rome. He was only 25, and he directed that his tombstone read, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Keats is the only one of the famous British Romantic Poets to die from anything approaching natural causes.

Shelley drowned in a storm while boating on the Bay of Spezzia in 1822. When his body washed ashore ten days later, his friends gathered to cremate him there. Present were his widow, Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame, Leigh Hunt, Edward John Trelawny, and Lord Byron, who had asked for Shelley's skull as a remembrance. (He didn't get it. His friends, remembering how he mistreated the skull of a Franciscan monk, decided he couldn't be trusted with it.)

As the flames of Shelley's pyre rose--or so the story goes--Trelawny darted forward and snatched out Shelley's heart (suffering permanent damage to his arm) and gave it to Mary. Some say Mary carried it in her purse for the rest of her life.

Byron's death is yet another example of the extravagant lives these British Romantics led. In 1823, Byron joined the fight for Greek independence, and he died in Missolonghi (1824) from a fever he contracted during his campaign. Although he requested a quiet burial, he had become a Greek national hero and an example of selfless patriotism. His body went back to England, sans the lungs which were gifted to the people of Missolonghi.

Once in England, his body was denied burial in Westminster Abbey, the repository of most of England's beloved figures. (Around 3,300 people are buried there, with many more commemorated by plaques--here's a partial list.) Byron finally received a memorial on the floor of the Abbey 145 years later.