Attention

Attention
Originally uploaded by Felix42 contra la censura

Increasingly, students bring their computers to class and faculty take theirs to meetings. Is everyone, however, paying attention to business? Who is checking email or sneaking a look at ESPN or sending snide notes via IM? What is the correct etiquette for this situation?

According to a recent article in The New York Times, there are no clear guidelines, although Microsoft Corporation makes use of 7 Rules for Using Laptops in Meetings:

1. Make sure there's a point. Don't take laptops to meetings unless you need one for a particular task, such as a presentation.
2. Designate a laptop. Put one person in charge of computer duties, for note-taking or PowerPoint projection.
3. Be ready to explain why you've brought a laptop. It's just good manners to let the meeting organizer know what you've brought a computer along.
4. Use some discretion. Be sure to look up from your machine, use eye contact, and stay involved with the meeting. Tablet PCs are less distracting than regular laptops because they eliminate the screen barrier.
5. Turn down the bells and whistles. Be sure you mute any sort of noise or sound that may prove distracting or annoying to others.
6. When in doubt, leave them out. Sometimes, it's appropriate to ask people to leave their laptops behind.
7. Dissect your meetings. If people aren't paying attention to the content of your classes or meetings, then take a hard look at the way you organize the session. Meetings that are well planned and well run help keep participants focussed.

"I keep getting older; they stay the same age."

Beloit College has released its annual Mind-Set List which attempts to to identify a worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2007: "Its 70 items provide a look at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students, most of them born in 1989."

Here are the first 12 items on the list; you can see the entire list of 70 on the Beloit College website:

1. What Berlin wall?
2. Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
3. Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.
4. They never “rolled down” a car window.
5. Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.
6. They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.
7. They have grown up with bottled water.
8. General Motors has always been working on an electric car.
9. Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.
10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.
11. Rap music has always been mainstream.
12. Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.

This execrable sentence erupted from the molten mind of Jim Gleeson, the 2007 grand-prize winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. And he's not even an English major, but a media technician.

For 25 years, the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges contestants to write the worst possible first sentence for the worst of all possible novels.

You can read the 2007 winners for all categories on the contest's web site, but we'll leave you with the winner of the Vile Pun category:

I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong. (Karl Scott, Brisbane, Australia)

Read Well, Live Longer

We've long known that education levels correlate to longevity. The New York Times notes that "one study found that people who did not graduate from high school lived an average of nine years less than graduates." Education, it seems, adds to one's health literacy, which then leads to a longer life.

What's new, however, is that one particular characteristic of lower education levels may cause the problem: poor reading skills. A recent study from the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that reading level "independently predicts all-cause mortality and cardiovascular death among community-dwelling elderly persons."

As nHumanities has always known, reading is good for you!

(Illustration John Gilbert, "A Death Unexpected by the Reader," DMVI: ALS019 .)

Bat Boy Lives!

I confess that one of my guilty pleasures is scanning the Weekly World News while waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store. You may remember the WWN from that great cinematic masterpiece Men in Black when Will Smith is stunned that Tommy Lee Jones refers to a copy as a "hot sheet" for keeping track of aliens on the planet.

Jay: These are the hot sheets?
Agent K: Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want. They get lucky sometimes.
-- IMDB

Bat Boy Lives, "the Weekly World News guide to politics, culture, celebrities, alien abductions, and the mutant freaks that shape our world," captures the essence of the WWN. Sample headlines include:

• Scientists figures out why old people smell! Over-ripe pheromones!
  
• Apollo 11 photographed beer cans on the moon!
• Four people vanish without a trace in Portable Toliet!
• Karl Marx was one of the Marx Brothers!
• 12 senators are from outer space!

It's obvious, from this list, that the WWN is one of the heaviest users of exclamation marks in the known universe. In a 1993 Smithsonian article entitled "Rare glimpse inside tabloid world reveals editor is mad dog!" Sue Hubble wrote

Salaries for established reporters are $75,000 and more. A recent hire, with no tabloid experience, has started at $53,000, and editors make salaries well into the comfortable six figures. In an unguarded moment, Eddie, himself a tenth-grade dropout and former wire editor at the St. Petersburg Times and the Evening Independent, once confessed, "We have to pay them a lot because we are, in effect, asking them to end their careers. . . . We're the French Foreign Legion of journalism."

Unfortunately, it appears the WWN has fallen on hard times. The 25 February 2006 edition of The Economist noted that American Media, the WWN's publisher

continues to sell millions of copies, but the numbers are contracting. The National Enquirer lost more than 20% of its circulation between 2003 and the middle of last year. . . . a possible conclusion is that the industry now faces the consequences of its own genius. Half-a-dozen publications now use exclamation marks on their covers to describe the divorces, pregnancies, affairs, eating disorders and assorted depravities of the same small group of celebrities. . .

We wish the Weekly World News the best. After all, few other publications have the courage to report that George Bush tried to enroll in the Electoral College.

Links:
Weekly World News web site
Weekly World News on Wikipedia. (It just seems appropriate that the most extensive article about the WWN on the internet is on Wikipedia.)

Embrace the Suck

Sure, everyone knows what an IED is. But how about a POG or a PUC or a TCP? Every war generates its own slang, and Austin Bay, a retired Colonel who served in Iraq, has complied a little guide entitled "Embrace the Suck": A Pocket Guide to Milspeak.

Bay writes, "At its core, warrior slang is a language of discipline and shared suffering, experiences that produce a tough human epoxy: the industrial strength social and emotional glue binding military comrades and building military units."

Some examples:

• All-American Decoy: A guard posted out in the open.
• Embrace the suck: The situation is bad, but deal with it.
• FOB: Forward Operations Base
• Fobbits: Derogatory term for soldiers who never leave a FOB.
• Hooah: U.S. Army slang. Actually a shout. Signals approval or solidarity. Means most anything except "no."
• Turkey peek: To glance around or over an object or surface, such as a corner or wall.

Additional links:

• 'Embrace the Suck' and More Military Speak from NPR
• Slang from Operation Iraqi Freedom
• Understanding Milspeak
• Origins of Hooah
  

The Ad Generator

Alexis Lloyd created The Ad Generator as part of his MFA thesis at Parsons The New School for Design. The generator mixes random phrases from corporate slogans with random images pulled from Flickr. Lloyd writes,

By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

The results are fascinating, thought provoking, and disquieting by turns.

From Dust to Dust . . .

Discover Magazine runs a nice series entitled "20 Things You Didn't Know About . . ." -- a list of twenty bits of often fascinating trivia about a wide range of subjects.

The September 1, 2006 column was "20 Things You Didn't Know About Death." Various tidbits include:

• "Burials in America deposit 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid—formaldehyde, methanol, and ethanol—into the soil each year." (In case you see this as a good argument for cremation, it throws "dioxins, hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide into the air." Oh well, as Dylan Thomas wrote, "Do not go gentle into that good night.")
• "There are at least 200 euphemisms for death, including 'to be in Abraham's bosom,' 'just add maggots,' and 'sleep with the Tribbles' (a Star Trek favorite)."
  
• " No American has died of old age since 1951." (The feds dropped that classification from death certificates in that year.)

If you are depressed about the harmful impact of your corpse on the environment, check out #8 on the list. There's a Swedish company that has it all figured out.

(The image of The Grim Reaper is from The Grim Adventures of Bill and Mandy, a series on the Cartoon Network.)

The New York Times for Free*

*For students and faculty, that is.

The New York Times Select is now available to faculty and students at colleges and universities for free.

All you need is a .edu email address.

A Select subscription allows access to the New York Times archive, where you may access up to 100 articles per month for free.

A number of other features come with this service, including access to op-ed and news columnists.

Here is a link to their sign up page.

The Death of Handwriting

Keyboards and keypads surround us. We type memos and reports and blog entries, we send emails, and we tap out text messages.

On the one hand, the rise of the computer seems to have increased the practice of ordinary people putting their thoughts in writing. On the other hand, it has also resulted in a decline of the handwritten word.

Physicians have long been notorious for poor handwriting--particularly on prescriptions like the one above, which is from the MethodistMD website.

In an article entitled "The Handwriting is on the Wall," The Washington Post reported last fall that

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

According to the Post, the problem is not just the proliferation of keyboards in our lives. Schools have significantly reduced the time spent on cursive, which was practiced as much as two hours a week in the 1940s and 50s. Susan Bowen points out in "Handwriting: A Key to Literacy" that

For years, colleges of education have largely ignored methodology of handwriting instruction. When more than 200 primary school teachers were asked if they felt prepared to teach handwriting, 90 percent responded that they did not. Very few, if any, colleges of education offer courses in the teaching of handwriting.

The concern from a number of educators is that the ability to write in cursive offers more benefits than simply producing legible handwriting. The Post notes,

The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better -- a lifelong benefit.

Perhaps not all is lost, however. The Guardian notes Patricia Lovett, fellow of the Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society, says the death of handwriting has been "greatly exaggerated." Maybe so. Britain is now running a National Handwriting Competition.

On the other hand, it's probably a good thing I'm typing this entry. My handwriting is pretty bad.