Category: Uncategorized

You should of course support your local public radio station. For me, this is WEMU— one of the few stations left out there that supports a jazz and blues format, along with NPR news and other things (“Car Talk,” “Wait-Wait,” etc.) Though I do have a confession: I also listen to Michigan Public Radio quite a bit, which is an NPR/PRI station that is an “all talk” format. But the way I figure it, WEMU needs my money more than the U of Michigan station.

But jeez, I hate fund raisers. I know they are necessary, but when public radio stations do fund raisers, I remember why I don’t like commercial radio too much. Fortunately, I recently received an iPod….

See this entry from Kairosnews. I know this is an April Fool’s joke, but I hope somebody out there hacks this together. I’d much prefer this to Clippy, that’s for sure.

It’s been a pretty crazy week around here. Besides all sorts of stuff having to do with work and with Annette’s work, Will wasn’t in school because of Spring Break. He was over at Rachel and Jim’s house on Monday, though I was on kid patrol on Wednesday this week. While Rachel entertained the children with wholesome time in the park, I took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese. Okay, we did that, but we went to the park after words.

Anyway, Will had a play date with another friend today, and, on a whim, I decided to go play a bit of golf. So I got the clubs out of the garage, and the first thing I discovered is that when the mini-van was stolen back in November, they got something else too: my golf shoes. Oh well; they weren’t that comfortable anyway.

I decided to go out to Hickory Woods, which is a silly little mom-n-pop 9 hole place. The course is surrounded by housing developments, and because the folks who own it stand to make a lot more money dividing the land up into housing lots than by running a golf course, they were going to sell. It was supposed to close up last year. They’re still open though, and according to the woman behind the counter, it’s because the township blocked the sale because of zoning reasons. “We’ll be here for a year, maybe five. Just depends on who comes up with the money to change the zoning,” she said.

I didn’t play a real round of golf per se– just practicing. I didn’t keep score, and I hit two or three balls on just about every hole. I’m basically about as bad as I was before, but not any worse, really.

See this entry on Weblogg-ed, “School Bans Blogs.” This is kind of old news (relatively speaking), but I thought it was worthwhile to post here since I can imagine seeing this kind of thing coming up again in one of my classes.

My initial reaction was the same as Will R.’s at Weblogg-ed: “outrageous!!!” Then I read the article in the Rutland Herald newspaper. It’s a little vague, but it seems that what is really being banned here is something called Myspace.com, which looks to me kind of like a sort of “singles” site. I tried to browse it for a few minutes, and it mostly seemed like a) women in underwear or bikinis, b) people who were looking for “special close” kinds of friends, and/or c) goofballs.

Anyway, I still don’t think the principal should ban the site from school, and parents should of course monitor their children’s use of the internet. That’s parenting. But what appears to be happening here is that the principal thinks that all blogs are along the lines of these things on Myspace.com. So we have a proverbial throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Maybe somebody ought clue this guy in on Blogger….

I discovered this while surfing around a bit before my class last night:

According to posts on the blog “A Week of Kindness” that begin here and end here (at least for now), Nate Kushner writes that he was approached in an IM session by Laura K. “last name changed to protect the innocent/guilty” Kirshna” to write a term paper for a class about Hinduism. Kushner essentially pranked her: he strung her along, wrote a silly paper that (we learn later) Laura is silly enough to hand in as is, and then he collected a check from Kirshna for his services (though I don’t think he cashes the check). Then he put the whole sorrid affair up on this blog in a series of entries. Drama ensued. You really have to read it to see for yourself– hundreds of comments, most of them ready to feed the plagiarizer to the wolves.

Meanwhile, over at boing-boing, they are suggesting that the whole thing is a hoax. They say it is part of an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke (though the last I heard, April Fool’s day was in, ah, April) and, since the site “A Week of Kindness” says up front that it exists to promote a sketch comedy troop of the same name, it’s a publicity stunt (this makes some sense; follow the link for “Press” on the site asks folks to “Stop Calling Laura, Come See Our Shows”).

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I do have two thoughts:

• It’s one thing to do something stupid or even (academically) criminal, like attempting to buy a paper from a complete stranger during an IM chat. If Laura exists (and as I typed that last sentence, I must say that I did get a twinge of a “this is just too stupid to actually be true” sort of feeling), then she certainly should be “caught” and punished by her school, whatever that punishment might be. Plagiarism, especially of the “buy a paper and hand it in as if it were my own” sort, is obviously a bad thing.

  But it’s another thing entirely to be humiliated in front of a gazillion people for your stupid action (and the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of comments from hundreds of different people make me thing “there’s just too much here for this to be faked”).

  Ultimately, what Kushner is doing here is a form of vigilantism. I don’t want to make too close of a comparison here to a public lynching because, obviously, public lynchings were much MUCH more violent and serious affairs than this. But that is kind of what’s going on. Kushner saw an “academic crime” happening and took matters into his own hands. Worse yet, Kushner arguably entrapped Laura K., something that was common with real lynchings, too. After all, Kushner could have declined to write Laura’s essay, or he could have just left it at “telling” on her by contacting folks at her school. Instead, Kushner decided to take it a step further. He thought all this was funny, worthy of a cheap laugh at this plagiarizer’s expense, so he wrote it up on his blog. I believe him when he says he had no idea that this would snowball out of control the way that it has, but (again, something that happened with real lynchings, too) it has gone out of control and it has even become a form of entertainment at the expense of the so-called criminal.

  Kushner invokes his family members who are academics as justification for his vigilante-style blog rampage. Well, as a practicing academic who deals with a lot of potential plagiarizers in writing classes, I’d encourage Kushner and everyone else to leave dealing with these problems to the teachers and professors.

• Don’t Plagiarize. And for God’s sake, don’t solicit for plagiarizing help via IM.

This morning, I read in yesterday’s Ann Arbor News (I was teaching last night so I didn’t get a chance to see it when it was “fresh”) this Scott Anderson article, “Wireless initiative touted: Washtenaw officials pitch plan for blanket coverage.” Follow the link to read the whole thing, but here are the opening paragraphs:

Washtenaw County officials on Monday formally pitched their concept of a public/private collaboration to make wireless, high-speed Internet as commonplace as running water and electricity to the county’s 340,000 residents.

But the county could face a hard sell to telecommunications and cable companies, which have poured millions of dollars into building local networks of their own and cultivating thousands of Internet customers.

County officials and other advocates outlined an aggressive timetable to roll out a wireless Internet, or Wi-Fi, network to blanket the region. Tentative plans include opening up the project for vendor bids as early as May, selecting technology providers by July and establishing three pilot programs by November. Dubbed “Wireless Washtenaw,” the initiative aims to build the countywide network by late 2007, allowing anyone with a wireless-enabled computer or handheld device to log onto the Internet for free in certain zones, or from their home or office for a still-undetermined monthly fee.

Oh, in case you haven’t figured this out: Washtenaw county includes both Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, among other fine towns and cities.

For me, this falls into the category of “I’ll believe it when I see it” because as I noted back on March 14 and earlier (though I can’t find that entry now), the unholy alliance of the cable companies and the telecom companies (the ones that are making money hand over fist by providing quite expensive broadband internet access now) has worked hard to stop these “public utility” model of Wi-Fi networks from happening. Maybe the county can get this to work, but while I will root for Washtenaw, I wouldn’t bet against big businesses that stand to lose big bucks.

This is the first in a couple of posts I meant to make earlier– I was delayed by work, life, and some sort of weird blogger glitch that I think (I hope) has been solved. Anyway….

See this article Bradley Bleck forwarded to tech-rhet, “A Word to the unwise — program’s grammar check isn’t so smart,” published on March 28, 2005 online and presumably in print by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The opening paragraphs give an idea about what it’s about:

Microsoft the company should big improve Word grammar check.

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. That sentence is a confusing jumble. However, it is perfectly fine in the assessment of Microsoft Word’s built-in grammar checker, which detects no problem with the prose.

Sandeep Krishnamurthy thinks Microsoft can do a lot better.

The University of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue.

This might be a good article to include the next time I teach “Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice,” though I already assign a couple of good articles about the problems of MS Word as a “writerly tool:” Alex Vernon, “Computerized Grammar Checkers 2000: Capabilities, Limitations, and Pedagogical Possibilities,” and Tim McGee and PatriciaEricsson, “The Politics of the Program: MS Word as the Invisible Grammarian,” both of which were published in Computers and Composition a few years back.

The other day, I was at the Food (W)hole, driving out of what is always a very congested parking lot. Right in front of me, there was a red and white bumper sticker smack-dab in the center of the bumper of a newish black Volvo sedan. It said:

Okay, I am sure I am missing something here, but what does this mean? I think it’s supposed to be a liberal message, a bumper sticker kind of akin to the one that went something like “Join the Army, meet people in foreign countries, and kill them.” I found an example of this sticker here at cafepress.com, and it was being sold by something called the Divided by Politics Liberal Shop, so I guess that is the intent. And the fact that this sticker was on the back of a Volvo coming out of the Whole Foods parking lot gives evidence to that.

But it seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing that folks on the far right (the Limbaugh dittoheads of the world) and maybe even the far right pretending to not be so far on the right (the Bush administration) would embrace. I mean, is it too much of a stretch to imagine Rush saying something like “You’re damn right you should thank a soldier if you’re speaking English right now– that means you’re free!” Or W. saying “The War in Iraq has brought freedom to those people. Why, they can even speak English now in public places if they want to.” Just very confusing to me.

Maybe liberals need better stickers….

I think I had heard this before, but I saw a notice today about the upcoming Ong conference in St. Louis. At first I thought that they had managed to have this on the weekend of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Championships (aka, “the Final Four,”) but I guess the Ong conference is the weekend afterwards.

I’ve been meaning to post this picture of Will for a while, but it’s been a pretty busy week around here….

Will’s basketball league wrapped up last Friday. I believe they won their last game; I know that they finished the season at 3-3, which isn’t bad considering that Will’s team was kind of the “miscellaneous other kids” team of his league. Despite the fact that this league is a bunch of first through third graders, there are actually some teams (coaches and parents, actually) who take this stuff kind of seriously.

Anyway, Will had a great experience, and while he still isn’t that good of a player, he’s better than he was and he had a lot of fun. After the last game, Will’s coaches (who really were just folks who were volunteered at the last minute and were willing to do it) organized a little surprise pizza party/awards ceremony. The picture actually features the rest of the team, but since some people are sensative to their kids showing up on the Internet, I cropped them out.

Next year, on to the final four!