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Thumbs up on OS 10.4 (Tiger)

I installed the new mac operating system on my laptop yesterday, 10.4. For fellow mac-folk who are still thinking about the upgrade, I give it a big thumbs up. A couple quick thoughts about it, though you can get the full and real scoop from Apple:

  • Despite the advice out there, I threw caution to the wind and didn’t do a “clean install.” I just didn’t have that kind of time or patience, so I just upgraded. Maybe I’ll need to do it right at some point, but I haven’t run into any problems yet.
  • Spotlight is cool; I’m pretty interested in learning more about what it can actually do, too.
  • The “Dashboard” widgets are really cool. In an interesting way, this seems to be Apple’s way of getting people to get away from browsers and do stuff on the ‘net through the Mac interface. I immediately downloaded widgets for accessing wikipedia, google maps, local yellow pages, local weather, television listings, movie listings, a dictionary, and several more that I’m forgetting right now.
  • Mail is pretty cool, though I haven’t quite figured out how it’s any “better” yet than the previous version, and I had preferred having my mailboxes listed on the right and not the left. There’s probably a way to change that.
  • Safari looks very promising with a built-in RSS feed reader, though I haven’t figured out how to use that yet either. And it the WordPress “quicktags” still don’t work in Safari, though there is a new version of WP I have yet to install, so maybe that’s fixed.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure if it would be worth the $70 for the upgrade, but I’d say personally that it is.

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That's done (sorta); now what do I need to do?

Monkey writer

I managed to meet the deadline that I had set up for myself with my textbook project just over a week ago– at least technically I met the deadline. This “on-again/off-again” project has been “on-again” in the past six or eight months, so I’m feeling confident about my progress and possibilities of finishing this project, or at least more confident than I have felt in the past. Of course, there’s still a fair amount of work that needs to be done, more revisions and such, it still has to be sent out to readers (yet again), if it’s approved it will take a year or more to actually publish, and even with all that, there is still no guarantee that this thing will ever actually appear as a textbook. Someday, when the dust for all this settles, I’d like to write something about the textbook writing experience. It’s been an education, no question about it.

Anyway, I worked on this a lot for the last 10 days or so, and this morning, the day after I emailed stuff to the editors, I have this odd “what now?” kind of feeling. Frankly, I know “what now”: I have to get ready for that pesky fall semester that is going to be starting here in about two weeks. I need to tidy-up my blogs and some other web projects. I should do at least a little thinking and reading about my longer-term project on the history or writing technologies before the computer (btw, thanks to Dennis Jerz to this link of Flickr picts of “writing machines,” mostly typewriters). And I am also interested in trying to focus some more time on actually trying to read the scholarship in my field and less time in trying to create more of it.

Not to mention I have a life, which includes a seriously neglected garden and a flabby body that needs to get to the gym. Immediately.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I know the answer to the question of this post. It’s just a matter of convincing myself that I need to go on to something else, I suppose. Okay contemplative monkey– get to work then!

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Adventures at the Food (w)Hole: “I know what that means!”

U of Okoboji

So, I was at Whole Foods yesterday afternoon to pick up a few things before heading home. While walking down an aisle, I saw someone who I vaguely recognized as also working at EMU. He made eye contact with me as if he were going to say something like “hey, don’t you work at EMU too?” But instead, as I got closer, he pointed at my chest and his face lit up. “I know what that means,” he said with glee, “and no one else here does.”

“That” was the T-shirt I was wearing, which was promoting the University of Okoboji. And I immediately knew what he meant. See, there is no “University of Okoboji;” it’s sort of an inside joke and a weird marketing scheme for the Spirit Lake/Okoboji area in northwest Iowa, the so-called “Iowa Great Lakes.” And really, I think it’s mainly a way for a store called The Three Sons to sell t-shirts and such.

Anyway, we had a nice “Iowa moment,” talking a bit about where we were from and all of that. This guy had never been to Okoboji, but I’ve been out there on a “extended Krause family vacation” we had there a few years ago. It’s pretty nice; I mean, it’s not near as posh or as pretty as the Traverse City area, but it was simple and certainly a lot cheaper that TC, too.

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Academic Commons: Looks promising to me

I just found out about Academic Commons, “a forum for investigating and defining the role that technology can play in liberal arts education. Sponsored by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.” It looks like they are running both an on-going blog and a quarterly (the first edition, August 2005, is available here).

And it also looks like they are attracting some “big names” in the world of technology and education. Their first issue includes articles and interviews with Jerry Graff, Michael Joyce, and Richard Lanham. Something I’ll have to check out in more detail soon.

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The NCAA and Native American Mascots (or, "Go Emus!")

This isn’t a new story, but on Friday afternoon, I heard this story on “All Things Considered” about Florida State University’s battle to save “The Seminoles” as the team mascot/nickname. As you might have heard, the NCAA “has adopted a new policy that prohibits colleges and universities from displaying hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery at any of the 88 NCAA championships.” (Or so says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

I think this issue is interesting for at least two reasons:

  • As the NPR story indicated, there is a kind of fuzzy line between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” use of Native American mascot names. There are some that probably need to change– the Carthage College “Redmen” and the Southeastern Oklahoma State University “Savages” are probably two good examples of names that I think cross the line (and for what it’s worth, I think pro football’s Washington “Redskins” ought to go mascot-shopping, too). There are some that strike me as fairly neutral, really– “braves” and “indians,” for example. And then there are some– the FSU “Seminoles” and, in more local news, the Central Michigan University “Chippewas”– that are a) named after real Native American tribes, and b) actually have at least some support from representatives of said tribes. I’m not going to pretend to know the answer, but I think it’s interesting– maybe even a bit odd– that the NCAA has just decided across the board that all of these names are wrong, and yet, as the Post-Intelligencer and other articles suggest, the NCAA has also decided to let some Native American names stand because the schools have “good intentions.”
  • The whole issue of Native American mascots was an issue just before my time here at Eastern Michigan University. See, some time in the early to mid 1990’s (I’m not exactly sure when), EMU changed its mascot name from “The Hurons” (a Native American tribe, and also the name of a river) to “The Eagles.” I mostly (see below) don’t care; I mean, my undergraduate institution (and the college team I still cheer for) is still known as “The Hawkeyes,” both a mythical bird and a Native American character in The Last of the Mohicans (not to mention everyone’s favorite doctor on M*A*S*H). But there are groups here, such as Huron Restoration Alumni Chapter, that seem to care a great deal. I’ve even seen some young people at EMU football games dressed up in mock Native American garb yelling “GO HURONS!” as our football team plays (and, in recent years, generally loses). Kind of an ugly display, but mostly a pathetic one.
  • I understand the name change away from “The Hurons,” but frankly, I’ve always thought that “The Eagles” is kind of lame and generic. It’s clearly a name that was thought up by some sort of marketing group, and a group who wanted to pick a mascot that caused absolutely no controversy. I think changing the mascot name to “the Eagles” was the epitome of “lost opportunity.” Just think about it: students could have taken a vote and we could have ended up with a cool name, like the UC-Irvine Anteaters did. If we had done that, maybe we could have ended up with a mascot both fun and completely logical:

    That’s right: The EMU Emus!

    C’mon, can’t you see the kid on the field dressed up in an emu costume? Can’t you hear the crowd yelling “GO EMUS, GO!!” I can even imagine how the local sportscaster could give us the nickname “the big birds” or something like that.

    Ah, missed opportunities…

(Thanks to gustavoG for the image on flickr, btw).

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"Downloading for the greater good"

Via Johndan’s blog, I found this amusing look at plagiarism, “Downloading for the Greater Good,” by Lauren Frey and available at her blog “The Morning News.” It’s a firmly tongue-in-cheek look at the “up-side” of students buying/getting papers off of the Internet. Like Johndan, I thought this was the most humorous passage:

Most tenured professors didn’t grow up with computers, so they’re not always that sharp when it comes to zeroes and ones. I used to work as an administrative assistant at a very reputable college. It is no exaggeration to say that many of the professors couldn’t handle making microwave popcorn, much less checking their email.

But since students started downloading papers, professors have been forced to catch up with technology. Skipping past the skills needed to operate a microwave, they now have to search the internet looking for proof that the papers are “plagiarized.� Professors have had to learn software such as the “Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program,� which blanks out every fifth word of a student’s paper and then tests how long it takes the student to fill them all back in. Also, many colleges maintain online anti-plagiarism databases that allow professors to type in any eyebrow-raising turn of phrase from a student’s paper to see if it was copied from another source.

This may sound like simple stuff to you and me, but keep in mind that about half of currently tenured professors were born before TV sets became common in American homes.

That popcorn bit got me. I don’t know about where you work, but every time one of my colleagues screws up making microwave popcorn in the faculty lounge, it stinks up the whole floor.

Anyway, two thoughts:

  • To be fair, I have plenty of junior colleagues, some born in the 70’s, who not only routinely burn the popcorn but who are still somewhat in the dark about this whole new-fangled “Internet thing.” Sure, they do email and they will look stuff up on the web, but I think that people of all ages find themselves in fields like English because they don’t want to become particularly computer literate. Of course, as Frey suggests, they ultimately have to become at least a little computer literate.
  • If you’re a student and you’re reading this blog right now and you are thinking that your teacher will never know if you just “copied and pasted” a paper and hand it in, you are probably wrong. Let me try to explain why:

    As I mentioned back in June, I had a student lift a paper from one of these sites with free papers last Spring term. I honestly think that this was the first time this has happened in one of my classes ever. I’m not suggesting that students have never passed any plagiarized material by me or they haven’t passed work by me where they have received maybe a little too much help from a friend or whatever. But I’m talking here about a paper that was pretty much lifted wholesale from a web site.

    The student who did this in June was clearly desperate. The student (I’ll leave the “he or she” thing up in the air) was going to fail the class because he/she was not able to write a passing essay the entire semester. His/her writing was simply that bad. How bad? Well, I was going to type a sentence from one of his/her essays, but I decided that wouldn’t really be that nice, even though this student did in the end cause me much grief. Let’s just say that I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I have had few college-aged students who demonstrated this lack of basic literacy skills. In short, passing off someone else’s writing was his/her last-ditch effort.

    How did I know it was plagiarized? Well, I was reading along in this student’s final research essay and it seemed like his/her writing for the first page or so. Then I came across the sentence “Since strict monitoring of diabetes is needed for the control of the disease, little room is left for carelessness.” That sentence struck me as being distinctly not this student’s writing, so I did a Google search. And the rest, as they say, is history.

    This is obviously an extreme example, but I tell this story because I have had any number of students who have inserted passages and quotes from their sources without giving them credit. This is technically plagiarism, but I usually attribute this sort of thing to not properly citing evidence. Sometimes, when I note in a marginal comment that a particular passage has come from a different source and needs to be properly cited, students respond as if I’ve performed some incredible mind-reading/magic trick in being able to spot this. I think this is because some students think they have seamlessly integrated the lifted writing into their own writing. And yet every college teacher I’ve ever met can spot most of these kinds of mini-versions of plagiarism the same way that anyone listening to the radio can tell when the station changes from classical to rock.

    Anyway, a long way to the moral, but here it goes: Students, better to cite your evidence too often rather than not enough, and if you’re going to steal from the Internet, do a really good job of it because most professors know how to do a Google search, too.

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Spam Theater




Spam Theater

Originally uploaded by this Public Address.

Ah, we missed it, we MISSED it!

On our way back from South Dakota this summer, we drove right though Austin, MN, which is the home office of Hormel meats, the maker of the infamous luncheon meat SPAM. We just didn’t have time, and really, by that point of the trip, we wanted to be home.

Ever have SPAM? I bet ya haven’t. To be honest, I can’t remember ever having SPAM until we went to Hawaii last year. There, SPAM is a local and traditional favorite, I think because the canned meat was brought by the U.S. military a long time ago. I didn’t try the SPAM sushi, but I did have SPAM as part of a traditional breakfast platter that included SPAM, Portuguese sausage, scrambled eggs, and white rice. And you know what? SPAM is pretty good.

Some day, I too hope to tour the SPAM museum. In the meantime, I’ll just have to live through the photo memories of someone else…..