Author: Steve Krause

Via the Humanist listserv, I came across this site, about a Ted Nelson concept in database design called ZigZag. Nelson describes what these databases would look like (sort of) in this talk at a “wearable computer” conference; toward the end of that talk, he defines ZigZag as:

“ZigZag is software built entirely out of connections in an interesting space, which I call Quantum Hyperspace (though it may have some other mathematical name I don’t know about, since I stumbled upon it independently).  It’s best compared to beads on a string: every cell is like a bead with many holes, and you can put one string of any color (dimension) through each bead.”

and…

“ZigZag takes place in a conceptual space which can be made visible as rows and columns, and mapped to human activities and interests in a rich and insightful way.  Thus it offers some very interesting interface possibilities.  I see it as a possible new basis for a new world of software, outside of today’s fads– with no icons, no “metaphors” (dead-end scraps of comparison like the “desktop” and “clipboard”), and best of all, no “applications”– separated, imprisoning, proprietary activity traps in which the commercial software vendors try to mire us.”

Kind of interesting, I guess, but whenever I think of Ted Nelson, I always think of this great article from a 1995 Wired magazine, Gary Wolf’s “The Curse of Xanadu.” Maybe one of the best articles I read in Wired when I used to subscribe to it, Wolf tells the “tragic” story of Nelson, a brillian guy we would today describe as having A.D.D. or something like that. Before you buy stock in ZigZag or even get too excited about it, read this.

… Craig Dean Willis, the recently retired president of Lock Haven University, in Pennsylvania. Go to the EMU homepage to learn very minimal details.

I have been doing some googling about this guy, but I’ve found very little. I will say this in the “for what it’s worth” category of things:

* Lock Haven University, while a school that originated as a “normal school,” seems quite a bit different than EMU to me. It’s a small school– less than 5,000 students– and it is in rural Pennsylvania.

* Willis was president of Lock Haven for 12 years, and at one point in time, that made him one of the longest serving university presidents in the country.

* On first glance, I couldn’t find anything particularly negative about Willis, nothing along the lines of “Willis house controversy lingers” or “Willis farewell canceled because of protests” or something like that.

So, we’ll see. I wonder if Willis fully understands what he’s got himself into…

Update:
I thought I’d mention that the board didn’t pick Willis’ name out of a hat– well, at least not exactly. Apparently, Willis works for The Registry for College and University Presidents, an organization that specializes in placing interim college and university presidents. In fact, as I understand the story as reported on WEMU this morning, Willis will technically work for this organization, and not EMU.

In other words, Willis is a “temp.” I used to be a temp for about a year and a half, between the time I was in school for my MFA and my PhD, and while the work I did back then (mostly things like filing and simple computer work) is different from what Willis will be expected to do, the principle is the same: EMU will pay “The Registry” (WEMU just reported this morning that we’ll pay them $23,000 a month for Willis), and then “The Registry” will pay Willis (and I assure you that it will be less than $23,000 a month).

Two more thoughts on this:

* I don’t want to disparage the concept of going to this agency and hiring a temp president. Far from it. This very well may be the first “smart thing” the EMU board of regents has done in, well, years…

* It’s kind of fascinating to me that there is enough of a “demand” out there to keep a company in business that specializes in placing interim presidents in colleges and universities. That tells me there must be a lot of interim presidents out there.

I’m starting to lose a little faith in Alton Brown here…

As I wrote way back in May, one of my favorite cooking guys, Alton “Good Eats” Brown, said he was going on a diet and that he was hoping to be down to 185 by the end of July, In fact, way back then on his blog of sorts called “Rants and Raves,” which is part of the altonbrown.com universe, he wrote the following:

To keep me honest I make this promise: On July 30 of this year I will post a photograph on this web page of myself wearing nothing but a bathing suit.

Hmm. Some “bathing suit,” huh?

It seems to me that there are only two possible conclusions here. One possibility is that Alton is just too modest to pose in a real bathing suit for all the world to see. Anyone who has seen his show, one where he regularly makes a fool of himself in the name of food science, will tell you that Alton ain’t shy. The other possibilty in my mind is it that he didn’t come close to meeting his goal. Given that one of his most recent entries about the movie Supersize Me! has a sort of “so what?” conclusion about the fact that the food McDonalds serves is profoundly fattening.

Alton, Alton, Alton…

-13 pounds

I know it’s just early August, but the summer is winding down for us. We don’t have a lot of “entertainment commitments” coming up (Annette’s parents are coming to town for a few days, and we might have some folks over one weekend before school starts, but that’s about it), I don’t think we’re leaving town again, and we’re going to have to start getting ready for school sooner than later. So it’s time for us to get “back on the wagon” diet-wise.

I’m back to -13 as of this morning, but that’s after being back to phase 1 (more or less) for a couple days. The Amanas in particular and Iowa in general was a fatty-fat adventure, and as I wrote before, it’s been kind of hard for me to think of myself as “dieting” at all since Hawaii. But Annette and I both realize the vacation food-wise is really over, and I think we both feel a bit better being back to the SB plan– or perhaps more accurately, our version of the SB plan.

My goal– highly over ambitious, I realize– is to be at -20 by the time school starts. That would be over 2 pounds a week, which strikes me as possible, but not probable. I can live with -16 or so though, so if I aim high, I’ll hopefully hit low.

See this article from The Washington Post,“Computers Weighing In on the Elements of Essay.” I found this via the NCTE Inbox newsletter, and I’m pretty sure that you need a user login to read the Post online.

There isn’t anything really that new here– I posted a couple of times a few months ago about this software being used to read the writing portions of some big standardized tests. One of my (many overly ambitious) goals for today is to put together the syllabus for the grad course I’m teaching in the fall, and one of the “units” or topics of discussion for one day’s class is going to be on assessment. This article, and some of the others that I found earlier in the year, ought to fit in there nicely.

And like before, I think I may be alone in my colleagues in English studies who is not completely against these electronic grading systems, especially for things like standardized tests. This story, like the other ones I’ve read, is talking about “grading” writing samples on a scale of 1 to 6; it isn’t about providing comments in the form of entering into a dialogue with the essay, or in the form of offering ideas for revision. Just a grade, and just a grade on a very standardized sort of test. Oh, and in this particular story, which is about the GMAT I believe, there is a human reader that goes back to the writing sample too– in other words, each essay gets read by the computer and by one human. If there is disagreement over the score, it is read by another human.

I don’t know, but this seems a pretty reasonable application of the current technology to me.

Cindy at “Making Contact” sort of sums up my position as a “Happy Academic” with this post: being an academic is “a job,” a very good one that allows for a lot of flexibility and interesting activities. But it is no the equivalent of “life,” which includes things like family, friends, reading silly books, golfing, writing bad poetry, watching TV, gardening, cooking. Not necessarily in that order.

Having said that, “academia is just a job” can be a pretty hard mind-set to pull off because academia is also more than a job. I was going to use the term “lifestyle,” but that seems to belittle it.

Here’s an analogy: academia is just a job, but it’s a job like being a dairy farmer. This is what my father’s father did before he sold the farm in the 60’s, more or less after my father had made it clear that he was going to use his college degree in engineering to get the hell off of the farm. I’ve talked with my father about this before, asking him why he didn’t want to be a dairy farmer. “Because you can never leave,” he said, “you have to milk the cows, every day, twice a day.”

Okay, academia isn’t quite that bad. I can haul my work pretty much anywhere, especially with my laptop, something that isn’t in the realm of dairy work. I have intense time “on the job,” but I also have time off the job. I guess what I’m getting at is this: like farming and some other professions (the clergy immediately comes to mind), academia is a profession/field that walks a line between job and identity. The trick is to make sure that you keep in mind there are times where the job part has to end, and there are other times in which you have identity outside of academia.

Try sticking out your tongue, like this German man.

See this site, WORDCOUNT/Tracking the Way We Use Language, which was mentioned on the Humanist mailing list. I don’t know if it really “tracks the way we use language” per se; I mean, what it does is rank the 86,800 most commonly used words and displays them in order of commonality– “the” is number one, “composition” is 3827, and “rhetoric” is 7256, and “conquistador” was 86,800. It was fun coming up with words not in the list, too. Very cool interface and design.

See this, the unofficial Google weblog. Kind of an interesting site to add to my list of links about Google (which I need to soon start building as part of my planning for fall classes, which needs to begin soon– VERY soon), though by “unofficial” here, I think what these folks really mean is “third party” and “unauthorized.” As opposed to my unofficial blog, which really just about me.

BTW, the same people who do this site, Weblogs Inc., apparently also have an unofficial Apple blog too, along with a lot of other blogs.

That’s my hobbit name, at least according to the Hobbit Name Generator. So I guess that must be right, right?

BTW, the guy who does this works for Blogger and also maintains this blog, which is mostly about computer geek stuff.