If you like Pina Coladas

I can't read this story without thinking about that classic, cheesy, creepy Rupert Holmes song.

Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported.The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful.

Online couple cheated with each other | The Daily Telegraph

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ADDED: I beat Best of the Web to the punchline. Too slow, Taranto.

Reading :: Spell of Catastrophe and Spell of Intrigue

Spell of Catastrophe
Spell of Intrigue
by Mayer Alan Brenner

Every once in a while I take a break and read some of the science fiction and fantasy books that really sparked my love of reading as a kid. So when I saw on BoingBoing that Mayer Alan Brenner was releasing his out-of-print fantasy series under a Creative Commons license, I figured I might as well take a look.

The first two books of the series are now online at Brenner's website in PDF format. You can also buy them used on Amazon for a cent apiece, plus shipping. But I really didn't want to commit to that degree -- or kill the trees to print them out -- so I ended up reading the PDFs in odd moments on my laptop. Think of it as an experiment in remediating print genres through new media and distribution channels, I guess.

The books themselves are not what I would call great. They have some interesting points, and the spellcasting mechanism sounds a bit like what Larry Niven did in his fantasy phase, but the author never quite manages to strongly differentiate the voices or world views of his characters. Some complex action scenes and visuals really suffered from the author's descriptive style, so I had trouble envisioning some of the key points in the book. And post-9/11, post-tsunami, the climax of Spell of Catastrophe seems to be far too lightly handled. On the other hand, the books still manage to be fairly engaging and the world that Brenner constructs seems to have potential.

The remediation aspect is actually more interesting. Since Brenner can control his own content and distribution now, he has gone ahead and written annotations of the books, including his recollections of how he shaped and sold the manuscripts, the influences on which he drew (e.g., Star Wars and the Society for Creative Anachronisms), and how he reacts to the series two decades later. Since he is no longer concerned with selling his work, he loads the annotations with spoilers. And since the PDFs are full text, not scans, the books themselves offer interesting possibilities such as easy searches of the text.

I'd recommend the series if you consume a lot of fantasy and are not terribly picky, or if you like to see how fantasy/sf worlds are constructed to support a large series. But I recommend the website to anyone who is thinking through the relationship of old to new media and the long tail.

Tipping professors

Daniel Drezner discusses a proposal that essentially allows graduating seniors to tip professors. Well, it's a bit more complicated, but essentially it's a scheme that allows students to anonymously allocate funds to professors who they think have been doing a good job. Because we all know that professors love to be praised for competence.

The first comment champions the scheme, framing teaching as a service transaction in which the professor plays the role of the student:

Your second objection is that it is unseemly to be rewarded for a good job. It's a good thing you teach PolySci and not Econ. You may not be aware of this, but the teacher-student relationship is not one of authority, but employee. Yes, that's right, the teacher WORKS FOR THE STUDENTS. Who is in a better position to judge his employee's performance? As any anyone who has ever taken a class after graduation strictly to learn something will tell you, the value of a teacher is how well he teaches, not the grade. Those immature students who don't get it cannot possibly foul up the system worse than it already is.

This is a common misconception. Check the funding of any public university and you'll find that tuition pays only a small percentage of faculty salaries. The lion's share comes from state and federal monies. So if we want to think of academics as a service industry, the "employers" are actually the taxpayers, not the students, and the "service" involves providing quality education that meets state and federal goals rather than individual goals. In this context, the notion of tipping professors becomes really incoherent.

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: A post in which I go against my material self-interest

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Another review of Tracing Genres through Organizations

This one, by Carolyn Miller, asks a pair of smart and insightful questions: Is TGTO really about rhetoric? Can genre be used to analyze mediated activity in nonrhetorical ways?

Miller, C. R. (2007). Review of Tracing Genres through Organizations. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16(4):476–480.

God gets sued

I'm late to the party on this one and all the good jokes have been taken. In a nutshell, Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers has sued God in district court for "terrorist acts" such as plagues, famines, etc. His supposed aim is to demonstrate how easy it is to file frivolous lawsuits. Mission accomplished. But it seems like these infractions would be criminal rather than civil violations.

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: Hi, I'm Daniel Drezner, the defense attorney for God

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Counting down surveillance doomsday

So people are talking about the new "doomsday clock" for monitoring progress toward the total surveillance state:

Taking a page from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists the American Civil Liberties Union today launched a "Surveillance Society Clock" that counts down to the total surveillance state (by the way, how do we know when we're there?). "The clock is set at six minutes before the 'midnight' of a dark end to privacy," the organization notes.

So we're supposed to be alarmed as the clock gets closer and closer to midnight. But come on. The time to really get alarmed is when the clock's hands suddenly jump back and the ACLU's successors tell us that surveillance is no longer a pressing issue.
Danger Room - Wired Blogs

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I never thought I would say, gee, I hope it's just radiation

Slashdot | Meteorite Causes Illness in Peru

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Flextreme!

Now there's a name you don't hear every day. It's a GM concept car, "hybrid" in the sense that it has a diesel generator on board -- but only to charge the battery, not to actually drive the car directly. But the best part:

Plus GM’s installed several new ideas on lighting design and—get this—a special cargo area under the load floor packed with a pair of Segway electric scooters. (My emphasis)

Since SegwayMania has swept the globe, I am sure this will be a huge selling point.

Google Presently; Lotus Symphony

Google has launched Presently. I haven't gotten to play with it yet, but it's on my list today, since I need to work on my SIGDOC presentation anyway. Simultaneously, IBM is launching Lotus Symphony based on OpenOffice code; it's unclear at present whether this means new features or amounts to rebranding a new product using a very old brand that had limited success in the target market.

Another piece falls into place in Google's office suite

I'm sure "Presently" will not match the power of Microsoft's desktop application etc. etc. But am I going to use it? Sure. I don't use wipes and fades anyway, and I love the idea that the presentation can be automatically published.

Google Presently Powerpoint Clone Could Be Days Away

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Checking color contrast on your website

10 colour contrast checking tools to improve the accessibility of your design | 456 Berea Street

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Facebook vs. Blackboard, part 2

A while back, I suggested that Facebook could replace Blackboard. Last night mpstaton left a comment on that post:

We developed a tool for teachers to use facebook. It's called Courses. go to http://apps.facebook.com/courses

At first glance, it looks pretty interesting.

From Russia with love

My Way News - Putin Dissolves Russian Government
This is London: Russia tests the world's largets ever non-nuclear bomb

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Mobile phones without mobile phone providers

Slashdot | Swedish Company Trials Peer-to-Peer Cellphones

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Department of Rhetoric & Writing Seeks Assistant Professor | Department of Rhetoric & Writing

Come work for us!

Department of Rhetoric & Writing Seeks Assistant Professor | Department of Rhetoric & Writing

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Google makes its move for enterprise apps

Google Gains A Big Enterprise Ally

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How to perform card sorting

An article on this simple and inexpensive UI research technique.

Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I’ve learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.

Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned :: UXmatters

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Are we getting more intelligent?

Or maybe our foreheads are just getting bigger.

Responsible Nanotechnology: Evolution on the March

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Word processor survey

Lifehacker is running an unscientific reader poll. What interests me is the selection of choices.

Reader Poll: What's Your Word Processor? - Lifehacker

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Your money is no good here

American won't accept cash on some flights - Austin Business Journal:

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AT&T's next move

Telephone companies and cable companies are the major broadband providers in the US: Cable companies have an extensive existing network that pipes both cable TV and internet, while phone companies have an even more extensive network whose loops can be upgraded to serve DSL as well as phones. Since everything is digital now, cable companies have rolled out landline phone service over their cables, while phone providers have begun to experiment with multimedia delivery.

However, the two companies have different core businesses supporting their networks. One -- cable -- is thriving, while the other -- landline phone service -- is dying. They are victims of their success: mobile phones have taken off in a big way, but they don't need the last-mile loops that enable broadband, and an increasing number of households (including mine) don't bother to use landline phones. So last-mile loops -- which each constitute a separate service -- are on the decline, and people don't want to subscribe to landline service just to get DSL.

So that brings me to the flyer I got in the mail yesterday. The upshot is this: Now AT&T sells "AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Direct Express" (i.e., its DSL service) decoupled from landline phone service. They sweeten the pot with "no termination fees," "no term limits," and a substantially lower monthly fee than cable broadband. From a consumer point of view, this lower pricing makes a lot of sense because cable broadband has higher speeds. But from AT&T's point of view, things are not so sweet: for the households that join, the cost of installing and maintaining the last mile will be borne entirely by that lower fee. What was once the core revenue stream has been left for dead. Cable companies, meanwhile, can maintain their network with their thriving core revenue stream as well as their broadband business.

"He has finally placed millions of people in the role of every key Apple employee — being alternately seduced and tormented."

Cringely psycholanalyzes Jobs.

Lessig finally gets his win

US court rules that free speech trumps copyright (sometimes) - Boing Boing

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Nukes on the loose

By now, everyone has heard that some of our nukes were unaccounted-for during a three hour flight. But Danger Room has this startling addendum:

Today, two hydrogen bombs and a uranium core lie in yet undetermined locations in the Wassaw Sound off Georgia, in the Puget Sound off Washington, and in swamplands near Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Danger Room - Wired Blogs

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Reading :: Virtual Peer Review

Virtual Peer Review: Teaching and Learning about Writing in Online Environments
By Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch

Lee-Ann and I entered the ISU PhD program together and took most of our courses together, so it's nice to sit down, about thirteen years after we first met, and see what she's been doing. And what she's been doing has been really useful. Virtual Peer Review surveys the landscape of peer reviewing with digital technologies up to 2004. And although the landscape has changed quite a bit in the last three years -- with the explosion of social networking, collaborative writing, and commenting environments -- Lee-Ann's survey is still solidly applicable.

Lee-Ann's work is like Stuart Selber's recent book: it doesn't present an empirical study or break any new theoretical ground, but it takes stock of an area of the field that has not been carefully chronicled previously, and it does this job clearly and comprehensively. And because Lee-Ann does this job so well, I found that even with a topic that changes as quickly as computer-assisted peer review, her framework and guidance still apply quite well. I use computer-assisted peer review quite a bit in my classes, and have migrated from Word comments to Drupal comments to Google Docs and Basecamp within the last few years, but Lee-Ann's work still applies just as well. If you do a lot of peer review in digital environments, and you need some sense of the scope of the changes, check it out.

I guess I won't write my next book in Google Docs

» The Content in Google Apps Belongs to Google | Enterprise Anti-matter | ZDNet.com

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30,000 movies on an iPod-sized device

Howard Lovy complains:

If 30,000 movies is the best we can come up with, then we have a severe crisis of imagination. I don't blame the Reuters reporter. Like the overused and inaccurate "human hair" comparison, "30,000 movies" places the technology in a context the average reader can understand.

That severe crisis of imagination is fairly common. Here on the UT campus, during the first week you couldn't walk on campus without being asked if you wanted to buy a subscription to the Austin American-Statesman or the Houston Chronicle. You might as well be selling butter churns or moustache cups.

But back to the issue. What could we store on such a device? One idea: a (relatively) complete lifestream.
Howard Lovy's NanoBot: Nano memory: 30,000 movies and nothing on

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You really are doing something at work

Fun fact of the day:

According to the International Labour Organisation, the United States leads the world in labor productivity, with a total output per employee of $8,000 over the second most productive country, Ireland.

If we are so productive, can we change the "International Labour Organisation" to the American spelling?
Productivity - Lifehacker

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Jotspot back from the dead

Finally, looks like Jotspot, which Google bought nearly a year ago, may relaunch as Google Wiki. It's going to be integrated into Google Apps.

Google Wiki Prepares To Launch

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lolprofs!!1!!!11!!!

Picked this up from Facebook.

lolprofs!!1!!!11!!!

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"The Voyager technology is so outmoded ... we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them."

A look at the thirty-year-old tacking station that maintains contact with Voyager 1 and 2.

Lifestreaming and GTD

SlifeLabs, which supplies software for monitoring and web-publishing your computer activity, wants to know your thoughts about how to integrate Slife with Getting Things Done.

The Slife Labs Blog » GTD and Productivity

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Where's my flying car?

Here.

BBC NEWS | Business | Flying saucer 'nears US take-off'

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Iraq's WMD found -- in New York

Dangerous Iraq chemicals found stored at U.N. in NY | Top News | Reuters.com

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GPhone apocalypse

Lots of discussion of the iPhone here. I like the sketches and the wish list, both of which appear to be entirely speculative.

The Gphone is coming; how Google could rewrite the rules | last100

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Reading :: Participation and Power

Participation and Power: Civic Discourse in Environmental Policy Decisions
By W. Michele Simmons

It seems to me that we in rhetoric and professional communication should spend more time talking about civic discourse, policy discourse, and public communication. Certainly much of this ground "belongs" to other fields and disciplines, such as government, law, and public affairs. But as Carolyn Rude has argued, those of us in RPC have a lot of expertise in written communication and argumentation in general, and certainly in specific genres such as recommendation reports. So books like W. Michele Simmons' Participation and Power represent a positive trend -- even though I am not enchanted with this specific book.

Let's first talk about what the book is about. Politics and Power describes Simmons' study of how the US Army included the public in a series of meetings about their plans to destroy 1269 tons of VX nerve agent at the Newport Chemical Depot. These meetings were not the Army's idea; rather, they were mandated by Congress. Simmons argues, more or less persuasively, that the Army implemented these meetings in ways that minimized actual public participation in decision-making. She argues that

the complex issues involved in risk assessment, governmental law, and governmental agencies present challenging obstacles to negotiating a policy that all involved parties consider just. By just, I mean that all affected by the decision had the ability to actively participate in the decision-making process. (p.3)

Based on that proposition, Simmons deploys a set of analytical tools to examine how parties were invited into, or discouraged from participating in, decision-making in the VX case. She does this by observing meetings, interviewing activists and Army spokespeople, and reviewing regulations. One very positive result is the figure on p.52, in which she sketches out the federal regulations, state and federal agencies, agency programs, and cross-institutional programs involved in the weapons disposal program. With that many regulations, agencies, and programs involved, one would expect some serious contradictions and double binds, even without throwing in the public, and those contradictions manifested in some very focused attempts by the Army to move the program along -- and some less focused attempts by heterogeneous nongovernmental elements to oppose it on a variety of grounds. Let's call these nongovernmental elements "the public," because Simmons does, although that label hardly does justice to the discontinuous activities, relations, and objectives that we can glimpse through Simmons' report.

Simmons asserts that the Army's approach to public meetings was pro forma and was either (a) designed to reduce public participation or (b) at the least, wasn't designed to properly encourage and leverage it. This case is fairly persuasive (at least in the weaker formulation b). So what could be done about it?

Unfortunately, this is where the discussion loses focus. Simmons promises an "approach" or a "rhetoric" of public participation in decision making, and she argues that this approach/rhetoric/model should be based on participatory design. This conclusion is problematic at several levels.

At the first level, the conclusion flows from Simmons' assertion that "Discourse and decisions are ethical only if all affected are allowed to participate" (p.100), and further, "Approaches that claim citizen participation through a few citizen representatives, that do not allow multiple publics access to decision making, or do not grant equal status to different groups, attempt to unify the public in ways that work to marginalize their contribution to the construction of a policy" (p.100). This conclusion, if taken seriously, would argue for a repudiation of representative democracy. The genius of representative democracy is its ability to black-box citizens in terms of interests; that's why it scales. Simmons' assertion opens up all of those black boxes, those Pandora's boxes. It is for that reason that participatory design has always drawn on user representatives -- originally labor representatives in the UTOPIA project, and later functional representatives (randomly selected users). Predictably, when Simmons gets to a case study of students working with "the local community" (p.142), that community is blackboxed into "community residents, teachers, citizen groups, and municipal workers" and students conduct "participatory observations" with representatives of each group (p.143). (These appear to be functional representatives.)

This brings us to the second level at which the conclusion is problematic. Simmons argues that formulating public policy is a sort of design work, and the student case in Chapter 6 involves actual information design work in service of communicating policy to the public. But the analogy between design and policy formulation is just that -- an analogy -- and it is not up to the task of underpinning a concrete model or methodology for public participation in policy formulation. I was actually surprised when I turned the last page of the book, because beyond very general principles such as involving the public and making sure everyone's voices are heard, I hadn't seen any specific guidance or strongly detailed participation model. This is of a piece with Robert Johnson's User-Centered Technology, on which Simmons draws extensively but which similarly speaks in terms of participatory design's general orientation rather than its innovative and thoughtfully constructed methodology.

And this gets us to the third and most problematic factor of the conclusion. Simmons wants to base a model of public participation on a design methodology, and she draws somewhat on Pelle Ehn's classic work to do that. But if she had only read Ehn's work more carefully and followed his citations a bit, she would have discovered that participatory design's future workshops component is based on Robert Jungk's future workshops, a well articulated model of public participation along the lines that she seeks, one that was extensively tested with dozens of community groups in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. (I review Ehn's and Jungk's books elsewhere on this blog.) So, for me, reading this book was like watching Romeo drink the poison just as Juliet is stirring. So close, so close to discovering the underlying potential of the participatory design approach for civic discourse.

Japan's edge in broadband

The Washington Post reports:

The copper wire used to hook up Japanese homes is newer and runs in shorter loops to telephone exchanges than in the United States. This is partly a matter of geography and demographics: Japan is relatively small, highly urbanized and densely populated. But better wire is also a legacy of American bombs, which razed much of urban Japan during World War II and led to a wholesale rewiring of the country.

In 2000, the Japanese government seized its advantage in wire. In sharp contrast to the Bush administration over the same time period, regulators here compelled big phone companies to open up wires to upstart Internet providers.

In short order, broadband exploded.

Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future - washingtonpost.com

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GPhone roundup

Suddenly rumors are (again) buzzing about the GooglePhone.

Om Malik speculates that the GPhone is an attempt to take on the $100 PC, which makes sense: the tight integration with Google Apps provides some computing functionality, the mobile phone paradigm is easier to support in places with low PC penetration, mobile phones are already being used in innovative ways in these areas, and the hardware should be cheaper.


rizzn.com claims that GPhone will run a modified Linux kernel. He adds more speculation about the competition with the $100 laptop as a long-term strategy.

And engadget clarifies (?) that we're not talking about a phone per se, but a mobile OS that would run on hardware manufactured by other providers. The OS rumor is supported by Google's 2005 acquisition of Android.

Making do with a $4B warship

Danger Room has an article about the stealth Zumwalt-class destroyer, built to cruise close to shore, appear on the radar as a fishing boat, and unleash a torrent of artillery rounds on cross-border armored troops. The problem? Between design and implementation, warfare changed. Massive tank armies are out. So the Navy is trying to recast Zumwalts as an air defender for aircraft carriers. The problem: the stealth design is lousy for this purpose, since it sacrifices stability and volume.

Simply put, the world is changing faster than ship design can keep up. “But that's not a new problem," Work says, citing the early 20th century and the post-Cold War period as similarly rapidly evolving eras. "When you keep a ship between strategic eras, you almost always have to goon it up.” That means kluging together all sorts of weapons and sensors you never anticipated during the design phase, and making do with less-than-perfect hull forms.

This is a familiar story for anyone who has read Max Boot's War Made New (reviewed earlier on my blog).
Danger Room - Wired Blogs

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Maybe marriage really is an institution

BoingBoing links to a bare press release about a study by sociologists at George Mason University and North Carolina State that "concludes that unmarried couples that live together divide housework more evenly than married couples." From the press release:

Couples with an egalitarian view on gender--seeing men and women as equal--are more likely to divide the household chores equally. However, in married relationships, even if an egalitarian viewpoint is present, men still report doing less housework than their wives.

"Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples--even couples who see men and women as equal," says Davis.

The obvious question -- and I haven't read the full study -- is: is marriage the cause, or does it just correlate? Commenters raise this and other methodological questions.

Shacked-up couples share housework better than marrieds - Boing Boing

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My Cell Style

Sprint's new website is an online quiz that purports to tell you what your mobile phone personality is. I took the quiz, but many of the questions didn't have a right answer for me. I was labeled a "technosexual," which sounds more like something on Fembot.

Michael Arrington, who was also labeled a technosexual, provides some sophisticated analysis:

Sprint Sucks And Their New Website Is Stupid

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How people became currency

A meditation on the guy who traded up from a red paper clip to a house.

So if the world of the red paper clip is neither a typical goods nor a typical labor market, then what is it? Perhaps it's the world of another Alice, the world through the looking glass. On one side of the mirror, the side where most of us live, we each make our way in the marketplace based on our own unique bundles of ability and work experience. The object of our quest--money--is just the opposite. It is utterly interchangeable; a dollar is a dollar, and we don't know or care about where it's been or what it's done.

On the other side of the looking glass, the world of one red paper clip, things operate in reverse. Here it is individuals who become interchangeable and their past experience irrelevant. Content is content, and anyone can fill the bill for a recording contract or film role. The objects of the quest, by contrast, are unique or idiosyncratic--fish pens and doorknobs come across in Mr. MacDonald's book as having more personality than their owners--and are valued precisely for where they've been and what they've "done." Why else would Rhawnie and Corinna hang onto the paper clip? It's because, as Mr. MacDonald says, it has "a great story."

OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts

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Do companies benefit from social networking?

SmartMobs points to this ZDNet column which in turn points to research at UW and NYU about social networks -- not sites like Facebook, but actual connections with people across media:

According to two U.S. researchers, fewer degrees of separation make companies more innovative. They’ve studied the innovative performance of about a thousand companies in various industries over a six-year period. And they’ve concluded that “companies that network and form strategic alliances are more creative and develop more patented inventions than those that don’t.”

As ZDNet author Roland Piquepaille cautions, the result seems intuitive to many of us, but the methodology -- measuring innovation via patent numbers -- may not be the best for studying innovation per se. Still, worth a look.

» Do companies benefit from social networking? | Emerging Technology Trends | ZDNet.com

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Facebook meets the Good Book

Faithvine is a social networking site, "a safe, online community in which Christians from all backgrounds can grow together socially, intellectually, and spiritually, with a greater sense of connection through the central figure of Jesus Christ." It's not anchored to any particular denomination, and Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, and the unchurched are all invited.

I'm not particularly surprised that social networking is taking off in the Christian sphere, especially given the success of the Willow Creek model and its emphasis on cementing large communities through small groups and culturally and community specific features. That theme is extended on Faithvine via blogs and discussions. Sometimes there's a bit of dissonance, such as this blog post worrying that Powerpoint makes church too much like business.

Faithvine

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Reading :: Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions

Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations
by Mark Zachry (Editor), Charlotte Thralls (Editor)

I received this book in the mail a couple of days ago, and was really glad to see it. I was fortunate enough to be invited to publish a chapter in it (Ch.3, a really fun chapter to write), but more importantly, the other chapters are written by really smart people and held together by the notion of the regulation of discourse -- an elastic and broadly applicable topic. The book's editors are also top-flight, which I suspected would translate into a more even collection than is typical.

I was right. The collection is much more even and coherent than most tend to be, particularly in professional communication. Authors have very different perspectives and draw on different theoretical frameworks, but they are working toward what is identifiably the same phenomenon and (mostly) doing a good job of it. The spread of authors is good, including many in writing studies, rhetoric, and professional communication, but also psychology, sociology, managment, and information studies. And the unifying concept of regulation works, even as it is articulated in very different ways across chapters.

As Zachry explains in the introduction, regulation in this collection refers to the ordering of "communicative practices in which people in workplaces and professions engage," and it is in turn "always constituted and sustained by communicative practices" (p.vi). Here, regulation is defined in terms of relationality and contingency (p.vii). And as we study regulation, Zachry argues, three issues become important: relationality, situatedness, and agency (p.ix). These three issues, not coincidentally, are foci of the subsequent chapters.

I won't review every chapter, but let's look at a few standouts.

Dorothy Winsor's chapter, "Using Texts to Manage Continuity and Change in an Activity System," continues the longitudinal study of four men who Winsor first met as freshmen at an engineering college. Drawing on activity theory, Winsor asks: How does a heterogeneous assembly of people agree on a common object and act in concert? And her short answer is that texts create common objects and coordinate activities over time, especially generic documents or "charter" documents (p.4). Such documents (her examples are requests for quotes (RFQs) and labor contracts) function as central stable texts that lend the appearance of stability but impart flexibility to the activity by accommodating subsidiary reinterpretations. In doing so, they merge contingency and change (p.6). Through her interview and artifact work, Winsor concludes that an activity system may have multiple objects; texts help these objects to cohere, but flexibility of interpretation is what makes the enterprise work (p.18).

Catherine Schryer, Lorelei Lingard, and Marlee Spafford continue their careful work with genres in their chapter, in which they use genre theory to examine case presentations by health care students. They emphasize that genre includes not only replicable structures, but also "regularized improvisations" (p.26). "Genres are constellations of regulated and regularized improvisational strategies triggered by the interaction between individual socialization, or habitus, and an organization or field" (p.31).

Dave Clark similarly leverages genre theory and activity theory in his empirically based examination of empowerment narratives in the new economy. After reviewing some of the most common narratives of empowerment, he describes how they were leveraged in an internet startup in which he was a participant-observer. "Using a cultural approach," he concludes, "we can build understandings of organizational power that do not view empowerment as a simple hierarchy but that seek instead to understand the broad array of discourses, technologies, professions, traditions, and capital that regulate the ways that workers receive financial rewards and build or lose the authority and value attached to their work" (p.176).

But for me, perhaps the most interesting chapter was David Boje's discussion of "antenarrative" -- which is a precursor to narrative, "a bet that a proper narrative can be constituted" (p.219). Drawing heavily on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of rhizomes, Boje identifies several destabilized antenarratives in the rise and fall of Enron. My one nit is that even as Boje draws the obvious implication ("analyses that refer to a unitary universal narrative ... should be seen as reductionist taglines," p.235), he mobilizes a unitary universal narrative to make sense of his identified antenarratives ("Capitalism will once again put on its magic mask and use the strange hypnotic power of spectacle to delude the 'spectator'," p.234).

Overall, this is an impressive and thoughtful collection, and I anticipate using and citing these chapters. Again, I'm impressed by the level of conceptual coherence compared to so many other collections. And it's also gratifying to see rhetoric and professional communication represented so ably in this interdisciplinary mix.

Reading :: Writing Software Documentation, 2ed.

Writing Software Documentation: A Task-Oriented Approach (2ed)
By Thomas T. Barker

I've always liked textbooks that present coherent approaches or methodologies, since they provide a framework within which students can work. Even if that framework is deficient, it holds together enough for students to work out ways to improve it. Tommy Barker's book presents a coherent approach, one without obvious deficiencies. I was introduced to it during my time at Texas Tech, where Tommy teaches, and was immediately impressed with how well it holds together and how carefully it leads students through the steps of developing software documentation. So when I committed to teaching a software documentation course this spring, I looked up Tommy's book and was pleased to discover that he had put out a new edition.

The new edition was necessary, of course, given the enormous changes in software documentation since the book was first published. Technical communication has been around a while as a field, but the boom in the 1980s and 1990s was largely driven by the explosive growth of the software market -- and, let's be honest, the importance of making those boxes heavy so people would feel like they were actually buying something. So paper manuals were incredibly important when Tommy wrote the first edition of the book. But in the 2000s, people have become comfortable buying CD-ROMs or just downloading software, and paper documentation is mostly sold in the form of third-party tutorials such as the Dummies manuals. Manufacturers' software documentation comes primarily in the form of online help, documentation on the website, and embedded documentation in the user interface. And let's not forget user forums, both official and unofficial. These changes are huge, and have really changed the landscape.

Tommy's second edition, released in 2002, gets us halfway through the changes above. I hesitate to say that he should already consider a third version, but another update would allow him to better address the question of user-generated documentation and forums, something that is touched upon in the second edition but not addressed to any great extent. The book is still manual-centric, but addresses online help as well. I expect that the solid foundation provided by the book's approach will allow me to build class components for the issue of user communities, though, so that's fine.

One major issue I had with the book has nothing to do with the author: The book's production values, like those of the series as a whole, are low. Allyn & Bacon has put together a fairly solid series here, but the pages look photocopied and the page design varies noticeably from book to book. If Tommy does come out with a third edition, I hope Allyn & Bacon can match the book with the high production values it deserves.

Netflix for books

In case your town doesn't have one of those things called a "library."

Books: Rent Books Netflix-Style with BookSwim - Lifehacker

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This seems like a positive development for the intelligence community

Spooks Get Their Own MySpace

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One in four adults read no books last year?

According to the AP:

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

This is pretty shocking, especially given those interminable lines for the Harry Potter books this summer. But what does it mean? Are these people not reading at all? Are they reading parts of several books? Are they reading a lot of short stories, newspapers, or blogs?

Or to put it another way: Is it reasonable to make the book the most important metric for literacy (as the news article implies but doesn't state)? Let's ask one of the people in the survey:

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

So a highly literate professional who reads and writes texts constantly doesn't want to do any more reading on his off hours. That seems reasonable. That's part of the reason I no longer read fiction. But how typical is Bustos?

People from the South read a bit more than those from other regions, mostly religious books and romance novels. Whites read more than blacks and Hispanics, and those who said they never attend religious services read nearly twice as many as those who attend frequently.

Southerners represent! But notice that the author hastens to point out the specific genres favored by this group, genres that are typically not considered great literature.

There was even some political variety evident, with Democrats and liberals typically reading slightly more books than Republicans and conservatives.

In this case, it doesn't say what sorts of genres are preferred by each group. Oh wait, yes it does, later in the article:

Those likeliest to read religious books included older and married women, lower earners, minorities, lesser educated people, Southerners, rural residents, Republicans and conservatives.

Presumably wealthy people, liberals, Democrats, and more educated people are reading celebrity biographies and those Harry Potter books instead.

So what do you think? Is a book a meaningful metric of literacy? Can we regard Who Moved My Cheese, The Bible, a romance novel, and Tracing Genres through Organizations as roughly equal, and are they more or less consequential than a week of reading your favorite political blog, or a year's worth of text messages?

One in four read no books last year - Yahoo! News

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Reading :: Making Things Public

Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
by Bruno Latour (Editor), Peter Weibel (Editor)

Making Things Public is based an exhibition in which Latour became involved, an exhibition of different artifacts that have to do with politics in the world of things. How do we think of a politics of things? How do we understand the public aspects of shared artifacts? This is a familiar theme for Latour, and in this edited collection, he convinces "more than 100 writers, artists, and philosophers" to join him. The result is a beautiful but massively thick book -- like an academic coffee table book, as a review at Amazon.com puts it, with wonderful production values and art.

Of course, with over 100 authors and artists jostling for space, even with a massively thick book, there's not much room for everyone's meditations. So the chapters are short. Reading it is like going through a buffet and grabbing small samples of everything. It's built for breadth, not depth, so we get samples of work from many different places, working on the same theme. It's not exactly satisfying, but it's still useful.

Unfortunately I never finished the book, and my copy is probably gracing someone else's coffee table right now. Last week I was carrying too many things on the bus and accidentally left the book on the seat. I can't imagine what its new owner thinks of it -- but if you buy this book used and you find that my email address is written on the inside front cover, now you know the story.

Uh-oh

Academic is sued for blogging a negative book review. Please don't get any ideas.

Read your life like a D&D character

From TechCrunch:

Vancouver based MyProgress offers a service that provides progress monitoring features (generally used in computer role playing games) for life tracking.

MyProgress allows users to track their personal finances, skills, “knowledges”, wealth and health dynamics.

The site tracks every piece of information users enter, from a new purchase, capital gains, an hour of photographic or driving experience, or a rental price change, and provides a detailed overview on how fast they are progressing in comparison with the others across multiple categories, such as age, occupation, and location. The service provides analytics about user’s life and build forecasts based on past data.

MyProgress Lets You Track Your Progress

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Robots will patrol the streets of Lubbock

According to Danger Room:

Armed robots -- similar to the ones now on patrol in Iraq -- are being marketed to domestic police forces, according to the machines' manufacturer and law enforcement officers.  None of the gun-toting 'bots appear to have been deployed domestically,  yet.  Both cops and company officials say it's only a matter of time, however.

And where will they patrol?

In addition to the Massachusetts State Police,  SWAT teams in Houston, San Francisco, and Lubbock, TX all have the robots, according to Foster-Miller spokesperson Cynthia Black.  None of the team have armed the machines, so far.   But Trooper Rogowski, for one, is extremely interested -- especially in equipping the robot with a less-lethal weapon, like a three-shot Taser stun gun.  "That would be phenomenal," he says.

Yes, phenomenal.

Danger Room - Wired Blogs

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Reading :: The End of History and the Last Man

The End of History and the Last Man
by Francis Fukuyama

Imagine you're at a cocktail party. You don't really know anyone, but you're interested in mingling, so you approach a knot of people deep in conversation. One man is talking to the others, who look skeptical. "Really," he tells them. "The sun will always rise in the east and set in the west."

Surprised that they are so skeptical, you can't help jumping into the conversation. "He's right," you say quickly, and the man shoots a grateful glance your way. You're about to explain how the earth rotates around the sun, when the man concludes triumphantly: "For the Lord Apollo would never turn around his chariot! He will always journey across the sky from east to west!" The others look at you contemptuously and as they disperse, one says, "Oh great, another sun worshipper."

That's how I felt reading Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. The conclusion sounds like it could possibly be reasonable -- and certainly seems attractive, as I discuss below -- but it is supported by a series of arguments and premises about which I am skeptical.

Before we get to that conclusion and the argument that supports it, let's review Francis Fukuyama himself. He is a philosopher and political economist at Johns Hopkins University and had been considered neoconservative through the first couple of years of this century, although he withdrew his support for the Iraq was in 2003. One of his theses, put forth in The End of History, was heavily used in neoconservative arguments for transforming Iraq into a democracy: the thesis that democracies tended not to war against other democracies.

That thesis is part of the overall argument Fukuyama makes. Essentially, Fukuyama's thesis follows that of Hegel and Marx, in outline if not in detail:

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled. (p.xii)

Fukuyama, who draws heavily on Hegel's dialectic and, in later chapters, on Nietzsche, posits that the combination of democracy and economic liberalism (i.e., capitalism or free markets) is "the end of history," the system that makes the most sense and that eventually will become universal (or universally striven toward).

As mankind approaches the end of the millenium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of universal freedom and popular sovereignty. Two hundred years after they first animated the French and American revolutions, the principles of liberty and equality have proven not just durable but resurgent. (p.42)

Indeed, he says, we have tried to imagine something better than liberal democracy, and we have failed (p.46). Liberal democracies, which by his criteria did not exist until 1776, have multiplied in the world. And this trend is important: "it constitutes further evidence that there is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies -- in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy" (p.48).

History, he argues, is directional (see Chapter 6). (He acknowledges postmodern critiques of this thesis in Chapter 5, but brushes them aside rather than engaging with them; see p.69.) To explain this direction, he draws on Hegel's idealist dialectics, arguing that the "primary motor of human history" is "a totally non-economic drive, the struggle for recognition" (p.135). History comes to an end when dialectic does: when there are no more contradictions, when "the present form of social and political organization is completely satisfying to human beings in their most essential characteristics" (p.136).

Fukuyama's thesis of a universal history, then, rests on the underlying thesis of a universal, transhistorical human nature (p.138). And to describe this universal human nature, Fukuyama reaches for a surprising source: Socrates. Socrates argued that the desire for recognition and value is a universal characteristic, called thymos (p.163), a characteristic that is separate from the other two components of the soul, reason and desire (p.177). Thymos can take the form of isothymos, the desire to be recognized to the same degree as everyone else, which is the foundation of liberal democracy; and megalothymos, the desire to be esteemed above all others, which leads to competitions and striving but also to tyranny (Ch.17). It is this universal characteristic of thymos, and particularly that of isothymos, that makes liberal democracy so appealing, since it is the only system that makes thymos possible for all. Even though differences of a cultural and economic nature will persist (p.244), the overall system will converge toward liberal democracy as the most universally satisfying system. Liberal democracy, he says later, gives the fullest scope to all three parts of the soul: reason, desire, and thymos (p.337).

Based on this analysis, Fukuyama rejects realpolitik -- the school of foreign policy based on Machiavelli and premised on the notion that history doesn't change, war is eternal, and the balance of forces is the most effective way to avoid conflicts (Ch.23). This school of realism, he says, looks only at capabilities and not intentions (p.258); it is deeply pessimistic. Fukuyama, on the other hand, is idealistic: "The civil peace brought about by liberalism should logically have its counterpart in relations between states." Drawing on Schumpeter, he argues that democratic capitalist societies are not warlike or imperialistic (p.260). Indeed, the costs of war have increased and the costs of trade have decreased, making war much less attractive (p.262).

I, for one, find the overall thesis to be rather seductive. Is history on the side of liberal democracies? Has the US found the right combination, and is the rest of the world trailing after us, eventually becoming happier and better off as they become more like us? What a pleasant and flattering thought! But I am much less sanguine about the premises and evidence that lead Fukuyama to this conclusion.

In particular, grounding this thesis in a particularly Western conception of the human soul seems oversimplified to say the least. Fukuyama spends so much of his time grounding his arguments for universality in Socrates, Hegel, and Nietzsche that he neglects to substantially draw from other philosophical traditions to demonstrate that the concept of thymos in particular is truly universal. He does provide anecdotal evidence, including quotes from dissidents of various systems, but he doesn't do enough to ground these as universal rather than cultural characteristics. In fact, he moves very easily from the concrete to the abstract in discussing human nature; he really needs to spend much more time at the concrete level, establishing universality with comparative work, before making that leap to the abstract.

He also treats the notion of thymos as unproblematically scaling from individuals to states. Again, he really needs to put much more effort into this part, since complex systems often have very different characteristics from their components. The fact that individuals extend esteem and equality to each other in a democracy, for instance, does not mean that their democracy as a whole extends something similar to other democracies. If states' characteristics correspond that closely to individuals' characteristics, Fukuyama really needs to drive this point home with a broader empirical base.

And that brings us to the third, empirical part of the argument. Fukuyama asks us to observe the "trends," trends that started less than 250 years ago on the national scale, for evidence that liberal democracy is the end of history. When you're arguing a universal thesis, though, this small slice of human history doesn't seem like enough empirical grounding -- especially since the trend can potentially be explained materially, as the result of better transportation, communication, and economic networks. What is the evidence that this stage is not transitional, beyond the fact that we have tried to imagine something better than liberal democracy, and we have failed (p.46)?

This book has been incredibly influential, and I'm glad I read it. At the same time, I was surprised at how grounded the book was in philosophical concepts rather than in empirical evidence. (It could have easily been grounded in both.) Either I am missing something -- which I readily admit could be the case -- or the book's seductive thesis has overshadowed its arguments for many readers. In any case, it's still worth a read for anyone who is interested in how US foreign policy is evolving.

Noöpolitik

David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla have a new article in FirstMonday about turning from hard power (preferred by realpolitik) to soft power:

Traditional realpolitik, which ultimately relies on hard (principally military) power, will give way to the rise of noöpolitik (or noöspolitik), which relies on soft (principally ideational) power. This paper reiterates the authors’ views as initially stated in 1999, then adds an update for inclusion in a forthcoming handbook on public diplomacy. One key finding is that non–state actors — unfortunately, especially Al Qaeda and its affiliates — are using the Internet and other new media to practice noöpolitik more effectively than are state actors, such as the U.S. government. Whose story wins — the essence of noöpolitik — is at stake in the worldwide war of ideas. 

The promise of noöpolitik

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Skimp on highways!

That's what the Austinist advocates. After discovering that TxDOT has increased its estimated cost for five new highways to $2.5 billion, the author states:

Here's an alternative that doesn't involve toll roads or raising the gas tax (although raising the gas tax would be great): don't build these new highways. Especially don't build the elevated expressway in Oak Hill at 290 and 71. If anything, the Fix290 plan is much better. Instead, spend the TxDOT budget fixing our existing bridges and roads and bring back funding for trail, beautification and tourist projects. Austin doesn't need any more highways.

Interesting. In the 1970s, city leaders decided that they didn't want Austin to grow too much, and the best way would be to avoid building more highways. Austin grew anyway, and we faced an expensive bout of highway building in the 1990s to compensate. Austin still doesn't have a decent east-west route. Now we get to see the logic recapitulated, and I don't expect the results to be any better. Pass the gas tax if we have to, but let's not stick our heads in the sand again.

Austinist: TXDOT: Local Highway Construction Estimate Now $2.5B

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Stardust

According to Slashdot, some scientists believe there is overwhelming evidence that life originated elsewhere and Earth was seeded with life via comets. (This hypothesis is called "panspermia.") Meanwhile, according to another story, "Researchers at the Russian Academy of Science, the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in German, and the University of Sydney observed particles of inorganic dust form helical structures and go through other "lifelike" changes. The experiments took place under simulated plasma conditions, representative of space and also the primordial Earth. These inorganic structures may have even led to the organic molecules of life that we're familiar with, and made from."

Hack your iPhone into a video phone

It's both a software and a hardware hack, involving the iPhone toolchain and two acrylic mirrors. The result looks kind of like a makeup compact that you can speak into.

Mac Daddy World » Blog Archive » Two-way Video Conferencing for iPhone

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Historically exploring Adventure

"Adventure" is the classic text-adventure game. New historical work -- including interviews, examinations of the author's student account at Stanford, and a walkthrough of Kentucky's Colossal Cave -- reveal how it was developed:

In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods's significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to their representation in Crowther's version; however, by May of 1977, Woods had expanded the game to include numerous locations that he invented, along with significant technical innovations (such as scorekeeping and a player inventory).

Boing Boing: Maze of twisty little passages, all alike is REAL!

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Galveston is shrinking and sinking

Galveston, which was razed by a devastating hurricane in 1900 in the US' worst natural disaster, is now facing a new, much slower natural disaster: it's eroding, "shrinking and sinking."

The Galveston County Daily News

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In US telecommunications, mobile data is where the money is

The Register discusses how the "US is consuming vast amounts of mobile data and, unlike Europe, it's not all SMS messaging." About half of the mobile data in the US are SMS, with the remainder being all that web surfing you've been doing on your new iPhone.

US punters gobbling up mobile data | The Register

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Using human-made tornadoes to supply energy and save the environment

This really should underpin a science fiction novel, even if it turns out to be unworkable in practice.

Are Man-Made Tornadoes the Answer to Global Warming? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

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Mark Cuban has forgotten how to write

I suspect more people have this problem than let on. If my work were not so portable -- meaning that I end up writing on printouts on the bus and in waiting rooms -- I could easily see this happening to me. Cuban reacts in shame: "Should I take a class with 5 year olds to relearn ???" But I'm more interested in how this will affect today's five-year-olds, so-called "digital natives," who will be writing more with electronic devices and less with pens and paper.

I Forgot How to Write ! - Blog Maverick

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2008 voting will probably begin in 2007

We saw speculation about this in the last two presidential election cycles, but it might actually happen this time. South Carolina Republicans have moved their primary to January 17, 2008, and this move looks to cause "a chain reaction among other early primary states," whose primaries are scheduled in relationship to other primaries by state laws. For instance, New Hampshire's state law dictates that it must have the first primary in the nation, a law that benefits NH immensely and selfishly. Similarly, the Iowa caucus is the first contest in the nation by state law. In theory, if another state were to legislate that their primaries had to precede New Hampshire's, we would have a legislated infinite loop on our hands. I'm not sure how to press Control-C in that eventuality.

On a side note, when I lived in Iowa, it was commonplace to see presidential candidates as the caucuses and the Iowa Straw Poll approached. Meeting a candidate was a good way to get a free pancake breakfast. But the casual access did tend to spoil people. I remember one woman's letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register, complaining that GW Bush had not visited the state enough; how could she decide whether to vote for him if she hadn't even met him? Ah, Iowa.

The Texas Blue | The Primary Primary

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Why we need IRBs

THE GREAT IVY LEAGUE NUDE POSTURE PHOTO SCANDAL - New York Times

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Make news, comment on the news

Google News will soon display reader comments from people who actually participated in the news story in question.

Google News Blog: Perspectives about the news from people in the news

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Big merger in the works

Slashdot | Astronomers Witness Whopper Galaxy Collision

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WWN RIP

All the News That Seemed Unfit to Print - washingtonpost.com

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Who foresaw cell phones?

Not William Gibson. But then again, science fiction really isn't about the future, it's always about the present.

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Not getting the cell phone ahead of time: William Gibson

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Move to Austin

I tell people that anyway, but now there's a more concrete reason than features such as the Alamo Drafthouse and El Sol y La Luna:

Austin tops the nation for business - Austin Business Journal:

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Associations Mean Endorsements

People have been jumping all over the story that Rudy Giuliani's daughter apparently "endorsed" Barak Obama by joining his Facebook group. We heard similar things about George P. Bush in 2000, but that was from the mainstream media, not screen grabs on TechCrunch.

Facebook Embarrassment For Rudy Giuliani

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Call for Papers: Ninth Biennial 2008 International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference

Ninth Biennial 2008 International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference

Wednesday, May 28 through Saturday, May 31, 2008

The University of Texas at Austin

Call for Papers:

Translating and Collaborating, Across Disciplinary, Educational and Geographic Borders

The very nature of WAC scholarship has led practitioners across disciplinary, educational and geographic borders. In doing the process of collaborating across these borders, we have learned as much as we have given: How has translating our work for those outside our field helped us reconceptualize WAC’s mission, theories, pedagogy? How has our presence in an institution, school system or country effected a cross-translation, a hybrid, an evolution of each? How does our movement across disciplinary and geographical spaces translate into effective pedagogies that prepare future generations—and how do we know they are effective?

This year’s conference will focus on how working with other disciplines has influenced our theories of composing and communicating; how communicating across local (e.g. K-16), national and international borders is changing our definitions of writing as well as our teaching and collaborative practices; how we translate what we do so that students, academic staff, administration, and those outside our institutions support the scholarship and curricular reform we promote. We invite proposals that investigate how our border crossings have affected the shape of our field, our institutions and our global WAC conversations. For example, participants might explore

* How multiple forms of communication make up a discipline, particularly those that may not often be discussed (e.g., the genre and eventually employment of field notes within a discipline): How are these communicated to students? How do they shape (a) discipline(s) and our work with faculty? How does all of this compare across borders or educational levels? What are the implications of this cross-comparison?

* How do current technologies change, foster or pose challenges to writing and learning in the disciplines? How does technology complicate our WAC practices (e.g., issues of plagiarism, technological equity through pedagogy)? How might technology open or complicate disciplinary research collaborations across educational or geographical borders?

* How have new knowledge and/or technology changed our evaluation of writing in and across disciplines? What practices of assessment differ across disciplines and/or across educational or geographic borders? How does that affect how we teach our students to communicate to audiences within (and outside of) disciplines?

* What new forms of faculty development have proven successful and how are we measuring their success? How do our cultural ideas about learning and education contain or foster particular practices and programs and what have we learned from others about improving each? How do we translate what we do; ;what forms do we use to successfully communicate our work to others (e.g., text, report forms, images, graphs); what constitutes the rhetoric that speaks to academic staff and administration?

* What applications of language theories successfully translate across disciplinary, educational or geographic borders,? How can these “crossings” promote teaching and learning and/or build mutual partnerships that help our students understand and respect the international conversations in which they will engage?

These questions and areas are meant to stimulate ideas for proposals not prevent other questions from shaping proposals.

We strongly encourage participants to propose thoughtful sessions or individual presentations that demonstrate or would be interactive, and that allow for questions. We suggest innovative and experiential presentations: for example, participants may want to “teach” a class during their session, recreating for participants a mock student or faculty experience. We encourage participants to submit a poster, inviting participation by scientist, engineers and others who excel in and can teach us about this form of presentation. We invite forum sessions: collaboratively-run sessions during which participants and leaders explore a similar problem and work on solutions together.

For more information or to download the IWACC 08 Call For Papers, please visit

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/progs/wac/conferences/iwacc/index/

Proposal deadline is Friday, September 28, 2007.

Email proposals as MS Word attachments to George Schorn at gsschorn@mail.utexas.edu. Please include in your email your full name, institutional affiliation, contact information, and whether you are proposing a single submission, panel, round table, or poster session.

Also please use " WAC 2008 Proposal" in your subject line.

Questions or information should be directed to George Schorn (gsschorn@mail.utexas.edu) or Joan Mullin (jmullin@mail.utexas.edu)

Emergent task timer

This flash application allows you to keep an eye on what you're spending your time on.

Productivity: Keep track of your time with the Emergent Task Tracker, online edition - Lifehacker

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Multiverse, a direct competitor to SecondLife

Multiverse is "a platform for creating games and other 3D experiences with the company’s development tools, which are then run on its servers." But the revenue model looks a lot like a flat tax:

The system and revenue model is markedly different from SL, however: instead of fostering user-created content in a single world, Multiverse is a network of worlds accessible by the client software. It comes with e-commerce tools built into the system, so developer’s can earn an income, while Multiverse makes money by taking a 10% cut of that revenue.

GigaOM Second Life (finally) gets a direct competitor: Multiverse «

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You will use ChaCha

That's the message of Michael McRobbie, Indiana University president and former member of ChaCha's board. ChaCha is

a search engine that uses experts as "guides" to help users find what they need on the Internet. To avoid a conflict of interest, [McRobbie] resigned before taking over as Indiana University's president.

Have a great time using ChaCha, IU!

IU getting in step with ChaCha | IndyStar.com

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gPhone

ComputerWorld is reporting that Google is showing around its cell phone prototype, and it may reach markets within a year. It "plans to offer consumers free subscriptions by bundling advertisements with its search engine, e-mail and Web browser software applications," ComputerWorld says, sourcing the Wall Street Journal. The move involves partnering with one or more existing telecoms, and that draws comparisons to the iPhone:

The move would echo another recent product launched by a phone industry outsider, Apple Inc.'s iPhone. But Google's product would draw its revenue from a sharply different source, relying on commercial advertising dollars instead of the sticker price of at least $499 for an iPhone and $60 per month for the AT&T Inc. service plan.

And relying on ads makes wireless/telecomm analyst Jeff Kagan skeptical:

"The average adult who can afford a cell phone is not going to want to listen to ads. So this is mainly for teenagers, twenty-somethings, high schoolers or people who can't afford a phone," said Kagan.

Four quick reactions:

1. Is Kagan misreading the plan? Earlier in the article, the advertisements were said to be bundled with "search engine, e-mail and Web browser applications." Text ads on these services are not the same as listening to ads when you have to make a phone call -- phone calls are about immediacy.
2. Is Google planning to avoid competing with the big vendors, instead taking a chunk out of pay-as-you-go phone service such as Virgin's?
3. Google tends to chip off competition in long-tail markets with free stuff, such as Google Docs. Is this a continuation of the same strategy? Will it be willing to let the gPhone be a loss leader?
4. If Google is partnering with existing telecoms, why does it want to bid for wireless spectrum?
   

Report: Google shows phone prototype to vendors

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Traffic accident, Austin style

"But she's from Austin," he said, "and I figure Austin folks are a little different."

Metroblogging Austin: Naked Collision

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What does it mean that the GOP spends so much less on new media?

Patrick Ruffini points out on techPresident that the GOP candidates are spending far less on in-house staff for new media than the Democratic candidates:

Looking closely at the list, I noticed another trend, and it's a disturbing one that ties depressingly into the issues by the YouTube debate. While Republicans and Democrats are spending almost equally on their Web efforts, Democrats are spending dramatically more on in-house staff. Approximately 36% of the Democrats' Web budgets are dedicated to staff, while less than 8% of the Republican budgets are. Overall, the Democratic candidates have 39 people working in the Web departments while Republicans have 18, spread over 9 active candidates. That works out to an average of 5.6 staffers per candidate on the Democrat side, and just 2 on the Republican side, encompassing both frontrunners and also-rans. Obama alone has 10 people on his Web staff... and it shows.

But what does it mean? Ruffini assumes that this percentage represents a significant lost opportunity, a bad tendency on the GOP side to outsource Web operations instead of dedicating "boots on the ground." He adds:

Most disturbingly, it shows that we are not investing in the human capital needed to drive our online efforts forward. If we can't innovate in a competitive primary environment, when can we innovate? The Democratic nominee will have access to nearly 40 bright minds who have direct Presidential campaign experience, and the Republican nominee will have access to less than half that. The key question(s) we need to ask ourselves are as follows. Would any campaign in their right mind tolerate a 3-1 imbalance in Political staff? In Communications staff? In Finance staff? So why is online different?

I'm no strategist, but I wonder if this has something to do with the candidates' perception of their voters. The GOP draws disproportionately from rural and suburban areas, and perhaps candidates believe that those voters are less likely to be attracted to a campaign via new media outreach. Or perhaps they believe that new media is for the young, and they think the young are not as important or reliable a demographic.

In any case, Ruffini points out that the exception on the GOP side is Ron Paul. Paul has leveraged the free infrastructure available to each of us (YouTube, Digg, etc.); perhaps that has freed up cash to spend on personnel?

techPresident – GOP Outgunned 3-1 on New Media Staff

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Get up and dance

BoingBoing reports on a system to convert the power of moving people into energy via a subfloor. "Designed for a railways system, Tad Jusczyk and James Graham's "Crowd Farm" would consist of sub-floor that moves slightly as people walk across it." And here's this gem:

And while the farm is an urban vision, the dynamo-floor principle can also be applied to capturing energy at places like rock concerts, too. "Greater movement of people could make the music louder," suggests Jurcyzk.

Boing Boing: Crowd Farm to collect energy

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Managing your life with SMS

Gina Trapani points out exactly what allowed me to abandon my PDA.

Geek To Live: Manage your life via SMS - Lifehacker

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Back to the future

Slashdot | DeLorean to Come Back (Sorta)

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Conducting qualitative research "unscientifically"

UIE Brain Sparks has a pointer to a series by Leisa Reichelt about "accepting the unscientific qualities of qualitative research, and using qualitative research as a flexible way to gather rich and insightful information about your intended audience." They provide a brief conversational apologia for qualitative research, which probably won't convince skeptics but which are interesting anyway.

Qualitative Research » UIE Brain Sparks

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Republican candidates don't want a YouTube debate

Presumably this has something to do with the way the Democratic YouTube debate went. Too bad: The questioning is less controlled, and I suppose the candidates think it's beneath their dignity to be asked questions by animated snowmen and so forth, but the YouTube debate was useful in that it gave actual non-journalists and non-politicians the chance to ask questions. I don't think this will play well. The only Republican candidates who have signed on are John McCain, who has nothing to lose, and Ron Paul, who -- in addition to having nothing to lose -- has shown strong willingness to engage with distributed media.

But Don't Ask Him on YouTube... | The Trail | washingtonpost.com

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Writing a novel on your phone

Commuter writes book using mobile phone - Yahoo! News

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Chorded keyboards

Some interesting discussions of the possibilities and challenges.

Trevor's Trinkets: Five Finger Keyboards

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Outdated phrase, overheard Saturday

"I'm sure he's not just sitting by the phone!"