Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Academic writing at its worst Every year, the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature, based in New Zealand, holds an international Bad Writing Contest. Its aim? To ridicule the worst excesses of academic writing. Entries must be real examples from academic books and journals. The judges recently announced their prizes for 1998. And the results are as funny as they are lamentable. The winner was Judith Butler, a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, whose [sic!] been described as "one of the 10 smartest people on the planet." Here's her "prize-winning" sentence, from an article published in the scholarly journal Diacritics: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relationships in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power." Which means, I guess, that class systems are based, not just on money, but on differences in political power and social status. Since I'm not one of the 10 smartest people on the planet, I'm not sure. Thank God they did not find some of my stuff 10:10:46 PM    comment []

Exceptional reviews of "Tipping Point" (Gladwell) and "Grooming and Gossip" (Dunbar) Here from the New Scientist are two great reviews that have an exceptional set of links as well that take you deeper 6:09:34 PM    comment []

Some like it Hot - City Temperatures over 90 degrees by 2100 I'm moving to Miami with over 120 days! 6:01:44 PM    comment []

The Atlas of Cyber Space Utterly Brilliant site - Weeks of Value - Shows the many ways that Cyberspace can be mapped and visualized 10:26:08 AM    comment []

A new form of literacy? - Makes sense to me that a new writing tool, text messaging that has a very narrow bandwidith - should drive a more compressed code. This is at the heart of Shannon's communication theory. Pattern Matching. An English essay written by a teenager baffled her teacher, because she couldn't decipher what it said. It was written in text messaging short-hand, like what teenagers use to message each other on cell phones, or like what is used in fast-moving chat rooms. It started like this: "My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." Well, that is not all that hard if you're used to seeing that kind of messages. It simply says: "My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York. It's a great place." Teachers and parents would typically think it is a horrible thing, that kids can't read and write in normal ways, and it means that education is going down the drain. Maybe that's what it means, and maybe it is bad. But it is also worth looking at, that what is emerging is different forms of communication, that cultivate different types of skill. To read messages like those, you're not using the same linear literary and literal skills previous generations would use. Many things are happening by pattern matching. You figure things out, not by a standard interpretation, but by looking at the whole picture and guessing at what it might mean. I notice that kids today appear to have rather advanced skills in some areas that I didn't at all have when I was a kid. My 3 year old daughter seems to learn things by some kind of pattern matching osmosis, without necessarily going through the 'logical' steps of getting there. There's a thousand channels on our cable TV, and she's not really fluent with numbers over 10, but she'll quite easily surf around between the channels she likes. Just like she can operate a web browser quite well without being able to read. It is like the new generations are evolving some skills that allow them to deal with complexity without getting confused. Because they aren't trying to reduce everything to linear logic. Maybe that is a good thing. [Ming the Mechanic] 7:59:41 AM    comment []

What is Wiki? I am struggling to understand better. Here is a useful page. As I understand it, Wiki is a group editor with a "Darwinian" power - crap will be edited out. Am I close? Is this what Socialtext is about? Ross if you see this I could do with some help - Rob 7:46:41 AM    comment []

A Gold Mine - See the example page on quitting smoking - Best health site I have found - Good tools plus community. There is so much ribbish about web sites - this is a gem! Captology, persuasive technologies and web credibility. Last couple of days almost everyone points to Persuasive Design: New Captology Book. It's not common for Jakob Nielsen to focus his Alertbox column describing work of others so positiely :) So, the gem: It is a rare book that defines a new discipline or fundamentally changes how we think about technology and our jobs. Dr. B.J. Fogg's new book, Sam Adkins in Learning Circuits Blog points to the follow-up reading: www.captology.org with key concepts, examples, relevant groups, collaboration suggestions, events and newsletter. Good read before you can grad the book. Between other links this site points to Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility (these guidelines are referred in the Alertbox column; references to supporting research are included). Make it easy to verify the accuracy of the information on your site. Show that there's a real organization behind your site. Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide. Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site. Make it easy to contact you. Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose). Make your site easy to use -- and useful.Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently). Update your site's content often (at least show it's been reviewed recently). Use restraint with any promotional content (e.g., ads, offers). Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem. [Mathemagenic] 7:34:31 AM    comment []