Sport and Poverty This is an odd concoction of contrasts: a downhill mountain bike race, sponsored by Red Bull, and staged in what is described as a "Brazilian slum." At one point in the vid, cheerleaders line the course. Filed alongside the EcoChallenge.

  ¶ 10:04 AM  0 comments

Blog Action Day: Climate Change I learned a little late that today is "blog action day" where bloggers are asked to take a singular focus: climate change. This vid hypes the event:



I'm not a climate change specialist, but I have been paying attention to the various arguments used to promote environmental awareness around this issue. Yesterday on this blog, for instance, I was chatting a bit about this video about the effect of climate change on the oceans. In the documentary, titled "Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification," you see a range of arguments for saving the planet. Earth should be saved because it's beautiful. Animals should be saved because they're like works of art. We need to save the planet to save ourselves. Climate change matters because it's hurting industry. Things like that.

What really bothers me about the film, though, is the ending, where the claim is made (cue optimistic music) that only our energy sources need to change. We can still drive cars. Cities can remain illuminated. We simply need to rely on wind and solar power. This is an appealing fantasy, I think, and one that is pro-science, pro-industry, and pro-consumer society. I don't buy it, though, thinking that reducing green-house-gas emissions is just one of many environmental agendas, and it's not going to happen fast enough (or at all) if all we do is gradually shift to windmills.  ¶ 10:33 AM  0 comments

Acidic Oceans After spending the day writing letters of recommendation, I took a few minutes to watch the now YouTubed film Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification.



It's another startling call for change making a non-anthropcentric argument for saving, in this case, the oceans. Well, I guess not entirely non-anthropocentric, as one argument is that "we need to save oceans to save our fishing industries." But that's only part of the video, much of which relies on a kind of earth-for-earth's sake logic, which I like.  ¶ 4:02 PM  0 comments

What's a Blog? Dennis Baron has a thoughtful post about the new FCC guidelines regarding blogging and product endorsements. Basically, the new ruling speaks to blogs like Gizmodo—places you go to read about things you may buy.

You can read about the new rules at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm. The rules themselves are at http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf.

Specifically, the ruling addresses messages "conveyed by bloggers or other 'word-of-mouth' marketers." What strikes me about this is the assumed stability around the terms blog and blogger. Instead of referring to "websites" that hype junk, the ruling speaks to blogs.

We know blogs to be websites typified by routine posting; newer posts generally appear at the top and older posts scroll down to the bottom. Blogs have such elements as blogrolls and comments and dated entries. We know blogging to mean the creation of content on such a site.

Note that static websites are either outside or on the margins of this ruling. Even static-looking websites; so if I create a new .html page each day to hype junk, am I blogging? I'd say not, which produces quite a nice loophole in the ruling.  ¶ 9:09 AM  0 comments

Michael Atkinson's "Parkour, Anarcho- Environmentalism, and Poiesis" A few years ago I got into parkour; not so much doing it, but watching cinematic representations of it and writing about it some in this blog.



Give it time, and an outstanding academic article will come out on just about any topic. Today I got the chance to read Michael Atkinson's "Parkour, Anarcho- Environmentalism, and Poiesis" in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues.



Atkinson's piece is outstanding, involving a study of traceurs in Toronto (he ran with the dudes) and developing an argument about the practice as anti-capitalist, environmentalist, and just downright in touch with urban spaces. A terrific piece.  ¶ 12:00 PM  0 comments

Bugs As you may know by now, our small town in the midwest has been systematically and completely overrun by little small bugs that get in your hair, stick to your clothes, and generally annoy. The bugs are Soy Aphids according to bug bloggers like this one.

Up close, the bugs that have filled our town look like this:



And we've all had plenty of chances to view them up close, since whenever you go outside you get covered in them.

This week has been a bad bug week in another way for me in that I was stung not once, not twice, but three times by the yellow jackets. They're living in my siding, and as it turns out, I swell up pretty bad when yellow jackets sting me.

Pretty much everything I do these days involves following advice I find online, so I ended up shop-vac-ing up the stinging buggers. This made me feel bad, as a bug lover, but the stings were just too much to handle.

Here's what a yellow jacket looks like up close:



That's it for bugs. Tomorrow is Friday.  ¶ 4:24 PM  2 comments

Recent Review It took me a while to notice it, but I see that there is a nice review online of my 2009 CCCC video prezzy. The presentation is on YouTube in two parts that pop up if you Google "desktop mcing."

From the review, written by Missy Nieveen-Phegley:

Schaffner’s work, and the work of emerging scholars employing new media as a vehicle for their scholarship, challenges our perception of academic scholarship and requires us to redefine it, both in how we recognize what constitutes “valid” scholarship and in how we reward it through tenure and promotion review processes.

Here at UIUC, this kind of presentation seems to exist on the periphery of institutional evaluation. I mean, it counts, but not any more than a regular conference paper. "It's just a conference presentation," in a sense. One cool thing about experimenting with new media at conferences, I think, is that there is a lot of free space to do something new; a downside is that there is little recognition for it. A conference prez is a conference prez.

Anyway, I'm using the Desktop MCing approach in two more conference presentations this year: one at SLSA in Atlanta, and another at CCCC in Louisville. I've pretty much eliminated the talking head from the mashup of media elements, and I'm ramping up the pacing in terms of how quickly things come atcha. We'll have to see how it goes.

  ¶ 9:48 AM  0 comments

Pickle Juice: The Taste of Power Two recent publications by Pete Gayed, typist and scholastic wonder. The work can be found online (where all good things are) at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

My fave of the two pieces is titled "Why Some People Prefer Pickle Juice" and pithily begins "Richard Lifton has seen patients who crave nothing more than pickle juice."  ¶ 2:08 PM  0 comments

Facebook Lexicon A bit ago I put up a few posts about how word clouders (like this'un) can be fun ways to visualize revision.

As a technology, clouders have their limitations given their reliance on lexical prevalence. If I wrote "I like blogs more than frogs," blogs and frogs would be tied. If I wrote "I like blogs. Frogs jump around too much. And plus, frogs are green." Frogs would come out on top via a clouder.

Anyway, Facebook is hyping their lexical clouder as a marketing tool. Step 1: Cloud lexical items on Facebook. Step 2: Sell stuff relating to what makes big clouds.



Facebook's hype copy reads "Lexicon graphs are a powerful way to understand the trends in what people are talking about. We've introduced a number of new ways to play with the data. Use the tabs at the top to explore different trends in a given topic."

Understand what people are talking about? Um, kinda. Only if you understand "what people are talking about" as defined by the prevalence with which they use identical words. "Facebook is like, like, like soooo 2006."
  ¶ 12:00 PM  0 comments

Typewriter Commercial Revising a piece on multi-app composition, I came across this ad:



A few others featuring transitional office machines include:





This one is funny:

  ¶ 1:46 PM  0 comments

Birding the Trash Dumps Our local news bureau at UIUC does a pretty good job of getting the word out about our work.

Melissa Mitchell put this article out, which made its way around the web some. It was then picked up by the Daily Telegraph and transformed into this piece.

Anyway, a few bloggers have been chatting about the original journal article, noting that it's hard to get a copy of the dang thing. So here is my piece on birding and environmental sporting in pdf form. The citation reads:

Schaffner, Spencer. 2009. "Environmental Sporting: Birding at Superfund Sites, Landfills, and Sewage Ponds." Journal of Sport and Social Issues. 33: 3, pp. 206-229.

This image, from over at Eva Casey's homepage, captures a bit of what the piece is about:

  ¶ 2:37 PM  0 comments

Fall.Semester.2009 Things are all a-twitter here on campus. Students are roaming around campus looking at maps, orientations have orientations, 500 things need to be done NOW, and I got photographed for an article for the campus paper. As it turns out, I get nervous in such situations, though I'm usually a camera hog. Reading on antiquated diagnostic methods (mental illness) this afternoon.

Oh, and I should say that it is still the case that the closed system that is FaceBook ruined this blog.

  ¶ 3:17 PM  2 comments

Template Composition For poster presentations, my institution has just released a new template. Fill-in-the-blank composition; where "identity standards" mean all texts look identical.

Here's what it looks like:

  ¶ 8:04 AM  3 comments

Dorm Bloggers Dunno if you follow m/any dorm bloggers, but they can be kinda fun, providing a journalistic angle on campus life, classes, and living in the dorms.

This one is a nice end-of-year post from one of the more popular dorm bloggers:

  ¶ 3:07 PM  0 comments

Comics at the Newberry   ¶ 8:05 AM  0 comments

Viral Syndication The other day, ML had a nice article published about her recent work on fMRI deception detection.


The article provides a nice example of viral syndication, having been picked up all over the place.

postchronicle.com: Professor Dubious About New Lie Detectors

bio-medicine.org: Scholar unconvinced new lie-detection methods

breitbart.com: Professor dubious about new lie detectors

news.usti.net: Professor Dubious About New Lie Detectors

sciencedaily.com: Scholar Unconvinced New Lie-detection Methods Better Than Old Ones

upi.com: Professor dubious about new lie detectors

labspaces.net:
Scholar unconvinced new lie-detection methods better than old ones

themoneytimes.com: Professor dubious about new lie detectors

It's even over at questionsoftheuniverse.com. Gotta love it.  ¶ 7:21 PM  0 comments

Visualizing Revision, Part II Earlier in the week, I put up a post about using tag clouds to visualize revision. It's a somewhat problematic approach, as it relies so heavily on lexical repetition, but with that known, it still shows a lot.

Now I see that RLG's Merrilee Proffitt (hi Merrilee!) is using a gadget called Wordle to visualize clouds a bit more ... artfully.

So here we go again: my dissertation, completed in 2005, on Wordle, followed by my book as of 2009:



  ¶ 3:32 PM  0 comments

Using Tag Clouds to Visualize Revision You probably know this: for folks in many humanities departments at large research schools like UIUC, a published academic monograph is a key part of getting tenure. That book is often derived in part from the dissertation, but there's this culture in place where, no matter how great that dissertation is, one generally has to demonstrate how much the book is different from the dissertation. This demonstration is usually done in prose.

Enter the tag cloud. Dump the text from both documents into an online clouder like tagcrowd.com, and compare results.

Here's the cloud from my dissertation, completed in 2005:






And then here's the cloud of the book manuscript circa 6.2009:






As you can see, some themes have stayed the same; others have disappeared or been added. For me, knowing these two documents so well, the tag clouds are detailed maps of the writing and rewriting. Each term is a pathway into so many decisions, dead ends, and productive avenues.

Next time I teach revision, I think I'll have students cloud their drafts.  ¶ 1:48 PM  3 comments

Non-Contact Graduation Here at the factory we're churning out another batch of graduates, but this year with less touching advised.

To: Faculty, Staff, Students
From: Robert D. Palinkas, M.D.
Director, McKinley Health Center
Subject: Handshaking at Commencement

Because of ongoing concerns about the possibility of spreading the flu virus, students receiving degrees and their families should not shake hands at Commencement if they have symptoms of an upper respiratory infection such as fever and cough.

McKinley Health Center will provide hand sanitizer on the platform at the Assembly Hall ceremonies so that graduates can, if they wish, use it before and/or after receiving their degrees. Members of the official platform party also are encouraged to use the hand sanitizer provided.

Everyone is encouraged to observe the other guidelines to reduce the risk of infection, such as covering coughs and sneezes; avoiding touching eyes, mouth and nose; and washing hands frequently.

Robert D. Palinkas, M.D.

This mailing approved by:
The Office of the Chancellor

  ¶ 10:25 AM  0 comments

The White House and Photoshop News today that $350,000 in taxpayer cha-ching has been spent getting the following pic over the Statue of Liberty. (It's not even that good.)




In the news is how the White House aide who authorized the flyover has stepped down as it freaked out about half of the residents of NYC.

Do White House aides know nothing about Photoshop?

As a service to our nation, I present these additional pics highlighting other national treasures:









  ¶ 2:55 PM  5 comments