Oh hell yeah. Sandman, Goblin 2, Space Parasite suit, Venom, Gwen Stacy, AND a rumored cameo from Mysterio. I’m not sure which of the Marvel properties I think is better overall, but Spiderman 3 looks like it will be amazing.
High-def trailers at Apple.
In all the excitement about the Democratic wins of yesterday, there’s been little coverage about my least-favorite happening here in TN: the passage of the Marriage Amendment. Evidently, 80% of the people who voted in the state of Tennessee are…to put it not-so-politely…bigoted idiots.
So in honor of that 80%, I thought I’d play a game called: My Favorite Homosexual! This is a simple game, anyone can play (and I’d like to suggest those with blogs play along) where I talk a bit about my favorite gay or lesbian from history.
My Favorite Homosexual is Alan Turing.
Alan Turing, arguably, was the key figure that led to the Allied victory in WWII. He was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma machine, the code that the German army used to relay messages. This allowed Allied commanders to know their enemies movements, plans, and goals…it doesn’t take Sun Tzu to know how important that is in war. Turing also developed the Bombe, an electro-mechanical device for analyzing Enigma keys…one of the first computers. He is most famous in geek circles for the Turing Test, a rubric for deciding if an Artificial Intelligence is actually intelligent. He is also the name behind the Turing Machine a thought experiment famous for its impact on computer science. By any measure, Turing was a genius, and was one of Britain’s national treasures…one of the brightest minds in the world, using his brilliance to serve his country and (without much hyperbole) save the world.
In the early 1950’s, Turing’s relationship with a younger man came to light, and he was arrested and prosecuted in England for “gross indecency.” He was given a choice between jail and probation that would include hormone treatment…a form of chemical castration. In 1954, after a year of the treatments mandated by the courts, he was found dead, with a half-eaten apple laced with cyanide beside him, an apparent suicide.
He wasn’t yet 42 years old.
What did the world lose when he took his life? The sad truth is, of course, we’ll never know. And we won’t know because short-sighted, bigoted, stupid people had a law that punished someone for a private, consensual, non-harmful act. So I say to the people of Tennessee: Shame on you. Shame on you for continuing the denigration and persecution of members of your society for nothing more than the way they were born. Shame on you for treating members of your society truly as second-class citizens. And shame on you for for not learning the lessons of the Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement, and the very words that frame the foundation of this nation; that all men are created equal. Future generations will look back at this time and wonder at our ignorance.
I already do.
I realize that my posting habits have been more than a little irregular, and not particularly content filled even when they happen, lately. Much of this is real-life intruding on things, and much of it is that a number of things that I’m terrifically excited about are juuuuuuuust about to come through, and I can’t really talk about them until they do.
But I can’t wait until they do! Excitement from MPOW, as well as other professional coolness.
But alas, I have to wait.
*sigh*
…the 5th of November…
Or, in the case of the US, the 7th of November. Go and vote, please…and if it helps to think of the man who, 400 years ago, used a terroristic act to get the attention of his government, instead of the current man who uses terroristic threats to remove the rights of US citizens, so be it.
It’s time for a change.
I’m falling so behind on blogging! Right now, I feel guilty writing here, knowing that it’s Nanowrimo and I’m not working on the novel. Add to that I now have 2, count’em, TWO possible publication opportunities that hit me this week. One involves blogs and blogging, and the other is a write-up of some podcasting work that I’m in the preliminary stages in setting up. More on that later as well…I don’t want to talk too much about any of this stuff before contracts are signed and such, but it wouldn’t be far off to say I’ve got many irons in the fire.
So right now, in order to not be terribly overwhelmed, I’m concentrating on nanowrimo. Once there’s a bit more clarity on the other issues, I’ll share as I can. Especially about the podcasting…an exciting opportunity might be around the bend on that front.
Because I’ve let a friend talk me into trying National Novel Writing Month. What’s that, you say? In the month of November, a few thousand people will agree to attempt to write an entire novel solely between Nov 1 and Nov 30. For those keeping score, that’s 50,000 words in 30 days.
It’s focused insanity. I clearly don’t have time.
I’m going to try it anyway. Want to join me?
One more conference! This time around, in my backyard (mostly): Netville in Nashville, the 2006 LITA Forum. I’ll be speaking on Saturday about libraries and wikis, and trying to give my spin on when they are useful, and when they aren’t. If anyone is attending, I’d love to meet you.
I’ll be blogging some of the conference over at LITA Blog, and some here. So check both if you’re interested.
On my campus, as well as others, there has of late been a terrific focus placed upon student plagiarism. I’ve been asked to teach a handful of plagiarism workshops (4 down, 1 to go…this Thursday, if anyone’s in town) and I was recently asked to produce a “statement” of a sort to be used in advertising a conference on Academic Integrity that is being held here at UTC. So I said:
There is a lot of confusion among students as to citation in academic writing, including what needs a citation and who should be cited in specific circumstances. My feeling is that if we continue teaching the specifics of what, who, and how, we’re missing the real issue. Students need to understand why we insist on citation, and the purpose and goals of this very specific sort of writing. We as educators need to encourage students to be willing to see themselves as part of the academic dialogue, as a piece of the ongoing attempt at the creation of knowledge. Students need to see academic writing as a conversation between themselves, the professor, and the rest of the Academy, and not as a hoop to jump through or a check-mark on their transcript. A large part of their vision of academic writing is formed by the way educators present assignments, and I think that we can better serve the student by re-imagining the way this is done.
Plagiarism is something that strikes me as old news…always been here, always will, and until we can convince professors that traditional “write a paper on X” assignments aren’t the best sorts, we’ll always have to deal with it. I need to find a way to get my workshop online…it uses music as a metaphor for academic writing, and shows how something can move from “bad” reuse to “ok” reuse, and how to think about academic writing in a different way. I believe that the current “millenial” student really has a difficult time understanding plagiarism, and the workshop is designed to get them thinking in a new way. I’ll put that on the pile of things to do in the next year or so…
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few months as I worked through the website redesign at MPOW is how reference departments interact with patrons in the virtual world. In conjunction with the re-launch, we’re going live with our IM reference service, and re-visiting how we take virtual reference questions. As I think about how we do things, I realize I’m not happy with the overall way we’re dealing with email reference…it’s distributed, so there’s no single record that can be browsed for common questions. It’s not archived in a meaningfully searchable way. It’s not flexible. It requires us to manually forward emails and potentially miss a followup.
So in re-envisioning email reference in a new way, I realized that what I really wanted was a Help Desk/Trouble Ticket system. Is anyone out there using a formal Trouble Ticket system as a reference tool? Or, is anyone using one at all, in any capacity, and could recommend a good Open Source php/MySQL system?
I’m looking for something that presents a browser-based form for collection of issues, with a big plus if it also allows email reception into the system. Anyone got a favorite?
After a comment from a friend, I’ve decided to throw this up on Cafepress and see if anyone else thinks it’s as funny as I do. I suppose it’s one good reason to vote republican…head off and buy one! I’ll donate 10% of any proceeds to an appropriate charity (ACLU? EFF? Leave a comment if you have a suggestion as to the best charity).
I’m just hoping this doesn’t devolve into a flame-fest in the comments…I don’t think anyone reading this is particularly conservative, but you never know.