The Salt-Box

New Britain is a very poor town, and, judging by this Courant article’s reporting, one wracked by hunger.  On the one hand, there’s a lot of anecdote here; on the other, this is an emergency in the making, and it’s probably hard to get reliable numbers in realtime.  After sitting in some PTA meetings in which even very low-cost events raised concerns–including a district-wide parent meeting in which someone walked in off the street to the Board of Education’s conference room in order to panhandle–I can say that the article seems pretty accurate to me.

The most useful part of the article is a link to a website, organized by a local chapter of Food, Not Bombs, called New Britain Food.  It’s got a neat events page featuring a Gcal grid with opportunities for food, as well as a Google Maps display of all the various locations one can get relief.  Among other things, it makes it supereasy to know where to donate. Regardless of whether one shares the idea that free vegetarian food is a likely pathway to revolution, or even that such a revolution is desirable, you’ve got to credit the dedication.  (For an even gloomier take on the situation, see the Herald’s coverage, which points out that city health inspectors are apparently shaking down Food, Not Bombs’s donations.)

The NY Times this morning ran a story about the least sympathetic Joneses of the current recession:

Meet the Joneses, two Silicon Valley engineers who, in many ways, seem to have it all — a home they bought for $850,000, two children and a combined income of about $250,000 a year. But despite their apparent wealth, Kirsten and Mike Jones financed much of their lifestyle with borrowed money.

Now, like many overspent Americans, the Joneses are deeply in debt. They owe $100,000 on their credit cards, and the tax assessor says their home is worth $100,000 less than they paid for it. To turn their finances around, they’re embracing an idea so quaint it might be cool again: living within their means.

Apparently things really are tough in the Jones household (emphasis added):

MS. JONES said that to get back to living on their actual incomes, she and her husband had to stop thinking in terms of credit. They set up one bank account to cover the household bills and pay back debt. To rein in unnecessary expenditures, she and her husband each get a cash allowance of $600 a month.

If your austerity budget includes $1200/month for “dinners out, clothes, gadgets,” here’s an idea: Don’t be in the %@^* paper.  Nobody’s twisting your arm.  When the reporter asks, just politely decline.  It’s not indecent to be successful, obviously, but it is to whine about how hard it is to live on a mere $250K/year.  And it’s outright obscene to be self-congratulatory about one’s ability to endure a $1200/month austerity budget.

One of the most weirdly difficult battles I have with students, taken as a group, is to get them to replace dictionary.com with the OED (freely available online through the school).  Despite all the informational advantages of the latter, and its convenience, sites such as the former remain the default.

But look at how Neal “Snow Crash” Stephenson comes up with words such as loglo and his other neologisms:

AVC: There are a lot of neologisms in your books in general—in Anathem, largely iterations of or plays on existing words, in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, invented words for invented futuristic concepts. Do you have a method for making made-up words sound sensible, for avoiding the terrible-made-up-word disease that hits so much science fiction and fantasy?

NS: “Method” is an awfully dignified word for it, but here goes: In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I’m going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots. Whenever I get distracted or bored, my eyes wander over to that chalkboard and I read the words. Some of them grow on me, and others annoy me. I attack the latter with eraser and chalk, and keep nudging at them until I like the way they look and sound. Others never make the cut at all and simply get erased. Perhaps one day I will sell these on eBay to RPG players who need names for characters or alien races.

Playing with the OED.  It’s a beautiful thing.

Wired Science has an obligatory post on how “the intensive selective pressures of industrial farming” have changed–sometimes to near-unrecognizable extents–traditional Thanksgiving foods. It’s perfectly interesting and in keeping with the season and all, so no qualms on that score.

But I could have lived many more years without reading this particular image (emphasis added):

 Anderson, who has bred the birds for 26 years, said the key technical advance was artificial insemination, which came into widespread use in the 1960s, right around the time that turkey size starts to skyrocket. The reason is that turkeys over 30 pounds are “inefficient” breeders: It’s difficult for them to actually perform the natural mating act. With artificial insemination, the largest birds can still be used as sires, even if they have a hard time walking, let alone engaging in sexual reproduction.

“You can spread the one tom around better. It adds a whole new level of efficiency. You can spread him over more hens,” Anderson said. “It takes the lid off how big the bird can be. If the size of the bird keeps them from mating, then you’re stuck.”

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

This semester I have struggled even more than usual to be timely about e-mail and certain other relatively simple online things.  In part, this is an effect of going to WikiSym in September and starting the semester behind; also, virtually all my preps are at least somewhat new.  But I’ve just realized over the past two mornings that the Wii plays a role, too.

Last spring, when I got tenure, I bought a Wii.  My five-year-old gets 1 hour of screen time (dvd, computer, wii) per day, usually divided into 30-minute doses.  Before the Wii, he would usually watch 30 minutes of something to wake up in the morning, and then again in the late afternoon to make it through until dinner.  Now, though, he’d always prefer to play Wii over watching something.  And usually, what we play is one of the varieties of Lego games–Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, or Lego Batman.  He likes them because their two-player mode encourages cooperation, rather than competition, because he gets ideas for building his own Lego worlds, and because they’re pretty cool.  But if what he likes about the game is two-player mode, then he needs a second player.  And so now, on weekday mornings, I play for 30 minutes with him.

You see the problem: In the past, when he was watching a DVD–especially something he’d seen 20 times before–I could do e-mail or whatever.  Especially in the mornings, this was a useful way to stay on top of my inbox before disappearing into the classroom for hours.

I didn’t realize how useful that 30 minutes was until this week, when the boy lost Wii privileges for a week. (Not a big deal–repeated instances of a minor infraction . . . I don’t think he believed we’d take it away. Hah!)  Just as he uses the DVDs to transition into the day, it is just enormously helpful to be able to point/click and do other e-mail-type things for a minute in the morning, before breakfast and getting him to kindergarten.

Maybe we should ban Wii in the morning?  Then again, he wants this game, which *is* a lot of fun, for Christmas.

Like many schools, we have a required first-year experience class. (Here’s the website for our program.) It can be satisfied in several different ways, but the most common (I think) is to take a 3-credit 100-level class plus a one-credit FYE add-on, usually taught by the same instructor.  That way, the “adapting to college” bits don’t take time away from course material, yet there’s still continuity & credibility because it’s taught by content faculty.

As with any formal requirement, many students are a bit cynical about the program, deriding it as at best a waste of time, and at worst an opportunity for brainwashing of sorts.   Some of that’s fading away as we do a better job of getting students an FYE course in their first semester.  (Next semester, I’ll be teaching second-semester students in an FYE section of 110, which is always weird.  They’ve already fallen into the bad habits that the FYE course is supposed to help inoculate them against.  Plus, because they’re in their second semester, it’s too late to spring on them the strong statistical correlation  between first-semester grades and time-to-degree.)

In the NY Times today, though, UCLA guard Jrue Holiday proclaims his fye-type class his favorite so far:

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CLASS AT U.C.L.A.? We have a life-skills class that teaches us about stress and stuff. I guess the stress is starting to build because of the basketball, so it really helps. They make us meditate and everything. It’s kind of cool.

That humming sound you’ll hear next semester at 1pm on Wednesdays will be my FYE students meditating so they can be cool like Jrue Holiday.  (It’s far too late for me to be cool like anything, as my cyberpunk students will attest.)

Matthew Teague has an interesting article in Sports Illustrated this week on the decline of hunting in the United States.  Fewer hunters have meant more wildlife attacks on people, more disease, more property damage (including the cost of removing deer carcasses from interstates and roads), and so forth.  There’s also the decline of traditional, familial hunting culture, and its replacement by virtual (video games) and consumerist fantasies of it.  It’s well worth a few minutes of your time, and seems to me to be a good example of the kind of article Sports Illustrated should publish more of–bigger-picture pieces that locate sports, broadly construed, in the culture.

Teague’s basic argument is that, as Americans have become an increasingly indoor nation, we have conceived of hunting largely in moral terms, rather than in resource-management or other terms.  I don’t think he gets the moral argument quite right, however–and his mistake is readable in his abuse of a Dickens quotation:

By the middle of the 20th century, the animal population had begun to rebound, and our fathers and grandfathers could again satisfy what Charles Dickens called “the passion for hunting . . . implanted . . . in the human breast.”

But in the decades since, attitudes have shifted and hardened, and the very idea of hunting as “sport” has come to imply something cavalier.  Among animal-rights advocates it indicated indifference to wildlife.  In two generations the lone hunter–once exemplifd by Teddy Roosevelt–found himself accused of enmity toward nature.  Hunting had become a question of morality.

In reaching for a Dickens quotation to dress up his article, Teague gets tangled up in something.  The Dickens line is from Oliver Twist, Chapter 10:

There is a passion FOR HUNTING SOMETHING deeply implanted in the human breast. One wretched breathless child, panting with exhaustion; terror in his looks; agaony in his eyes; large drops of perspiration streaming down his face; strains every nerve to make head upon his pursuers; and as they follow on his track, and gain upon him every instant, they hail his decreasing strength with joy.

The “passion for hunting,” in other words, is the mob’s bloodthirsty pursuit of a wholly innocent boy, and its delight at the prospect of ravaging him.  Dickens wasn’t suggesting that people naturally like to hunt animals; he was noting that there is an unbridled bloodlust and unslakable desire for cruelty that’s intrinsic to being human. Civilization overlooks this desire at its peril.  (This is why you can’t drop in quotations out of Bartlett’s or other resources!!)

Teague’s misreading of Dickens is consistent with his downplaying of the savage elements of hunting.  (The same elements become overly fetishized by the video-game hunters out for a thrill.)  And that’s too bad, because the fact that hunting is sometimes savage doesn’t really counter his main point: That it’s also profoundly valuable, and a defining aspect of civilization.  In fact, we could even go a bit further and say that it’s value arises in part from its savagery, because Dickens is right: If we try to ignore or wholly disallow (rather than find outlets for) that cruel instinct, then the consequences will not be to our liking.

Last week Alex Jarvis and I found out that we’d gotten funding for a local faculty-student research grant.  Entitled “Tagging Dickens,” it entails putting tikitags (RFID-enabled stickers) inside Dickens novels to see if it helps spur students to use supplemental materials. We’ve got no idea whether it will work, of course, but it seemed like it might produce interesting results.  The application’s project narrative is below the fold.  Details as we have them.
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The Hartford Courant reports on a nightmarish lawsuit over a student’s expulsion for plagiarism.  Though it happened at CCSU, I don’t know any of the participants in this case.  At any rate, it hardly seems worth it to get into the specifics of a case that will probably leave everyone’s reputation at least somewhat damaged.

But there are a few generic points worth making:

1. Allowing students to turn in work to an unsecure location: Risky!  In addition to plagiarism concerns, there’s always the chance of mischief, purposive or otherwise.
2. Relatedly: Part-time faculty need to have secure locations to receive student work.
3. Commenters on the article seem to believe that the grammatically cleaner piece is likely to be plagiarized, because doubtless the cheater would’ve cleaned things up a bit to cover their trails.  This has not been my experience, and I’m not naive about plagiarism.  The reason is simple: If you had the time and inclination to write a good paper, and the knowledge of your subject matter to produce a coherent final draft, then you would know that “covering up your trail” in this way is as time-intensive as just writing the damn paper in the first place.  Plagiarizing well doesn’t pay–you’d be as well off doing the work.  (Assuming you’re doing this yourself, of course, and not buying a paper outright.)

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, there’s a pretty good chance that the local paper, the New Britain Herald, will close.  On the faculty e-mail list, one or two faculty members have speculated about having the campus paper step into the breach.

Here’s a sampling of the local news our students could cover:

• “City man held for alleged sexual assault.”
• From last week: “Prostitution sting nets 20 in city’s downtown” Notable: the oldest john was 77! the address of the sting: Beaver Street! (How did they ever know where to look?)
• From the SAME DAY as the report on the prostitution sting: “No porn charge for lawsuit filer who lived below pedophilia suspects.”  Be sure to click that link for gruesome details about the police allegedly ripping a catheter out of a man, tearing [!] his penis.

The recruiting pitch almost writes itself!