Thursday, March 31, 2005

Disturbance Report I

6:29 a.m.  Hop up, tidy the bedcovers.
6:31 a.m.  Flick on the laptop.  Three comments in the nighttime hours.  Cool.
6:45 a.m. Good morning, Ph. (D. was already up and about).
7:20 a.m.  Prepare for shower.  Discover plugged shower drain.
7:25 a.m. Commence vigorous plunging.  Curse the drain-stopper cap allowing the pipe to breath. "$%^& you, drain-stopper cap!"
7:31 a.m. Fever pitch plunging.  Breaking a sweat, new found back pains.
7:32 a.m.  Wearing a towel, search the basement for hand auger.  Did we sell it in the garage sale last summer? 
7:45 a.m. Shower in ankle deep crud-water. Disgusting, I know, but what the hell was I supposed to do?
8:01 a.m. In an effort to get back on track, I refresh on De Certau for a few minutes.  Hermeneutics of the Other...and "A Variant: Hagio-graphical Edification": "Thus hagiography enters into ecclesiastical literature only through effraction; in other words, through the back door" (274). And so on.
8:42 a.m.  See a penny on the sidewalk; keep on walking.
8:45 a.m.  (On the walk to campus) Beautiful day! One...two...three blisters.
9:01 a.m. Coffee from Dunkin' Donuts.  Hope!
9:09 a.m. Bagel and banana from Blinker.
9:13 a.m.  In the midst of peeling the banana, it broke, toppling from the place where I was opening it to the keyboard of my laptop. 
9:31 a.m. CCR 611 Composition Histories

Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Was A Toothy Kid

And so I wore a plastic retainer, top and bottom, for four or five years. At lunch, I would pop the metal-plastic devices out and wrap them in napkins to avoid showing (and thereby stimulating the raucous fun-making, teasing, ridicule, shame, etc.) them to onlookers while we ate.  Throughout first grade we public schoolers ate lunch in the basement of the Catholic church next door to the little yellow school house.  For first and second-graders only, the yellow school was a two-roomer, later demolished because of an infestation of bees. (Yellow building...swarm of bees, I'm serious) But back in the basement of the Catholic church (the same cafeteria used to feed the kids who attended the Catholic school), a half hour with all the ordinary aliments and routines--something with mashed potatoes. Until I absentmindedly tossed the napkin-wrapped retainers into the trash with the rest of my unconsumed foodstuff.  Unnoticed.  About an hour later, coming off the high of recess, it occurred to me that I'd misplaced the expensive straighteners.  And so I quit my crying, and Mrs. W talked my two good friends (P. and S.) into walking back over to the basement of the Catholic church where everyone including the priest, no doubt, had finished their mid-day victuals and had left us more than eight gigantic bags of garbage.  The three of us picked through it, bit by bit by bit in search of the coveted set of plastic retainers.  S. finally found them (said he thought it was a bundle of potatoes; why do kids wrap up food they intend to throw out?), saved the day.  Quite a friend, S. 

Of course the dental drama carried forward.  There were lots of dentist appointments, too many after-schools spent in the dentist's waiting room.  It was high-priced torture, really.  In fact, eventually, I was awarded a wire key, which I used to crank a single arrow-notch each week, thereby turning the screw that widened the apparatus that stretched my aching jaw over a period of several years.  Dental behaviorism: "When it stops hurting, turn the key again."   

No stranger all the agony that follows from accepting an invitation to sit in the chair, I returned to the dentist this morning for a regular cleaning (a new dentist for me since we're less than a year in NY).  Have a brief pictographic recapitulation of the one hour appointment:

Clown posters, a record-setting repeat loop of Uptown Girl, and bleeding gums.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Monday, March 28, 2005

Nickel Cadmium

Ph. had his first lacrosse practice this afternoon.  I don't know what to think of it; seems like the past several weeks have left me in such a haze that I can barely keep up.  We squeezed in a brief trip to Dick's sporting goods on Saturday to pick up the last few items--mouth piece, padded gloves and so on.    And he's fourteen now.  Fourteen?  He and D. both had birthdays this month.  More than a week after returning from San Francisco, I'm finally settling back into normal sleep habits.  And, nonetheless, my eyes are constantly fogged from fatigue.  Used up most of today staying inside from the non-stop rain, writing a five-page essay on emergence, sociality and cognition for a class I have tomorrow, and finishing up some required reading due later in the week.  D. and I were supposed to catch up for a trip to the bank, but she got waylaid at work, intercepted long enough that we decided to hold over until Wednesday.  She has a class on Monday nights; just got notice that she's fully admitted in the program for early childhood literacy at SU--a promising turn since switching ed. certifications from Missouri to New York has been nothing short of complicated.  And so without the car, Ph. and I walked to Westcott for General Tso's tofu, two egg rolls and a two liter of Faygo Red Pop.  I'd cook, but the restaurant is just two blocks away, and so I figure why not?  Plus, gotta get out of the house now and then.

And I heard from the folks at Johns Hopkins to confirm my travel schedule to Albuquerque for three days in mid-June.  That means I should get back in the gym and test out my stiff-weak ankle, work it back into good enough shape that I won't be embarrassed in ten weeks.  And there's a CFP due this week, and an hour and forty-five minute gig in Albany coming up in two weeks.  It's the time of year when I could use a new battery pack--a shot of juice to pull through the last five weeks of the semester, the school year.  But no, it's nothing much revelatory, nothing I'm alone in feeling (on a rainy Monday in Syracuse, late March), and nothing I can't overcome just by plodding along on momentum.

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Homophily Bias

Among the many intriguing ideas offered by Ronald Burt in the chapter draft of "Social Capital of Structural Holes," (PDF) from Brokerage and Closure, homophily bias--or the echo chamber effect--returned me to some questions I was thinking about at CCCC in San Francisco last week.  We're reading Burt's chapter for CCR711 this week, taking it up alongside a chapter on postmodern mapping as research methodology from Porter and Sullivan's Opening Spaces.  Earlier this semester, we read about homophily parameters in Duncan Watts' Six Degrees; commonly framed as echo chambers, the concept circulates in correspondence to like-mindedness, absolution of dissent, or the kind of diminished, unproductive parroting bound to stagnate--an abundance of closed-group gestures.  Homophily bias, then, is the orientation of a particular network structure toward such a closed-ness. 

And so I find the connection to CCCC in the structuring of Special Interest Groups or SIGs--the interest-defined clusters that form around a particular issue, cause, political imperative or specialization.  SIGs meet each year, and, of course, they make possible a forum for collegiality, perhaps even solidarity, organizational focus and expert niche.  Variously, they serve social, political and professional needs; as defined structures (form-alized with the petition to be listed in the program), they give us one way to imagine the field--embodied in the annual flagship conference--as a clustered topology.  Fair to say?

If we apply Burt's analysis to these clusters, however, we might begin--productively--to find vocabulary for understanding the rules, roles and power dynamics enforced in a particular SIG.  The groups have membership rosters, but what would happen if we started to differentiate the members as connectors (people who have multiple ties across special interest groups) and brokers (people who, because of their multiple ties, are able to pitch the group's interest to other, perhaps larger, bodies in the organization)?  Should the SIG accumulate too high a homophily bias, it would stand to disconnect from the more active channels in the organization.  Through particularly well-connected agents--active connector-brokers capable of bridging structural holes in the organization's topology--might the SIG sustain itself beyond a kind of isolation and connect meaningfully with the organization at-large, provided, of course, that such broader persuasions are mutually valued to the SIG's members.  For what it's worth, I'm not thinking about any particular SIG; instead I'm trying to reconcile Burt's terms with network formations related to CCCC.  Furthermore, I'm interested in exploring what it might mean to convene a heterophily-biased interest group--maybe something that would have different interest groups co-mingle for fruitful partnerships and cooperatives.

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Syracuse Regional

 


More at Flickr.

So it'll be Badgers-Tarheels in the regional final at the Carrier Dome tomorrow afternoon.  Last night's games were well worth the walk to campus.  The Wisconsin-N.C. State game was unfortunately discoherent, the first half favoring the Wolfpack and the second dominated by the Badgers.  N.C. State fell apart in the second half; couldn't make a shot, couldn't defend.  By the end of the game, the regular, varied dances and waves by the Wisconsin contingent got me thinking that Badger fans are like a cult.  I offer this only provisionally and with a quasi-affectionate ambivalence toward Wisconsin sports, of course.  They sang through bizarr-o chants and cheers, though--stuff nobody who decided to be a Badger fan for just one day would ever figure out in the two hours of a single game.

And almost everyone walked away from the Villanova-UNC game with the sense that the officials intervened excessively in the last two minutes.  At least two calls (the foul shot lane violation and the travel) could have gone either way, and both calls went against Nova for plays that would have favored them.  The Tarheels looked like they'd regressed into the lackluster style they showed in the ACC Tournament--lots of talent, but no spark, no sense of urgency, no intensity.  So they make great plays to bail themselves out, squeak by.  Plus, we were sitting at the border between local Villanova/Big East fans and UNC fans, so there was lots of antagonistic banter reduced to jeering reduced to blathering idiocy. Contributing factor could have been the four pints of JD and Captain Morgan's smuggled by the four hoops fans to my right.

Friday, March 25, 2005

CCCC

Score me tardy, but I'm just now getting around to posting shreds of notes on a few of the sessions I attended at the conference last week.  Been called worse than a slacker.  Much worse.

A.15 Public, Private, Political: Social Theories and Blogging Practices
Lanette Cadle talked on her research involving four-month studies on the Livejournal weblogs kept by a group of young women.  She referred to at least two phenomena that made it into my sketchy notes: 1.) aggregated multiblog clusters determined by group friendship designations and 2.) friend cuts--the subtractive role call enlisting a note of "here!" to validate presence.  Cadle also mentioned the fluidity of identity construction; she seemed to be interested in exploring the ways communal practices and trends in linking impact, even accelerate, identity construction. But I might have this wrong.  Daisy Pignetti abstracted comparisons between the political weblogs used by Howard Dean and George W. Bush's campaign teams leading up to the 2004 Primaries.  She worked on questions about why the Dean campaign failed despite its robust start in the blogosphere; she also suggested the expanded role of weblogs as a campaign technology in 2008.  Clancy Ratliff led with reasons to complicate questions of "Where are all the women bloggers?"  I noted more questions and connections than tidy summary statements, so I can only say that the talk got me wondering about the relationship between audience and opportunities for dissonance, locationality-positionality, and the degree to which patterns of practice and stylistics in blogging might be understood as gendered.  Clancy also mentioned subaltern counterpublics--a nice conceptual hook due for more consideration in the often overgeneralized totality of the blogosphere.

B.26 Evaluating Academic Weblogs: Using Empirical Data to Assess Pedagogy and Student Achievement
I was on this panel, and honestly I didn't take any notes.  As well, in light of channeling all my attention and energy toward my own talk, I had a hard time focusing on the particulars of my co-presenters, so it's far and away more worthwhile to consider the generous summary-overviews here and here and here.

C.Featured_Session Writing Modalities within Literacy and "Electracy": A Conversation with Gregory Ulmer
Let me see.  Quite a lot going on here.  If only I could read my notes.  The talk was in a curtained space, so it was like a two-for-one, a polyvocal mingling.  Basically, Ulmer talked back to a series of questioners--Haynes, Coleman, Davis and Jarrett.  Ulmer initiated the talk by referring to the lack of felt he felt when he first read McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy.  He spoke of the developing apparatus--a social machine plotted in three dimensions: technology, institutionality and identity formation.  I appreciated Ulmer's re-articulation of heuretics (eureka!, heuristics) next to hermeunetics; he spoke of electrate people and non-electrate people, of moving into electrate possibility.  My notes tell me Cynthia Haynes declared herself a mystorian; she said Ulmer would have us consider a created mood.  What do we do with error?  Glitch heuretics--bug, blunder, fluke.  Graphic disobedience and propaganda remix.  State of attunement: how do we teach students to be receptive to their change? Punctum as a sting!, getting students to read.  Any technological apparatus is in service to memory.  Lisa Coleman talked about the felt, connecting it with bodily/affective and personal is political.  And then I wrote a whole bunch of unrelated stuff on my scrap of paper.  Weird.  I guess I'll stop here (even though I know Davis' and Jarrett's bits were sharp, interesting).  I'm not really doing justice to the complexity of these ideas; these ideas deserve better.  My notes: not so thorough.

D.24 The Aftermath of Access: From Critical to Creative Computer Literacies
This session was subdivided into four chunks, with Jenny Bay and Collin Brooke each working through two units. Jenny led the session off with some defining terms--intelligent agents and expert systems.  She spoke on interactivity, folksonomies and communal ethos.  Collin's talk started out with a recognition of the centripetality/centrifugality(!) of deictic gestures; he also talked through linking practices and power laws in terms of economies of abundance and scarcity.  Missed it?  Then you should go listen to these important, insightful talks on blogging now. (Yeah, how many pod-casted CCCC papers have you checked out before?). Ah, and better notes than mine over here.

G.23 Rapping Down the Gate: Black Women and Hip-Hop
A versusing of hypocracy and hip-hopcracy.  Elisa Norris?  Mm-hmm.  Makes my hands shake trying to recapture this one.  Good stuff on teaching within hip-hop framework, on the implications of partial invocations of African-American rhetorical traditions.  CGB's got notes here, too.

When I have more uninterrupted time (apart from writing a short essay on emergence and Vygotsky, chapters from de Certau, Porter and Sullivan, _Situated Learning_ and _Situated Cognition_, and prepping for a conference talk in Albany in mid-April), I aim to post more notes on the other sessions I attended:
H.30 Owning Knowledge: New Intersections of Intellectual Property, Technology, and Academia
I.26 Accessing Identities: Women's Life-writings in the Progressive Period
L.20 Exploring Online Communities
M20 Indigenous Rhetoric: Speaking to Power without Saying a Word

Good to Better Friday

I have no idea what I did to deserve it, but I just lucked into a single ticket to the games at the Carrier Dome later tonight: NC State vs. Wisconsin and UNC vs. Villanova.  For my brackets, I need both teams from North Carolina to win.  But I wouldn't go away unhappy if I witnessed 'Nova showing up Roy Williams and crew.  If you're watching at home, I'll be under the basket, sixth row in section 113.

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Re United


United Airlines finally (finally!) delivered my lost/found bag last night at 11:15 p.m., after nearly 72 hours on "priority search" status.  They called around 8:30 to tell me it'd be brought to the door no later than ten o'clock.  I'm not the first to bemoan UA, but the service and responsiveness over the past few days has been deplorable.  Lesson learned is never ever again to use Chicago as a connecting hub on United if I can avoid it.  And so I'm unpacking, laundering, and so on. If you've put off unloading your bags as a form of protest or as a gesture of empathetic collegiality, friendship or whatever, you can go ahead and unpack, put your stuff back in its rightful place.

Monday, March 21, 2005

A Brief Photographic Comment on Returning to Syracuse

Peelt

It's a comment more on the cliff face of a two-hour afternoon meeting combined with break-intensified reading-writing-teaching work resuming today than on anything else. I've posted the rest of my San Francisco photos to Flickr.  There's more to say about the conference, but take the photo-slide show as a photographic-essay, because I'm not too sure if/when I'll get notes to the blog.  Several others have more complete, thoughtful renditions than my fanned out notes could ever supplement, anyway.  So go read them all.  And know that I enjoyed an exhilaratingly good, enriching (if exhausting) time.  And that I hope my precious luggage finds its way home soon.

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Standing By in O'Hare

A mechanical disturbance in the aircraft scheduled to handle my connecting flight Saturday night derailed my one-hop progress from San Francisco to Syracuse and instead left me sitting in Chicago's O'Hare for the better part of the past twenty-four hours.  Initially, United Airlines delayed my connection to Syracuse from 8:55 p.m. CST to 9:30 p.m. CST, then re-delayed until 11:00 p.m., then cancelled altogether.  Impatiently and inexpertly, the cranky customer service staff strained against their own wishes to cut out for Saturday night plans (expressed again and again via cell phone calls while servicing the long line at snail's pace) to accommodate us one by one with obligatory apologies, $14 worth of food vouchers (not to be used on alcohol, but what difference would it make?) and shuttles to area hotels where folks would lodge for the night.  I was awarded a pass-card to the Doubletree in nearby Des Plaines, Ill.  After riding the shuttle from O'Hare to the hotel, freezing the whole way because it was 35 F and my jacket was stowed away in my luggage (which they said they had to keep at the airport), the Doubletree checked in another long line of stranded travelers, heartening everyone, albeit unsuccessfully in my case, with warm chocolate chip cookies.  It was 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. I skipped the cookie and the line; gulped a quick MGD in the empty hotel bar instead, wishing silently it would induce restfulness. 

The best United Airlines could do last night was to switch me to stand-by status for the six flights from Chicago to Syracuse today.  I took a 5:00 a.m. wake-up call, hopped back on the shuttle (sans change of clothes, toothbrush, etc.), and returned to the airport in time to miss the cut on the 6:40 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. flights home.  No seats were available for me; I was 14th on the waiting list for already-full flights. So I went to the customer service line, considering whether to invoke a sugar rhetoric or a vitriolic rhetoric, then waited for a half hour behind an Oswego State student who sobbed as she pleaded with the agent for some kind of solution to her bind--a bind much like my own.  All six flights to Syracuse today were oversold; for a guaranteed seat, the soonest flight would be Monday at 1:25 p.m. The agent suggested flying into a nearby airport; the same option last night, however, was qualified with the condition of paying--ourselves--for a rental car to complete the final leg of the trip.  But today, probably because of a greater force of frustration exerted by smelly, tired, irritated customers on the airline staff, the zone manager offered me a 5:55 p.m. flight into Rochester along with a voucher for a taxi to run me the 79 miles from there to Syracuse's Hancock International where I could pick up my bag and complete the trip by calling D. for a drive home from the airport.  The best of bad options, so I took it.  And although I'm missing a cake and ice cream social for Ph.'s 14th birthday (actual b'day is tomorrow), and missing his Sunday afternoon soccer match, and spending yet another day away on this exhaustion-making trip (due to a mix of lag and overstimulation, not more than five hours of sleep any night in the last three tries), a call to my older brother J.--who travels all the time--reminded me that 24 hours in O'Hare beats the hell out of plummeting headlong into Lake Michigan in some clunky jet-plane.  And the $14 of food vouchers--11-plus of which were swiftly spent up on an airport breakfast--is something. And more than enough time for reading Vygotsky so I can lead a class discussion in seminar Tuesday morning.  Bright spots?  Not so many.

I liked to think I could fill the day by watching a few basketball games in one of the airport bars or that I could drop $10 on a day-long wifi session.  Ten hours with basketball and blogging would have made O'Hare almost tolerable.  But have you been in O'Hare on a Sunday in mid-March?  Stupid crowded.  And I've asked four different agents about wifi and they've pointed me to Laptop Lane in another concourse--a place I checked out only to find the Lane wants $.65 per minute for sitting in an Ethernet-connected office-closet.  Wifi?  No luck.  I might've walked three or four miles around O'Hare, tried five or six different not-so-hot spots, pried the agents for expertise, prayed to the airline gods whose Wrath of O'Hare I'm enduring, and finally quit.  No basketball, except a few walk-by glimpses, and no wifi.  Just tired-reading Vygotsky and wishing for a nap (why can't I sleep with this un-padded armrest jamming my ribs?) and listening over and over and over again to CNN Headline News piping into my site between the "last call for Moline" and "final boarding call for Philadelphia" who can tell which is interrupting which?

So I have a thick stack of folded sheets with miscellaneous CCCC notes I thought I'd have the time and concentration to give to coherence today, and I'm overdue now to respond to emails and reground myself for the return from spring break.  This is my excuse and my decompression.  It's the best I could do under the duress of a few unfortunate conditions.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Madder Than Ever

Was last year (a second-to-last finish) a fluke?  Join the bracket to find out.   

Yahoo! Tournament Pick'em
Group: Bloggers' Mad Dance II (ID# 1766 for Yahoo! only)
Password: ewm
Set your picks after bracket assignments on March 13. Sign up before the start of round one March 17.

I've set up a tournament group at Yahoo! (men's tourney). You are invited to join the Bloggers' Mad Dance II (ID# 1766 for Yahoo! only). It's all free, no $ involved. The password is ewm. Shoot me an email if you have any questions: dmueller at earthwidemoth dot com. All are welcome, bloggers and non-bloggers alike. The group will hold 50 people. At stake, pride and infamy, all of which went the way of the pool's last winner, dr. fabulous, a year ago. 

For whatever it's worth, I set up a women's tourney bracket last year and it fizzled with just two sign-ups, so I'm not bothering this year.  Build one of your own and let me know about it, though, and I'll throw a set of picks in the mix.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

View of the World

Heading to San Francisco first thing in the morning to give a paper called "Ping! Re-Addressing Audience in the Blogosphere" at the flagship CCCC, the annual conference for college composition and communication. And I've never been to California before (no closer than Portland and Phoenix, anyhow).  Because I still have to pack, have this, a statement on worldview:

Saul Steinberg's "View of the World from 9th Avenue" (via)

No telling whether I'll luck into a reliable net connection in SF (which I'd use to post a few photos, probably, little else). 

Sunday, March 13, 2005

65 Minus 64

Penciled in a ghost bracket; eerie how many higher seeds I was compelled to choose.  I've read up on the competition (Hey you, blogosphere, how come you're not signing up for the bracket posted here!?...still time to join, but we're going ahead with it no matter what). 

Mulling over these:
UAB vs. LSU in an 11 v. 6.  Haven't watched LSU play this season.  UAB gets after it.
Advancing No. 12s: ODU or UWM.  I expect G. Washington and Ga. Tech to be a game.
Solid 10-seeds: Iowa and NC State.  Two-seeds Kentucky and UConn, get loose, get ready.
Washington Huskies a No. 1 seed?  First purple-wearing No. 1 since ???.  Can't see 'em getting past Ga. Tech or Louisville.
Maybe Texas Tech'll beat Gonzaga, second round.  Maybe.
UNC was unbelievably flat against Clemson and Ga. Tech in the ACC Tourney.  And never been impressed with Carolina's coach.
Play-in game: Oakland edges Alabama A&M.  Or not.
Not much feeling about the final four yet.  Probably better sleep on it.  I don't think Illinois or Washington will make it to St. Louis, and I don't want Duke to get there.

Trails of Activation

No, I really don't have time for puttering around with graphing software, so that's exactly what I did for a brief while yesterday, an insignificant gesture of defiance at my own focus and production obsessions.  It is spring break after all, a period of regenerative slothfulness.  Yet knowing that I have to ease into slothfulness to avoid system shock, I watched a little basketball while reading, trying to get ahead of the post-break reading load to avoid any related trauma on down the line.  It all folds together--the slothful regression, the read-ahead and NCAA hoops--this way, in what I'm calling trails of activation.  Just a quick graphic generated by software from a randomized list of stuff from Saturday.  I'd offer claims toward intelligibility, but that would require effort and, therefore, undermine my attempts to enjoy some overdue rest and relaxation. 

Friday, March 11, 2005

Darling Clemson-tine

The Clemson Tigers have got to win the conference tourney to have a shot at the big tournament, but their win just now over UNC in the ACC tourney up-ended my expectations for March.  Today the Tarheels were so so-so, they might've lost to anybody, and this means a cloud of skepticism surrounding the baby blue.  I didn't plan to watch it.  Just flipped it on for background noise.  Some game. Up next, lots of scheduling overlap, but I'm keeping an eye on these conference tournament games to inform my picks, which is keeping double question marks next to Iowa, Syracuse, Wake and Louisville.  Oh, and Arizona is interesting this year, too.

Flipping between:
Iowa v. Michigan State
Syracuse v. UConn
Wake Forest v. NC State
Louisville vs. UAB
Memphis vs. USF

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

5

Yoga poses: fish I, dog, rolled leaf, cowface posture, bear.  None of it helped.  I started my day with some of this serenity stuff and I've been doubly-stressed all damn day long.  Why?  Oh heck, maybe it started with the meeting last night at Ph.'s high school to be.  He's going into ninth grade in the fall, so they invited the parents of all incoming freshmen to an orientation session.  Ninety minutes in, we were still watching the same powerpoint slide show which, click by agonizing click, listed every single bloody course the high school offers.  Math I.  Math IA.  Math II.  Math IIA.  Regents Math Facts.  Like all gripping powerpoint shows should be, this segment was narrated by a math teacher--"We offer Math I.  Math IA.  Math II.  Math IIA."  And in explanatory moments, we'd hear, "If your child is deficient math, those students take Math IB...."  Of course, I was mostly off in another world by this point, watching the six-year-old at the next table make faces and fly his hands around like jet planes, marveling at the absurdity.  I should have known it was going to keep us on the edges of our seats when the moderator of the whole meeting (the guy clicking the mouse to list each of the hundred courses) started with, "We're on a four day schedule.  We have day one.  Day two.  Day three.  And day four.  Most classes are offered on days one and three or days two and four."  Was straight to this meeting after ten hours on campus.  We almost skipped, but after sitting in the near-vacant parking lot for ten minutes, enduring a prolonged three-way dunno-about-this, I said, "Let's go."  And of course we picked a table in the middle, more than five paces away from all the exits.

By the time those in charge got around to scanning the room to decide whether they should explain the ELL (formerly ESL) courses, which they described in the most obtuse terms imaginable, and by the time they announced that the Child Development course was for "young girls who are pregnant or who might not be pregnant but who will have children one day," and by the time they told us that Health I "covers everything about healthy lifestyles except for sex and drugs," I was long past burned up.  I think some of that carried over to today.  Must've.

But there's also been a heaping load of work stacking up.  Five.  Five! letters of recommendation for freshmen I had in class last semester--three for scholarships and two for transfer applications.  I really don't mind doing the letters, but five at once felt like quite an addition, and I wanted to customize them sufficiently that each one actually characterized the student.  And extra care with proofreading.  Probably shouldn't have signed them "transferably yours," eh?

Nothing more than that.  Posted something over at the 711 blog, and I've still got more reading to do before tomorrow, so I'm going flip through some of that, see what I find, ruminate over what I meant to put together here. 

Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Disappoint-ensity

When a watchful mentor emailed me a link to Attensity over the weekend, I was encouraged, finding, from a quick glance at their web site, that some of the same data-mining they market, as their hallmark, matches up with a few of the configurations defining a project I have underway.  Attensity claims to process data and analyze that which is otherwise difficult to discern.  Their software churns away like some kind of high-powered heuristic meaning-cruncher--a processor of mass quantities of text into readable metadata.  NORA (non-obvious relationship awareness) for large-scale discourse. 

So I sent them an email inquiring about the whole plot, all-the-while-recalling that the only other text parser I looked up asked $2k per year for software licensing.  Did I mention I'm a grad student?

Well, I did mention that in the email to Attensity, the email inquiring about their project.  And I heard back today--a polite note, something about serving the US Intelligence community and a starting fee of $50,000. And something about wishing me the best in my quest.  Thanks.  But no thank-you. 

The proliferation of textual analysis apps self-identifying as the devices built to root out terrorism piques my interest.  Perhaps because of the sheer volume of text to be analyzed for particular patterns (suspicious patterns! watch the parentheticals, Attensity!), mass-discourse text parsers are up and coming.  And so unbelievably over-priced that they're no use whatsoever to the project I'm working on.

Monday, March 7, 2005

Today's Piaget Passage

One among many of the gripping passages from The Origins of Intelligence in Children by J. Piaget, the patron saint of observing and reporting the minutiae of early-childhood development:

Observation 91.--At 0;3 (11) Laurent is pulling toward himself sheets, covers, etc., to suck them (he does this a part of each day since he has learned how to grasp).  When I hold out directly in front of him a  package of tobacco, he grasps it immediately, without looking at his hand.  Same reaction with an eraser.  At 0;3 (12) under the same conditions he grasps my watch chain which is on his left and outside the trajectory of the joining hands.  That evening, same reaction with this chain and with a roll of cardboard.  At 0;3 (13) he immediately grasps a case which I hold out to him.  He does not look at his hands or attempt to join them but at once directs the right hand toward the case.  When he has grasped it, he does not suck, but examines it. (118)

And so the observations go with slight distinctions over the course of several months/pages/stages.  After much of my own accommodating, assimilating (taken together: adapting) and organizing, I've crawled to p. 152, which is as far as we're going for tomorrow morning's session.  Since I'm already feeling infantile over the whole plot, I flipped through the Piaget Primer and found this zany cartoon:

To round out my prep for class, I'm going to catch the last few minutes of Super Nanny.  Some poor brat is battling with his parents over bedtime. "Don't you pinch!"

Sunday, March 6, 2005

Entanglement

Not because I picked up a book by this name at B&N yesterday afternoon, using up the last few bucks from a gift card given to me several months ago as a going away present from my athletics gig back in KC, and not because Ph. was materially doppel-ed in his indoor soccer match early this afternoon, although no. 2 did deliver both goals in a 2-1 win in this the second match of the season, and not because last night's restaurant manager rudely dimmed the lights while I stood and read chs. 1 and 2 with the when-will-it-flicker-and-buzz-a-table's-ready disc inert in my right hand, waiting for D. to return from the store where she was buying miniature wire glasses and a tiny straw hat for performing a puppet reading the one about the old lady and the fly-spider-bird-cat-dog-cow-horse, but instead, entanglement because the camera, which wouldn't produce many quality shots through the soccer netting and plexiglass, groped this one of Ph. divided and multiplied, and also because I keep thinking about this: simply-simply "a phenomenon in which two [or more?] entities are inexorably linked no matter how far away from each other they may be" (1).

Saturday, March 5, 2005

Wists: Visual Bookmarks

I've set up an account at Wists (via).  The entry at Many-to-Many likens Wists to del.icio.us, but the distinction between Wists (image/link bookmarks) and del.icio.us (site/link bookmarks) gives me an early impression that Wists is an exciting addition to the tagged, social and RSS subsrcibe-able systems.  Sure, there are correspondences, but in short, it's different enough that I can think of ways to put it to good use.  The bookmarklet works well to parse images from text; early tinkering around with it tells me so, anyway.

Friday, March 4, 2005

Fruition

On the walk to campus Tuesday morning, I carried along the camera, intending to snap up a few digipics of the fresh snow on trees, covered paths and whatnot.  I shot all the ones I wanted, but then, just as I passed onto campus, low and behold a coveted, rarely spotted Syracuse Banana truck rolled up from a side street, mush-braking to a squeaking, slushy halt just in time for me to pass in front (walker's privilege on campus, ordinarily, and a friendly wave from Driver to keep me in motion).  But knowing that I don't see Syracuse Banana trucks often and knowing that I might not have another chance to record the sighting, I yanked the camera from its case and grabbed this image from an over-the-shoulder half-turn.  Click!

Full line of fresh fruits and vegetables, daily delivery to restaurants & institutions.  No, this isn't a one-fruit town, if you ever supposed it was.

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Hurley's Jinx

I'm wading through the shallows (where the heck are the depths?) of a draft I'll be stammering through for a colloquium Friday afternoon, the same draft carrying forward to CCCC in San Francisco two weeks from tomorrow.  But I did break for Lost.  Tonight's Hurley-centric episode turned open the millionaire's jinxed numerology.  I was tempted to post the string of digits here, but I passed on that idea for fear that, well...I don't really need to be engulfed by a sphere of bad luck.  The same string that landed him the lottery mis-guided a cruise-liner crashing on the island in question, which explains the odd electrical torture episode involving Sayid a few weeks ago.  None of this makes any sense if you haven't been following the series (why haven't you been following the series?). But Hurley's one of the more engaging characters, and, consequently, I found his episode satisfyingly smart and entertaining for lots of reasons, like when he declared himself "spry" and sprang away from the trap-trigger, releasing the swinging spindle of thorny death, just to name one.

Added: Nixlog's gone and done it.

Tuesday, March 1, 2005

Tulip Economy and Fitness

Last week, when I ran across Henry Farrell's Crooked Timber entry on flogrolling, I was also reading from Watts' Six Degrees and Barabasi's Linked.  Flogrolling, as I understand it from the few places I could find it in recent circulation, names the aggressive efforts to publicize or promote links, thereby elevating the rate of emergence of newer bloggers.  From Farrell's entry and the comments following it, the discussion seems to center on the problem of spamming entries to Technorati and the resulting skew altering an entry's popularity or "interestingness" (a term which Farrell acknowledges as "ugly").  Flogrolling potentially circumvents more authentic geneses of interest in small-world networks, such as those networks constituting the blogosphere. It assumes, with links as a basic unit of exchange, rank is sharable; it can be passed from one high-ranking blog to another through simple linking, even if such linking is profit-motivated.  Consequently, the new weblog stands on the shoulders and enjoys a fleeting, deceptive mobility.  Yes?

Although Barabasi doesn't write directly about weblogs, a few principles from his research seem to apply.  Foremost, Barabasi suggests that scale-free networks (as distinguished from random networks) should be understood in terms of growth and preferential attachment.  Their busy edges and volatile topologies present us with just a few defining premises--premises which, as I understand them, may or may not apply neatly to the blogosphere or, more specifically, the network(s) of politically-interested blogs and bloggers.  In a scale-free network (which is a theoretical abstraction, Watts tells us...no network can be both an object of study and purely scale-free), we might guess that the earliest-established nodes (some turned hubs) occupy a privileged position, near the tall margin of the power law graph (in fairness, Farrell and Drezner speculate that the politically-interested blogosphere follows a lognormal distribution, rather than a power law).  But when we factor in competitiveness--the ongoing "up-for-grabs" nature of links--network fitness intervenes, bucking the assumption that the first-comers hold a protected position of privilege in the network.  Fitness addresses the consequence of newly adjoining nodes, latecomers who inject new energy to the network, often with the potential of cascading beyond the proximal nodes and, thereby, imparting other effects.  Barabasi discusses this phenomenon in terms of Einstein-Bose condensations and Bose gases, and although my few notes here are mostly just a summary of Barabasi's middle chapters, some of his physics references are more scientific than I can write through with confidence just yet.

I'd like to return to the idea of "authentic geneses of interest."  How do we find weblogs we're interested in or, more specifically, entries we're interested in?  If we accept that ordinary links (rather than trackbacks) are the dominant currency unit in the blogosphere, then I suppose it follows reasonably that futzing with the genuine link as a gesture of interest and replacing it, instead, with the flogrolled link--a paid-for gesture meant to by-pass the economic order, results in economic disturbance. And although this quasi-counterfeiting might initially appear in the form of robust new accelerations in traffic for newcomers exploiting such a system, I tend to think that the net effect will be negligible. Maybe that's too strong a way to put it.  But as I read it alongside Watts' discussion of tulip economies (196)--the high-hopes bubbles bursting over The Netherlands following the spark-fizzle of bulb sales, I had the impression that flogrolling will settle out as one of the lesser disturbances in the blogosphere. Just how great is the disturbance?  How long will it elevate low-interest (or artificially trafficked) sites into lofty standing before those sites must self-sustain or before the network's fitness coefficient stabilizes again?  It's just a hypothesis, really, but the selective paths of specific readers who follow links according to interest or reputation will restore the regular patterns.  Granted, much of this does little to account for the different ways we trace paths of interest across the various small-world networks of the blogosphere.  Whether by RSS, Technorati searches, trackbacks, chains of blogrolls, conventional links and so on--distinctions in how our interestedness is enacted when reading across the blogosphere most definitely bears on these tentative few ideas.

Pathbreaking

Started the day that way, anyhow, by marching fresh tracks through the park.  The path was well-worn by the end of the day, as it usually is, but the first pass through a fresh several inches blanketing Syracuse and surrounds was a test, and by successfully managing it, I extended the oft-cited family lore about lonely uphill walks through the driving snow to get to school.