Paul Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement (image adapted from Wikipedia).
Faced with the rapidity at which anonymous conversations on the internet deteriorate, Paul Graham’s broken things down into six levels of argument. It starts with name-calling at the bottom and ends with the Refutation of the Central Point at the top.
This is a wonderful model. I especially like the diagram because it’s really easy to pick out which level your argument is on. I’m going to make a poster sized version of this and post it on the wall. And, there’ll be a lesson.
This one takes me back to the days when I was growing up and going to weddings and Hindu prayers ceremonies at someone’s house. There’d be food, with curry chicken, dhal, buss-up-shot roti, served on banana leaves. Oh … the smell and the taste. I unreservedly endorse using them for serving food; they’re biodegradable and seem to add something to the flavor. Long-term packaging I’m not so sure about, but you never know.
Rheingold’s social-media class did an exercise that changed the way many of his students interact with Facebook.
Each student projected their profile on a screen with everything but their name or picture. Everyone had to guess whose profile was on display. Estela Marie Go, an undergraduate student in the class, says she suddenly realized that she didn’t like the way Facebook forced her to define herself with a list of interests.
—Sydell (2010) on NPR.
A number of my students have Facebook accounts. I have one too, but I think I’ve used it twice in the year that I’ve had it. Part of my problem is about how it accelerates the loss of privacy inherent to living on the net. However, I also have a very big problem with its insular nature, the fact that it is its own walled-off section of the internet. The two times I’ve used it have been when people I knew from inside the wall wanted to share something and I could not get to it from outside. I also find it difficult to give so much personal information, about my history and my habits to a single company.
So I’m always enthused to see other people coming to the same conclusions, like those in NPR’s recently broadcast story about how, “New Networks Target Discomfort With Facebook.”
Wikileaks’ recent leak of U.S. State Department cables offers the student with a politics/geography interest an amazing glance into the role of U.S. diplomats. There are however, a lot of cables.
The Atlantic magazine has come up with an interesting way of perusing the information. Their Cablegate Roulette webpage puts up a random cable every time you press the “Load a new story” button.
What’s also nice is that they provide a sentence or two that gives the context of the cable so you don’t have to puzzle it out on your own.
The cable excerpts are brief, well written and quite informative about the political goings-on in different parts of the world. They could make an interesting supplement to the geography curriculum. The self-motivated student with a geography interest would find these quite fascinating because you have to have a basic knowledge of the world and recent history to understand what’s going on.
An example:
An executive with Kazakhstan’s national gas company has dinner with the U.S. ambassador at the Radisson hotel in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.
FROM: ASTANA, KAZAKHSTAN
TO: STATE DEPARTMENT
DATE: JANUARY 10, 2010
CLASSIFICATION: SECRET
SEE FULL CABLE
ΒΆ7. (S) The Ambassador asked if the corruption and infighting are worse now than before. Idenov paused, thought, and then replied, “No, not really. It’s business as usual.” Idenov brushed off a question if the current maneuverings are part of a succession struggle. “Of course not. It’s too early for that. As it’s always been, it’s about big money. Capitalism — you call it market economy — means huge money. Listen, almost everyone at the top is confused. They’re confused by their Soviet mentality. They’re confused by the corrupt excesses of capitalism. ‘If Goldman Sachs executives can make $50 million a year and then run America’s economy in Washington, what’s so different about what we do?’ they ask.”
Answer survey questions to better understand your characters in these Character Tests by R.J. Hembree as part of the online Writers’ Village University project (found via GalleyCat).
Sample question from the Character Builder Test (Hembree, 2010).
Building realistic characters is an essential component of writing fiction. The Character Tests are a part of a Character Building Workshop page, which also contains Character Building Tips, character archetypes, and a set of character disorders that help define them.
The challenge that comes with working with something like this is that following archetypes too closely has the potential to lead to cliched writing. This site could be very useful if used with caution. From the site’s creator:
The Character Building Workshop is an independent study of your characters using these online questionnaires. The process of filling out the forms will help you, the writer, learn about your characters on a more in-depth level. Once the questions have been answered, you will know more about the roles your characters play in your story. No longer will they be names on a page; they will become living, breathing beings as you continue writing your story.
—Hembree, 2010)
This nighttime photograph of the Nile River and its delta from the International Space Station beautifully illustrate the importance of water for life and civilization. The city of Cairo is at the neck of the delta; the brighter spot where the distributaries diverge.
Spaceflight Now has other really cool photos. Bad Astronomy has an interesting post on the logistics of this particular photo, while Heather Pringle has a very interesting post on how the desert may have aided the ancient Egyptian’s civilization.
Free Speculative Fiction Online is a great, centralized source for tracking down science fiction online. It links to online repositories and the websites of a wide variety of authors: from classics like Asimov to stalwarts like Gaiman. There are hundreds of authors, short stories, and novels (including any number of Hugo and Nebula Award winners), and all of them are free.
