First the dogs ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I did not have a dog.
Then floppy disk failures ate our work,
but I did not speak up because I kept a spare.
Then social networks ate our work,
and I knew we were in serious trouble.
Robert Swartwood is a man after my own heart: a lover of the incredibly short-form. Earlier this year he coined the term “Hint Fiction” to mean “a story of 25 words or less that suggests a larger, more complex story.” Then he got a book deal from W.W. Norton to edit an anthology. Boom, like lightning.
When I first read about hint fiction (and some of its examples), I already had a very similar take on my ideal nano story. I completely agree with the definition quoted above as a basis for good short stuff (and I work from a very similar angle in choosing stories for Nanoism). But for some reason, in my experience (and especially in reading submissions for his original contest), many hint/nano stories are a not standalone stories at all but rather some kind of movie tag-line/newspaper headline that alludes to a story. They’re much more compelling if you imagine the guy from the movie previews reading them (though, really, wouldn’t that be true for everything?). If you read one of the various “six word story” outlets, you’ll see an even more extreme version of what I mean. Entertaining—yes. Standalone—yes. Story? Debatable.
I’m not the kind of person who says a story can’t be short, obviously. But in my reading, it should have some self contained action. The beginning, middle, end definition is not particularly useful. Nor is the conflict, climax, resolution triad. In nanofiction, these elements are often implied in a word or phrase (hinted at, so to speak). Given the length, it’s unavoidable. For “story”-judgment, I tend to ascribe to the idea of “change.” There must be some fundamental change for the character, however slight, from onset to ending. And to really hit home, the greater story must be hinted at. Leaving it out for the reader to make up is not hinting—it’s omission, and they are not the same thing.
One person killing another person with nothing else is not a story (but it is by far the most common theme I see). The author needs to give the reader some help in deciphering a greater narrative arc. There is a level of necessary vagueness to the form, but just tossing a scene out in 25 words does not a story make. All scene and no story is not good. All plot and no scene is also not good—it’s not supposed to be a synopsis, after all. You need both.
Submissions to the Hint Fiction anthology are open until the end of the month. While Mr Swartwood has already received over a 1000 entries and will publish probably no more than 150, perhaps your submission could net you $25 delicious dollars and an excuse to say, “Oh, why yes, I was published by Norton.”
One of the internet’s double edged swords: a lot of information is good, but the consequent ton of poorly researched and incorrect information is bad. Even lay people who want to be up-to-date on science must swim through the well-intentioned mistakes of their sources. Take, for example, this article: “Blindspot shows brain rewiring in an instant.”
The title and thrust of the article is that because we don’t notice our blind spot (the spot where there are no photoreceptors due to the optic nerve) even when deprived of input from the other eye, we must re-wire our brains instantaneously to compensate. “Re-wire” is in fact a horrible way to explain this phenomenon.
In order to produce our visual experience when deprived of input from both eyes, our brains utilize pathways that already exist—a sort of backup circuit. “Re-wire” implies that there the utilized pathway is new.
When the conductor of a train sees a problem ahead on the track and switches over at the next junction, he’s not building a new path. The other path has always been there, he’s just utilizing it in a situation when he otherwise might not.
Scientists have known for some time that the brain has alternate circuits for a variety of sensory modalities (think of “blindsight” for example). The fact that our brains can utilize our natural development and genetic predispositions to create this intricate machinery is incredible. The fact that our brains can cope with unexpected stimuli almost instantaneously is also amazing. But, let’s be clear: re-wiring—also known as learning—takes time. Contrary to the article’s implication, this study says nothing to the contrary.
A bizarre conundrum:
If you make a return to Bed Bath & Beyond with a gift receipt, you get a gift card for store credit.
If you make the same return without a receipt, you get a store credit receipt: a regular-looking paper receipt with some old-fashioned highlighting and a signature or two or three.
Now, the receipt can be used in any store for any item. In other words, just like a gift card. What possible reason is there for using an easy-to-lose wrinkle-prone receipt for returns instead of a gift card (like every other store in the 21st century)? And if I have a gift card, why can’t I just add the return value onto it so I don’t have to carry around two pieces of paper and one piece of plastic in order to buy overpriced curtain rods?
If it has the exact same buying power, why make a distinction in the first place?
The world is full of surveys: surveys for free meals at TGI Friday’s, surveys for news polls, and at school, surveys for curricular reform:
“In order to improve this course for next year, we would appreciate it very much if you would take a few minutes and fill out this evaluation form.”
And the idea behind a survey is a good (nay, excellent) one: to gather feedback and ostensibly make changes and corrections based on it. The issue is in survey construction and follow-through. The usual survey has a variety of broadly worded statements with answer choices 1-5, 1 being “strongly agree” and 5 being “strongly disagree.” There will usually be a text-box for general comments at the end. You take this survey and your answers disappear into the depths of the internet never to be heard from again.
But from the beginning, the idea that you can sum up whether something works effectively or not based on a numerical average is a kludge. Furthermore, even if an average of 4 does approximate satisfaction, that doesn’t mean there aren’t better ways to do things. It’s an understandable shorthand, but anyone hoping that it’s sufficient to understand reception is fooling themselves. If people’s responses show that weekly quizzes are on the whole useful, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t prefer or think it better if they were biweekly, on Mondays, on Fridays, longer, shorter, or anything else. If people say dividing the year into 4 chunks is no good, it doesn’t mean 7 would be better. A number is all well and good, but at the end of the day, how someone feels isn’t the crux: it’s why they feel the way they do.
In order for a survey to be effective, it has to take time. Each question needs to have its own comment box. Then, someone needs to go through those comment boxes and compile all of the suggestions and problems. Take the suggestions and complaints, then formulate new courses of action. Then, before implementing them, offer them anew in a survey: What do you think about these choices? Do they sound good? How good? Better then before? If not, why not? If that takes too much time to do, have students volunteer to do the grunt work. They’ll put in on their CVs, the administrators can continue doing whatever it is that administrators do, and everyone is happy. This is also how you make changes quickly. It doesn’t need to take years.
People tend to make incremental changes to the status quo. It’s hard to make drastic changes, especially if those changes reverse your hard work or go against your own inclinations; it’s even harder to come up with these changes yourself when necessary. This difficulty then breeds the stagnation that allows bad systems to continue even when their obsolescence is practically taken for granted. And yet, this is how you get curricular form with a stethoscope on the heartbeat of a student body.
Sometimes things don’t work—but if a goal is truly to teach a subject effectively, then no one can tell you better what does and does not work than students. This is how you don’t spin your wheels around a problem, making arbitrary changes. You need to ask for feedback, but more importantly, you need to be willing to listen to it.
This is not: “You Try to Live on 500k in This Town,” a NY Times article that explains why Obama’s proposal will make life unlivable for the executives whose daily life is inexorably tied to wasteful extravagance. When you don’t follow your own advice and save some of your 1+ million dollar salary, it’s harder for me to take your mortgage seriously. Just the same, when your necessary annual expenses include paying your Tom Daschle-style chaffeur, it keeps America firmly on the revenge train. If extravagance is required by corporate culture, then the culture-change brought about by salary-caps or (better yet) progressive tax increases can be a good thing.
If I were still in college, and if I spent my time in college with a schedule that allowed for such awesome frivolity, then I would want to take a class that did in-depth (with some calculus!) analysis of StarCraft. Homework would never be so fun again…
There’s no surprise people are realizing and writing about the low-value of advanced degrees. Schools have used grad students as educational fodder, producing far more than the demand for academics can keep up with. People hoping for their PhD to be something beyond their pursuit of an intellectual interest unfortunately will continue to be disappointed when tenure remains forever out of reach.
For the first time, there is a phone on my carrier that genuinely interests me: The Palm Pre, a brand new smartphone that has, at least at first glance, a winning combination of features.
It’s a touchscreen phone, and it offers all the fun gesture support of the iPhone. While some press members noted that the touchscreen functionality wasn’t quite as responsive, that doesn’t really matter because…
It has a full slide-out keyboard.
Perhaps most significantly, it has a brand new operating system, “WebOS.” Hands-on impressions have been uniformly positive, and there a few aspects that make me a little more than curious to see the final pricing when the Pre comes to market:
- Its programs are based on a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript—the same technologies that make up most of the web (Flash being the major exception). Remember the widgets that made OS X cool a few years back and then popped up everywhere? Same idea. It means that developing applications will be fast and straightforward. It also means that the internet will look and feel like the internet, something that cannot be said for browsing just about anything on Windows Mobile.
- Like Android, Google’s new open-source venture, webOS can multitask (unlike the iPhone)–meaning you can open more than one program at a time. The task-switching mechanism in webOS is called the “Card System,” and it’s apparently quick and awesome.
- It’s going to have a more open and tolerant app store. Unlike Apple, which has iron-fisted control over what you can and cannot run on the iPhone, Palm plans to be permissive: anything that can run on webOS eventually will, without the need to “jailbreak” the handset or anything else dramatic. They won’t block Flash just because it will cannibalize their own software sales. This is also a perk of the Android Market.
- Palm plans to unveil a way to convert old PalmOS programs to webOS. How? I don’t know, maybe an emulator (which could be pretty slow). But, if the method works well, the Pre will instantly have a back catalog of useful software. One of the big perks of Palm products has always been the software and development community—incidentally, two of the things recent Palm phones have lacked. If you see a correlation between those two attributes, the iPhone’s success, and Palm’s downward spiral, so do I.
WebOS just looks slick and the UI looks effortless—which is exactly how a phone should be. Two notable shortcomings: there’s no video capture (which could potentially come as a software update), and Adobe has yet to definitively confirm that it will be Flash capable. Flash has already been demoed on Android, and if it comes out on both competitors, it’d be a distinction that would really speak against Apple’s for-us-by-us attitude about critical software.
Now, if an Android phone finds its way to Sprint around the same time, it might be a harder choice. Of course, if my contract runs out first, then I may just switch to get the G1 on Verizon anyway—it has a lot of things going right, and the software perks are only going to get better. Still, I always had a fondness for the PalmPilot I had sometime around my Bar Mitzvah…if Palm can wrangle up some of the old cadre of PalmOS devotees and get them excited about devleoping software for webOS, we could see an interesting battle in the smartphone market this year. I think there’s a good shot: I haven’t coded outside of CS50, and even I want to develop for this thing.
As I type this on my msi wind “netbook,” it occurs to me that some otherwise very smart people are getting a very odd message from the explosion in this new computer category’s popularity.
Farhad Manjoo, Slate’s tech guy and author of a book that has received very respectable reviews on Amazon, wrote last week that the netbook craze means that the public wants small tablet computers (preferably made by apple), and not cheap laptops with a small factor.
When I see the huge popularity of the new netbook category, I see it rooted in a new combination of small, light computers and cheap computer: People have a desire and use for this novel combination, but there haven’t laptops in this niche until last year. Nothing is easier to carry around to class, the library, or around campus than a netbook. While ultralights would do the job even better, the cost is prohibitive. Tablet’s aren’t desirable for taking notes, writing emails, or any other active text-input–it’s not an interface best suited for the job. When I bought my MSI wind, I needed a computer—not a bigger version of the iPhone.
While netbook’s are not an ideal as a everyday desktop replacement, they are great second computers and get the job for basic productivity software. And let’s face it, PC computing has been on the decline for some time now. My new MSI wind is roughly as powerful as the $2000 Powerbook G4 I bought four years ago. It runs XP beautifully with Firefox and Word open. That’s sufficient for 95% of my computer usage.
Would I want to sit at a desk starting at the 10″ screen at all times? No, of course not–but did I enjoy lugging my powerbook to class everyday? Nope. The keyboard gets the job done, but it’s an even better size for children and women with smaller hands, two groups that some people have said have really taken a liking to these small laptops.
Let’s be clear here. Netbooks don’t represent some new edgy crossover device. They are computers that sacrifice glamor in exchange for great value and a small form factor, nothing more.