Machina Memorialis

academichack has reviews of two free, online presentation tools, Sliderocket and 280Slides. Both seem to favor Keynote’s visual presentation model over PowerPoint’s text-on-slide model.

Thanks to Mike at FoolsCap for a point to Rolling Stone’s review of The Dark Knight. I thoroughly enjoyed Batman Begins revisioning of my favorite hero and I knew I was looking forward to this move. If the movie’s even half as good as the Rolling Stone review makes it out to be, I’m going to be pleased. Here’s an except:

The Joker wants Batman to choose chaos as well. He knows humanity is what you lose while you’re busy making plans to gain power. Every actor brings his A game to show the lure of the dark side. Michael Caine purrs with sarcastic wit as Bruce’s butler, Alfred, who harbors a secret that could crush his boss’s spirit. Morgan Freeman radiates tough wisdom as Lucius Fox, the scientist who designs those wonderful toys — wait till you get a load of the Batpod — but who finds his own standards being compromised. Gary Oldman is so skilled that he makes virtue exciting as Jim Gordon, the ultimate good cop and as such a prime target for the Joker. As Harvey tells the Caped Crusader, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” Eckhart earns major props for scarily and movingly portraying the DA’s transformation into the dreaded Harvey Two-Face, an event sparked by the brutal murder of a major character. [Read more.]

The Research Network Forum, a CCCC pre-convention workshop for presenting and discussing works-in-progress, is now accepting proposals for the 2009 convention. For information on being a works-in-progress presenter or serving as a discussion leader, please see the CFP. The proposal deadline is Friday, October 31st, 2008.

And don’t forgot, the RNF now has a blog to keep you up to date with all things RNF.

Via Neil Gaiman’s blog, I see there’s supposed to be a subterranean inferno burning in Uzbekistan. The story goes–who knows if it’s true as everything I’ve found seems to just be recycled content like this post is–that thirty-five years ago drillers looking for gas collapsed the roof of a huge cavern full of poisonous gas, which they set on fire with the intent of burning it off. It is, supposedly, still burning. I should note that some sources place it in Turkmenistan rather than Uzbekistan. Here’s a picture of the place, via My Blue Star Life:

Gaiman linked to a set at Slightlywarped.com’s Curiosities. You might also want to check out this video.

Update: A follow up on Gaiman’s blog (sent in by a reader) indicates that the site in question is in Turkmenistan, located here in Google maps.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is 25 years old, which means I’ve known him for 24 years. We met when the first Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, came out in paperback. At the time, I was a young journalist in an unbecoming hat and Terry was the press officer for the South Western Electricity Board. It was his first interview and we had a Chinese meal, arranged by the publisher. Neither of us was certain who was meant to pay for it. [Read more.]

Thus begins the article in which one of my favorite authors is interviewed by one of my favorite authors. While it’s a right proper interview marking the 25th anniversary of the Discworld (Gaiman, who was a journalist back then, was the first person to interview Pratchett, which I’m sure is why this interview was arranged), it’s not your run of the mill interview. It’s a friend writing about a friend and it’s worth reading.

Playing around some more with Wordle, which I first wrote about the other day. For fun, I thought I’d do a word cloud comparison of the article and chapter versions of “Towards a New Revised Canon of Memory.” First, here’s the article version, which I posted earlier:

And here’s the dissertation chapter version:

Something we’re not going to get for the house (well, probably not) but stumbled upon while looking for something to get are this set of Tolkien inspired tiles from the Verdant Tile Co. My favorite is the one of Smaug.

Thanks to Collin Brooke, I’ve discovered Wordle, a word cloud tool that makes cool looking word clouds. Here’s a word cloud of “Towards a New Revived Canon of Memory,” a piece I’m getting ready to send out that’s based upon the second chapter of the dissertation:

And here’s a word cloud of the essay’s bibliography:

You can, of course, click on the images for a better view.

While the word clouds above are unedited, Wordle lets you tweak the font, layout, and color.

This last one is the whole piece, text and bibliography, in which I’ve selected the Powell Antique font, the “any which way” layout, and “ghostly” color scheme:

As part of the WPA-L thread on Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“, Robert Delius Royar sent a link to an International Herald Tribune article “Brain power and the advantages of aging,” a summary of Harvard pscyhologist Shelley H. Carson’s current research. What’s interesting about the IHT piece is that people over the age of 60 are much better at processing information than younger people. Specifically, the research the story is based on found that while younger people tend to ignore “out of place” information, older people take in, process, and retain such information:

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Because we never really know what information will be useful until after the fact and because creative thinking is often nothing more than combining disparate pieces of information in new and novel ways, the implications of this study are vastly important for education. Although I argue for the value of external memory systems (books, databases, etc.) as valuable mnemonic tools, our problem is access. Until our brains are wired directly into such systems and we can run background searches in the same way our brains do, our internal memory will remain the more privileged system.

In other words, as much as I love Sharon Cogdill’s maxim “In an oral culture, you know it if you have it memorized; in a written culture, you know it if you have the book; and in a digital culture, you know it if you can find it again,” we’re much more likely to make those creative connections with information and knowledge stored in our biological memory.¹

In his WPA-L post RDR suggests, “This [students seeming inability to focus on and understand longer, complex print texts] appears to be physiological which might explain why so many generartions (e.g. Socrates’ contemporaries) thought the young had been corrupted in their abilities to comprehend and recall.”

1. The story notes that in 2003 study, Carson found that “[t]he more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data,” which seems to support the connection between information retention and creative thinking. [back]

Via Neurophilosophy, I see that IEEE Spectrum Online has a special issue on the Singularity.

From the lead story, “Waiting for the Rapture“:

Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe that in the next several decades we’ll have computers into which you’ll be able to upload your consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you. Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception.

Now you know why the singularity has also been called the rapture of the geeks.