YouTube recently emailed me about a partnership program which promised to “monetize” a video. I decided to take the plunge. But I didn’t get far, because about half the required “tutorial” for sharing was copyright warnings like this one:

It’s NOT OK to use someone else’s material even if you…

• edit together or “mash-up” other works.
• alter it by 10%, 20%, 30%, etc.
• only use 30 seconds of a song or video clip.
• found it on the internet.
• nobody sent you a copyright notice.
• paid for it.
• give proper attribution (credits).
• are only singing the words of a favorite copyrighted song.

This is copyright infringement and your video will be deleted!

Not much of a surprise here. I give credit to YouTube for trying to convince over-eager copyright holders that they don’t have to nuke every video users post which contains their content. Their ContentID program allows tracking or claiming for ad revenue content like the Chris Brown wedding dance video. But I’m afraid that happy ending is, unfortunately, the exception not the rule, and this partnership program is more about putting Meow Mix ads on top of barfing cats. Unless I’m misreading something, “partner” doesn’t apply to anyone remixing content, and my guess is if that cat video has commercial music in the background, it’s not gonna be eligible for shared revenue.

And I thought I had that new roof all paid for…

I ran the Quad Cities half-marathon Sunday at 1:49:17, which is my personal best for the half. (Chip time was 0:19 faster than my GPS, which I now realize I started too soon and turned off too late.) That’s 266/1,525 overall, 41/95 in age group (57th percentile), 202/691 men. At right, there I am returning Madelyn’s thumbs up as I enter the home stretch. She was also ringing a cowbell like the dickens: that’s my noisy girl!

Obviously, given a personal best, FIRST training served me well. I was very well-prepared, feeling super throughout, and enjoyed every bit of the race. Two days later, I still feel great, with only a little tightness in my calves yesterday and this morning, which I worked out just now with a short easy run.

I’m very pleased with my pacing. Other than a 7:58/mi half-mile at five miles, which was all downhill, I kept it pretty constant for the first 10 miles. I did log a 9:14/mi half-mile when I crossed the Government Bridge. Not only did I have to slow down because of some runner traffic and the steel surface, my GPS lost signal. Once my GPS caught up when I got off the bridge, I did some quick calculations, figured I had a shot at breaking 1:50, and accelerated. I passed a bunch of people the last three miles. Probably 50. Nobody except the elite marathoners passed me (since they share part of the course). That was great. All that telling myself, “Slow, slow,” for the first 10 miles worked: it was easy to drop to 7:50/mi for the last three. Here’s a graph of my pacing:

And wow, did those elite marathoners zip by. The fastest finished at 2:18, or 5:15/mi, which in elite terms isn’t that fast (the world record is 2:03:59, or 4:43/mi). But yes, they did make me feel slow.

Once again, props to the QC organizers for putting together a fine event. As always, the single lane on the I-74 bridge was very crowded, and I wish there was a way to break up the chains of folks running five abreast: they forced faster runners to push past, and that’s not fun for anyone involved. But that’s the only complaint I had. On the other hand, they did put mats down on the Government Bridge, making it easier to run safely. The in-race support was very good, and the post-race eats solid, even if the beer was lame. (Miller Lite. I saw someone drop his cup and gave him my ticket.)

What’s next? Some easy runs, some biking, and a couple of 5K races. Then a 10K to calibrate my pace, and another 16 week cycle. A 1:45 half would be 8:00 pace. Hrm…

The following is the dream I had last night. Two immediate thoughts: 1.) definitely one of those vivid dreams associated with being in the family way; and 2.) I would totally watch a science fiction movie with this as its premise. Screenwriters, if you want the idea, have at it; see Creative Commons license.

I was in the future – around 2030-2040. I hadn’t aged, though; in fact, I think I was a few years younger and had been brought in from the past. The city I was in looked like it had gone through a disaster of some kind. Houses were partially burned, boarded up, or splintered. Rubble was everywhere. But there were some inhabitable buildings, and I lived in relative comfort.

For entertainment, people salvaged old technology from the 1990s and 2000s and played it, mostly old voice mails found on some cell phone companies' hard drives. People would listen to voice mails left by strangers for other strangers 40-50 years prior.* I listened to a message from someone inviting someone else to go to a Bible study. Another message I heard was from a woman letting someone know she had made "dime chicken," a low-budget but tasty and healthy dish, and that the person was welcome to stop by for dinner.

My job consisted of being sent into old dilapidated houses to take out an installation of equipment called a "Doom Matrix." It was a huge setup of projectors and computer processors, kind of similar in function to the holo-emitters (holodeck) on Star Trek. They had been sold as video game consoles. People had gotten addicted to them, and the machines had become self-aware, destructive, and murderous, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise.

I had, apparently, been summoned to purge the houses of these machines, which had been temporarily disabled by bombs and power shutdowns. They needed people who had a proven and utter lack of interest in playing video games, as I do. Others they had recruited for the job had been too curious about the Doom Matrix and had turned it on just to see what it was like.

* Actually, if voice mail had been available in the 1950s and 60s, I would definitely enjoy listening to old messages. I can imagine "http://oldtimeyvoicemail.blogspot.com" quite easily.

At the confluence of two conversations. Yesterday I watched Dave Parry's talk on the future of the university and received a link to William Chace's American Scholar article on the "Decline of the English Department." These are very different approaches. Both identify a problem/crisis with our current situation, but where Parry recommends an embrace of emerging practices, Chace calls for a return to the past. Not surprisingly, I am more sympathetic to Parry's argument, but there are interesting things in both.

When I look at Chace's essay, it is maybe easy (for someone like me) to dismiss his position as some old guard conservative reaction. But I don't really read it that way. Certainly there is some longing for the way things were back in the heyday of literary studies' height of popularity when he was an undergrad in the early 50s. But as he points out, in retrospect (and if, indeed, we are seeing some final decline of lit studies), the popularity and centrality of the field to higher education was really quite fleeting--something experienced only by a generation or two of scholars. The explanations for the decline our now familiar I think: the rise of other, pre-professional majors, the increased acceptability of women entering other fields, etc. Chace adds to this the observation of English's fragmentation and departure from the traditional, canonical approach to literary studies (i.e. the experience of his youth). And perhaps that could be seen as finger-pointing as cultural studies or feminism or whatever, but he also notes

there are more and more gifted and enterprising students coming from immigrant backgrounds, students with only slender connections to Western culture and to the assumption that the “great books” of England and the United States should enjoy a fixed centrality in the world. What was once the heart of the matter now seems provincial.

Note that even he is putting "great books" in scare quotes. After this, the essay becomes somewhat fragmentary (much like our discipline). Chace goes into the changing economics of higher edu: the increasing expectation that a college degree is preparation for a career, increasing tuition, institutional expectations for external funding which is scarce in the humanities, etc. But he really wants to focus on the discipline's internal problems, namely that "English has become less and less coherent as a discipline and, worse, has come near exhaustion as a scholarly pursuit. English departments have not responded energetically and resourcefully to the situation surrounding them." In short, for Chace we have lost sense of identity and mission starting with scholarly/research paradigms and bleeding down to undergrad curriculum. Though he may be loathe to recognize it, I think even Chace sees the old structure is not useful. As he aptly observes, "The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn’t here anymore; our technology is obsolete."

So where does the rubber hit the road in Chace? This is what he suggests:

• " a return to the aesthetic wellsprings of literature" (as opposed, I think, to the politicized cultural studes analysis, but that's just my assumption here)
• emphasize teaching over research for tenure: "If they wanted to publish, [humanists] could do so—at almost no cost—on the Internet" (really? no kidding? tell me more)
• central to that teaching focus is a renewed focus on books (again, away from cultural studies/theory)

But here's the real kicker:

English departments can teach their students to write well, to use rhetoric. They should place their courses in composition and rhetoric at the forefront of their activities. They should announce that the teaching of composition is a skill their instructors have mastered and that students majoring in English will be certified, upon graduation, as possessing rigorously tested competence in prose expression. Those students will thus carry with them, into employment interviews or into further educational training, a proficiency everywhere respected but too often lacking among college graduates.

Just as a side note, I was talking to faculty in the law school last night, someone who teaches legal writing to first year students. He said that English majors have the hardest time adapting to legal writing b/c they have been taught and rewarded for writing in a particular way that is not appropriate for the legal genre. That's something to think about if we are going to proclaim our expertise as teachers of "writing."

If we fail to act, Chace imagines literary studies will become like Classics departments. That's a good analogy. I always think of art history myself.

Parry sees the same problem in a different way. He's looking more broadly at the university as a "hack" (as he puts it) for the limits of print-based knowledge production and distribution. Here in the late age of print, we necessarily must re-invent ourselves or see something arise to replace us. He calls for us to embrace and even race toward the realization that the cost of educational products is approaching zero.

That's true, but he also points out the knowledge is more properly seen as a process than a product, and certainly learning is a process. As a process, it requires labor and materials to be undertaken. I would argue that the labor involved is highly specialized and thus ought to continue to demand some premium in the marketplace. I've been up and down that debate before. Yes, there are folks who can go to opencourseware and learn on their own. And maybe there will even be people who will be willing to teach/mentor for free or in a crowdsourced way or something. I remain skeptical at this point that we can educate our citizenry through such practices. The institutions must change, but I think we will still need them for the foreseeable future. However, those that do not change may be in trouble.

In that way they are like Chace's English departments.

It's funny, but I really don't disagree that much with Chace. I don't really care much for his "return to books" strategy, but if that's what lit studies folks want to do, I don't think it matters much to me. I agree that we need to change our research practices (and that digital scholarship wll play a role in it). I certainly agree with a renewed focus on writing, but I'm fairly sure that we would disagree on what that actually means, as I don't think that writing 1000-word close readings of canonical works is going to achieve the writing goals that Chace values.

In my view, English is the humanistic study of textual practices in the English language. We have had to think broadly of text and see our interconnections with non-textual media. But our obvious focus remains on text whether it is creative writing, rhetoric, literary studies, composition, or professional/technical writing. Obviously today we need to study the transformation of those practices in the context of digital networks. But the reality is that there is more text and more textual production today than at any time in human history. And textual production, distribution, and consumption is undergoing the most radical revolution we have seen in centuries, if not since the invention of writing itself.

In other words, there is more for us to study and more for us to teach our students than ever. So maybe that's why we seem so fragmented and lost. The process of globalization altered the centrality of the textual practices we historically studied. And now this technological revolution has fundamentally changed the rules of the game.

But I agree with Chace, we need to stop wallowing in despair or pining for the old days or closeting ourselves off with our particular research interests (if we are indeed doing such things) and put something together. And I think a lot of what Parry says about where we might go by questioning the naturalized assumptions of print-based university practices makes. So I think we need to ask two simple questions of ourselves, our departments, and our discipline.

1. How do we make use of our existing knowledge, experience, methods, and expertise to refocus on the central issues and challenges of contemporary textual practices?
2. How do we communicate that renewed focus to (prospective) students, to others around the university, and to broader public discourses on education?

A couple years ago, I blogged about the phenomenon of "octobering," that crush of work that hits the second full month of the new fall term, and includes all manner of the kind of labor we do in this profession: writing rec letters for job marketing grad students; attending can't-miss talks; preparing for conferences; going to meetings about everything; more letter writing. Oh! And teaching happens somewhere in there usually.

I've noted this to other people, and others have noted it as well, but this year there seems to be considerable October creep. For starters, deadlines for job recs are inching up earlier and earlier, probably because folks lucky enough to have lines want to get the ball rolling before higher-ups change their minds, and also they are seeking a competitive edge over the other two or three schools with lines. True, a lot of this work could spill into October, but I have such an insane travel schedule in October (trying to pack it all in before traveling becomes difficult, flying impossible) that I'm having to frontload some of the work before the end of this month, and thus Octobering has come to be something more like "fall"ing. 

The new liberal arts course I'm directing comes with a ton of meetings, and though I'm grateful that it takes a village for this kind of thing, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to schedule the work that should follow these meetings, all the while composing two talks for mid-October--one I found myself structuring, I kid you not, while I slept last night--and helping my advisees make it to their dissertation defenses this semester (both of which require me to travel back to Champaign-Urbana). All told, between now and December I will make a total of four trips back to the midwest (including NCA's Chicago and a Minneapolis/Madison trek in mid Oct.--I'm ever grateful to M-city hosts for helping me combine those). I won't even be home for my favorite holiday--halloween--so those little Kiss costumes I was hoping to create (Tillie as Gene Simmons and Jada as Paul Stanley) are unfortunately going to have to wait until next year. Of course I'm not alone in my busy-ness, and knowing that actually weirdly helps.

Even so, at 6:30 this evening I fell into a deep, twitchy sleep while watching "Flight of the Conchords," waking up when JM started giggling at some crazy dance Brett was doing. I pulled myself out of my grog so that we could walk the dogs and clean up from dinner. There was just enough energy to answer some emails about courses for 2010-2011 (!) and write this blog entry, and very soon I'll be heading to bed. 

I’ve been on a dialog box kick lately. Yet another:

Not so informative this time.

After a Firefox upgrade, crashola. The result: this funny dialog box. Remember the good ole days of “about:” easter eggs?

Read on Slashdot, ASCAP Says Apple Should Pay For 30-sec. Song Samples.

read more

65% of doctors oppose the President's health care plan

or...

63% of doctors support a public option?

The New England Journal of Medicine would seem to be the more reliable source, but then again, we know that the American Medical Association isn't in favor of a public option, or they want to be sure they can opt out of accepting it, at least.

In an interview with New Scientist, robotics expert Noel Sharkey expresses his doubts about the possibilities of artificial intelligence. He says:

It is my contention that AI, and particularly robotics, exploits natural human zoomorphism. We want robots to appear like humans or animals, and this is assisted by cultural myths about AI and a willing suspension of disbelief. The old automata makers, going back as far as Hero of Alexandria, who made the first programmable robot in AD 60, saw their work as part of natural magic - the use of trick and illusion to make us believe their machines were alive. Modern robotics preserves this tradition with machines that can recognise emotion and manipulate silicone faces to show empathy. There are AI language programs that search databases to find conversationally appropriate sentences. If AI workers would accept the trickster role and be honest about it, we might progress a lot quicker.

So of course when some mentions the use of trick and illusion, I immediately think of rhetoric. It's not about being intelligent; it's about convincing others that you are intelligent. In other words, AI is like an academic conference. OK, enough snarkiness.

One of the fundamental conceptual problems of AI is that we don't have a very good grasp on what "intelligence" is to begin with. As Katherine Hayles' work details, the history of this field is replete with hand-wringing over defining human intelligence in a way that would allow it to be artificially recreated with computers. Is intelligence really computational? Does intelligence equal sentience/consciousness? Obviously we don't know the answers to these questions.

What does seem more likely is that we might develop computers/robots that have the appearance of intelligence that is driven by computation. As Sharkey points out, Big Blue can win chess matches with brute force computation. Perhaps in some sense this makes it smarter than humans but it's "thinking" isn't anything like our own. On the other hand, when I talk with someone all I can discern is the appearance of intelligence.

From a digital humanist viewpoint, one of the interesting things about AI discourses and practices is the way they lead us to reconceptualize human intelligence. Does the computational model of the mind represent the material reality of how we think? I suppose that would fall into the "I guess anything is possible" category. Does it shine light on how equally flimsy and contingent other, more traditional models of the mind might be? I'd think so.

I just think it's interesting to turn this conversation around and ask the same question Sharkey has for AI to the conversation we have about human intelligence. Maybe human intelligence is little more than cultural myth and a willing suspension of disbelief. After all there are plenty of humans who could use some additional programming in order to "recognize emotion," "show empathy," and "find conversationally appropriate sentences." (I guess I wasn't finished with the snarkiness.)

I don’t remember where I saw recent changes to Facebook described as desperate attempts to keep up with Twitter. Anyway, here’s a move which might fit in the same category:

'Tag a friend': Facebook picks up Twitter's @username syntax

Type @ into status updates, and you can include friends’ names, creating updates which are echoed onto their walls. Okay. But why adopt the be-more-like-Twitter approach? Why would Facebook, the do-everything Swiss Army chainsaw of social media, think that adding another level of complexity makes it more like Twitter, with its simplicity and one-dimensionality? (Know I don’t mean that as a negative.) Perhaps those coming late to social media see Facebook and Twitter as mutually exclusive, and find Facebook’s current focus on friends’ information streams, rather than interpersonal communication, as negative. But given the number of people who’ve integrated the two services, how prevalent is that view?

It might be that Facebook is correcting for the unintended consequences of diversifying its interface. Once it became possible to “like” or comment on nearly every Facebook utterance, wall-to-wall communication, long a Facebook standby, took a hit as wall posts (and other utterances) garnered replies by comment, not by paired wall-to-wall posts. Last week this was apparent to me twice: (1) I asked someone for context on an update; once I viewed it his whole stream of updates (via Twitter), the post made perfect sense. However, viewed single-page (via RSS), I missed the whole story. (2) I wrote on someone else’s wall, and they replied as a comment on that post–not on my wall, as in the old days.

I like the comment-on-everything model, and given that I’m not a heavy mobile phone user, Facebook-centric updates make more sense for me than Twitter-centric. But my guess is that’s not the norm. I don’t know enough about the demographics to know if Twitter is “stealing” communication once done via Facebook, but adoption of the @ syntax by Facebook seems a pretty clear attempt to keep up.

Got this in the (g)mail this week:

Dear cbdilger,

Your video Mr Moreno meets Mr Spikes has become popular on YouTube, and we’d like to invite you to start making money from it by including it in the YouTube Partnership Program

Making money from your video is easy. Here’s how it works: First sign into your YouTube account cbdilger. Then, complete the steps outlined here: [link redacted]. Once you’re finished, we’ll start placing ads next to your video and pay you a share of the revenue.

We look forward to adding your video to the YouTube Partnership Program. Thanks and good luck!

The YouTube Team

The mechanism here is easy to imagine: at a certain number of views, YouTube kicks out this email. Just one of the ways they encourage content providers to “monetize” YouTube (e.g. the recent popularity of a wedding video with a Chris Brown song; instead of shutting it down, the record company involved added a “Buy this song” link. Smart.). However, this isn’t “my” video. It’s a clip I’ve shared assuming that doing so meets fair use criteria:

1. it’s a non-commercial use
2. the work in question is nonfiction
3. amount of work reproduced is very small (0:30 of 2:00 or more), though significance is high (Spikes and Moreno are arguably the best two players on the field, both future NFLers)
4. impact on market value is low, given #3

Now, if I sign up for the program, #1 changes, and the fair use argument is considerably weakened. I wonder if CBS and other rights holders consider these programs when making decisions about shutdowns. Or do they automagically get a cut as well?

I have half a mind to sign up, just to see what happens.

At the beginning of the year I set a goal of exercising four times a week: two runs, one swim, one bike. And I have completely failed to do that, given that I’ve been in the pool less than ten times all year. It’s just been too difficult to harmonize child care for the girls with the ever-fluctuating schedule at the Y.

Having said that, my exercise output has been very good, it’s just been different than I expected. So far in 2009, I’ve exercised 133 of 261 days, for about 895 miles. At this time last year, I had logged 122 workouts for 721 miles. And since I’ve rebooted FIRST training, four and five workout weeks have been the rule, even if I’ve been mostly running and biking.

In September 2008 I completely whiffed, exercising only 6 times in 30 days, and I wasn’t much better in October. Gotta avoid that this year. Chanting now: stay on the road, stay healthy, run the half-marathon, go from there…

I held two extra office hours today, and I'm so glad I did. I got to talk with three smart grads, two of whom are already hammering out topics for their final project, and one of whom wanted me to take a look at his RSA abstract.

And when folks weren't here, I got a chance to tinker with a little teaching grant proposal, copy a section from a rare greek book that I have to return to the farflung place that lent it to me this summer, fiddle with my new psu website, AND write a blog entry. How productive is that? 

Wildly. Even the little sprog is kicking around, seemingly with excitement.

On the face of it, the movie Sugar and the HBO series Eastbound and Down don't really belong in the same blog post. Except that at one point while watching the movie I found myself thinking the two main characters, Miguel "Sugar" Santos and Kenny Powers, could easily cross paths, though that would probably end badly. Both the movie and the film also happen to be about baseball players--indeed, both Powers and Santos are pitchers, and both characters' situations offer commentary on U.S. professional baseball. Both heroes suffer; they struggle with the ladies and with their slumps. Life without baseball is fairly unimaginable. The similarities pretty much end right about there. Well, actually they don't. But I don't want to give any spoilers.

So I'll stick to character analysis. Miguel is far too humble and serious to live his life by Powers's mottos: "If at first you don't succeed, maybe you just suck," and "Why give 100% when 35 can get you paid and laid?" Nor would he write--ahem co-write--a memoir titled "You're Fucking Out, I'm Fucking In," a memoir Powers listens to on cassette while driving in his truck and also while lifting weights. Powers is far more hilarious and infinitely more quotable, thanks to the work of EBD's creator Will Ferrell (who also plays a hilarious bleach-blond BMW salesman).

And however much you might enjoy sitting around with friends recalling curse-filled zingers delivered by Powers, like we pretty much did all weekend with C and E, Sugar is the character that will actually stick with you, his courage matched only by his comparative silence.