Floaty thoughts

Lack of sleep leads to inability to form coherent paragraphs, so herewith my point-form blog entry:

1. With all the questions about whether Earth Hour actually reduces a significant amount of carbon dioxide, perhaps we should just be thankful that it encouraged people to think about consuming less, in general.
2. I spent Earth Hour at the (lit) dwelling of a friend of mine, who hosted a clothing swap where everyone came with unwanted clothing and left with other people's unwanted clothing (that fit. and looked good. For the most part). Leftovers went to charity and photos are here. We rationalized the need for electric lighting (candlelight is inaccurately flattering and impractical for our purposes) by noting that while one apartment was lit, the homes of all the guests were dark. Also, the clothing swap enabled us to reuse goods (clothing) and reduce our consumption of new clothing (in others, I don't need to go shopping for a while).
   
3. It has been a week of material lightening; in addition to raiding my closet for the clothing swap, I also culled books for a charity book sale. Good bye, third copy of Bridget Jones's Diary.
   
4. The workload, ironically, gets heavier as the end of term means essays and more marking.
5. I'm trying to figure out why this story about an abstinence club at Harvard annoys me so much that I currently can't get past the third page. Is it the sensationalist spin taken by the article writer? The puritanical leanings of some of the club's predessors at other universities? The article's attitude towards the club's female leader or her attitude about what she's doing? Is it the headline's use of the more value-loaded word "chastity" vs. my (to my mind) more neutral "abstinence"? I might get back to you on that one.
6. I bought a bottle of "reward wine" for when I finish writing chapter two. As of today, I have... 100% of it left to write. I'll get back to you on that one, too.
   

Sweet Valley High (on a diet)

There's been a lot of comment online about the rerelease of the ghostwritten-by-committee young adult novel series Sweet Valley High that was immensely popular in the 1980s and 1990s, specifically the modern updating of the twins from size 6 to size 4. I agree that it's stupid (why provide their sizes at all?) and unnecessary.

But why hasn't anyone really pointed out...

That the books aren't that good to begin with? Predictable, soapy, formulaic, they suffered due to the episodic nature of the series (Jessica, forget all the lessons you learned in the previous book!) and the writing was straightforward without being at all interesting. I wasn't obsessed with SVH like some of my classmates were in junior high; I just couldn't get on board with a series where you could see the ending by chapter three.

Does someone want to explain to me...

why toilet paper commercials must prominently feature cute animals?

Cases in point:

TP#1, which, if the Youtube description is to be trusted, has been using (secretly demonic?) fluffly white kittens in its TV ads since 1969.



TP#2, which demonstrates animated proof that indeed, bears do shit in the woods.



And finally, TP#3, which features a puppy sniffing human butts (apparently other puppies were not cheekily available). Your tolerance of this commercial will depend on your feelings on Zach Braff, who gives voice to the pup's interior monologue. (Shakespeare it's not.)



I suppose toilet paper is difficult to advertise, associated as it is with perfectly natural but impolite bodily functions. I'm just not sure if cute animals are really the best approach.

50 greatest books (available in English, by dead white men whom you've all heard of)

I have been following with increasing dread the Globe and Mail's Book section series of the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Not because I don't think people should read (of course I do!) or that lists like this seem rather arbitrary (they will at least spur discussion). But frankly, the list has been kind of... predictable.

Let's see: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, James Joyce's Ulysses, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Marx's Das Capital, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Dante's Divine Comedy. Bonus points for Origin of Species, but points taken away for another famous dead white guy (Charles Darwin).

Okay, fine, yes. I'm going to rehash the "dead white guy" argument. Look, I know that one reason a disproportionate number of books are written by dead white men is because the number of educated white men has historically been high compared to educated women and/or minorities. (I also know that there are currently more dead authors than live authors.) But my issue with the list isn't that the books so far have been written by dead white guys, but what the preponderonce of dead white male authors suggests—that the list will tell us nothing new or encourage us to re-think what it means to be a "great" book. Many of the chosen books are of great historical import, but any undergraduate student currently making his/her way through a liberal arts degree will encounter many of them in time. In fact, an undergrad student of 40 years ago would have encountered many of these books in time. At the rate the exercise is going, the list is beginning to look like the "great hits of the Western canon."

Every week, I have greeted the announcement of the next "great book" with a deflated resignation and a touch of resentment. Oh, Machievelli's The Prince! How original! How exciting! How daring to select a book by an author whose name has entered everyday vocabulary, becoming synonymous with ruthless dictatorial actions, on the basis of this book.

There are any number of "great books" lists in the world, fiction and nonfiction, all easily found on Google. There is even a list of great books lists! Considering all of this, the Globe and Mail list seems redundant at best and frankly, a little wanky at worst.

And to test my precognitive abilities, herewith are my guesses for books that will appear on the Globe's list of the 50 Greatest Books E-VAH:

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Paradise Lost, by John Milton (unles Dante's Divine Comedy cancelled it out in the balloting?)
The Republic, by some guy named Plato
The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes
The Cantebury Tales, by Chaucer
something by Nietzsche
War and Peace

Some off-the-wall guesses:
Johnson's Dictionary (or possibly the Oxford English Dictionary, but Johnson's came first)
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style
Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

And if an Austen novel does make the list, I hope it's the superior Emma, rather than the go-to Pride and Prejudice.

What constitutes plagiarism?

A Ryerson student is facing academic misconduct charges because his professor found out that he's the administrator of a study group on Facebook.

The student compares the study group to peer tutoring or study groups that meet in person, making it a part of his argument that what he's doing isn't cheating. The university alleges... well, frankly, it's unclear what the university alleges, except that students can't get away with things that they do online.... A university representative also noted generally that students must do their own work.

The story prompts more questions than it answers, specifically:

1. Exactly what was going on in the study group? Were students merely getting help from each other on general concepts or were they specifically asking about questions on assignments? If so, did students actually provide other students with the answers on assignments? If yes, that would be cheating since students wouldn't have done their own work. But...
2. How can the university prove this? Does it have printouts of the group's discussion boards and wall posts?
3. How would this differ from a library study group or peer tutoring? And if it doesn't, does that also mean that library study groups and peer tutoring constitute cheating?
4. What about the possibility that students can help other students learn since they can explain things differently than the prof did in class? That sometimes hearing an explanation the second time or being able to ask questions about it makes a difference? Should students only learn from profs and text books?
   
5. How many first-year Engineering students even know exactly what constitutes cheating? High school students help each other with homework all the time (I remember many phone calls about math homework in my day, and a few years later I'm sure it would have been all MSN instant messaging). Students aren't going to know that practices established earlier might be unacceptable in university. While "not knowing" does not mitigate the offence, the institution still has an obligation to make its students aware of proper and improper academic conduct.
6. Why on earth is Ryerson charging the student with 147 counts of academic misconduct (one for him, one for each member of the group)? The excessiveness smacks of bullying and heavy handed "let's make an example of this one".
7. Don't you think that the study group members have now started a new Facebook group with more stringent privacy settings?

I hate to break it to Ryerson, but students have been "helping" each other with their homework since the dawn of homework. This particular student got "caught" because there must have been a Facebook record.

Incidentally, I don't know why people are all up in arms about a Facebook study group when 100% improper and unethical essay mills get to advertise in the guise of a Facebook group.