Musings from Brian J. Noggle
Sunday, December 07, 2008
 
The Collision of English Students and The Workplace
Instapundit links to a piece from a book about higher education or something, and the author relates a story about a faculty member teaching a graduate level course on technical writing wherein the faculty member gets in trouble for having a potty mouth:
    "I will no longer tolerate," the chair writes in his letter to my friend, "what can only be described as your insensitive, vulgar, and obscene language in the classroom."

    The colleague's intent in a graduate-level, academic tech writing class (i.e., not a vocational training workshop) is not just to teach students how to type memos, but rather to challenge students to consider how they know what they know as tech writers. This can be achieved while they expand their knowledge of their field, which exists right in the oily hinge, right in the fishy craw of the intersection of higher education and the corporation. Given the mess such a collision must be, he and I agree, some form of institutional critique is vital, and this sort of three-dimensional, reflexive analysis can, over time, only make students better tech writers. To know your context is to know your work.

    Like many of his grad students, the complainant is his age, and already works as a tech writer. For much more than his salary.
Oh, give me a break. The "ends" of which academic types, particularly in soft sciences, of technical writing is to deliver correct and useful information to people who need it. Take it from a technical writer. Any time spent on institutional critique and three-dimensional, reflexive analysis is a waste of time unless you want to become a professor of technical writing somewhere since the whole expertise on Dickens' view of male/female relationships isn't working out.

You want to teach a technical writer something, teach him or her how to suss out information from the misanthropes on the development team, how to actually freaking open the software or somewhat understand the thing they're writing about, and how to make a good business case that documentation isn't a waste of time and saves money on help desk calls and whatnot. But teaching them how to approach their jobs as though they're academics ain't it.

Nor is teaching them that swearing is professional in any way shape or form. The tech industry already skews to younger people who have already developed the habit of f-bombing everything in sight to show their intensity and passion instead of, I don't know, showing quiet competence. I hate to see that taught in the universities as good institutional technique.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:12 AM   2 comments
Friday, December 05, 2008
 
The Undead Rise Again
A good tax proposal doesn't stay defeated for long:
    The tax would finance an $80 million system which would allow members of police, fire and other emergency service agencies to talk to each other. The tax would raise about $15 million a year, Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis County Municipal League, estimated today. Currently, the county has a patchwork of radio systems using different frequencies. Often personnel from different agencies at an emergency site cannot talk to each other by radio.

    On Nov. 4, voters defeated a 1.85-cent county use tax that included money for the radio system. The communications commission made its request for the 0.1-cent sales tax on Nov. 21. The county's Blue Ribbon Commission on facilities needs discussed it this morning.
The shamble of bureaucracies is only slowed by the will of the people.


- posted by Brian J. @ 1:59 PM   0 comments
Thursday, December 04, 2008
 
Things That Make Me Wish I Were Half As Crackpot As I Sound
Commentary in the Washington Times entitled "Nostradamus Redux":
    Mr. Celente's accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the 2007 subprime mortgage scandal that he said would soon engulf the world at a time when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a macroeconomist and expert on the Great Depression, told us, "the worst is behind us." In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it "The Panic of 2008."

    "Worse than the Great Depression," Mr. Celente opined. Beginning with a sharp drop in standards of living, and continuing with an angry urban underclass that threatens a social order that allowed the mega-rich to continue living behind gated communities with summer escapades to luxurious homes on the French and Italian Rivieras or to bigger and better and more expensive boats from year to year.

    This time, Mr. Celente's Trends Research Institute, which the Los Angeles Times described as the Standard & Poor's of pop culture, can see a tax rebellion in America by 2012, food riots, squatter rebellions, job marches and a culture that puts a higher premium on food on the table than gifts under the Christmas tree.
I really ought to stop talking about loading up on guns and liquor and start doing it.


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:49 PM   1 comments
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
 
Book Report: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life by Dave Stern (2003)
This is a novelization of a sequel to a movie based on a video game. The only way it could be more geeky were if there was a comic book in its lineage somewhere (yes, I know the game series has a comic book based on it, but that's not directly in this book's pedigree, so it doesn't count).

The book follows the movie, wherein Lara Croft seeks vengeance on the murderers of a couple of childhood friends and to prevent a scientist who's into selling bio-weapons from acquiring Pandora's Box and all that it holds. It's a pretty quick bit of reading and really did make me want to watch the film, its predecessor, and a raft of other titles from King Solomon's Mines/Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile, Firewalker, and the host of other Indiana Jones knockoffs.

Unfortunately, though, the book does do some in-filling of character development, and it might overdevelop a character and make him to sympathetic for his ultimate fate. Much of that doesn't serve the actual story well as it makes the end a bit shocking.

But a nice bit of filler between the heady novels in my queue.

Books mentioned in this review:


- posted by Brian J. @ 5:47 PM   0 comments
 
The President of the Government of Grown-Ups in Exile
Speaks on the economy:



(Link seen on Hot Air.)


- posted by Brian J. @ 9:51 AM   0 comments
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."