On Microsoft's grammar checker

From "Microsoft Word Grammar Checker Are No Good, Scholar Conclude," in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

If you've ever used Microsoft Word, chances are you've seen that jagged green line appear beneath something you've written--scolding you for drafting a fragmented sentence, maybe, or for slipping into the passive voice. That's Microsoft's grammar-checking technology at work.

But how much good does the grammar checker actually do? Precious little, according to Sandeep Krishnamurthy, an associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington. After experimenting with the tool, Mr. Krishnamurthy concluded that it cannot identify many basic grammatical faux pas--like errors in capitalization, punctuation, and verb tense.

Now he has dedicated himself to chronicling the grammar checker's blind spots, and to persuading Microsoft to improve the tool.

On his Web site (http://faculty.washington.edu/sandeep/check), Mr. Krishnamurthy has posted evidence that he considers damning: a series of examples of poor grammar the software considers passable. One reads: "Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying? It is no wondering that advertisings are bad for company in America, Chicago and Germany."

Microsoft officials did not respond to calls for comment. . . .

Editor's note: The headline on this article cleared Microsoft's grammar checker.

You can read the entire article by clicking here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

By the way, you can easily be rid of jagged red and green lines: go to Tools, Options, and Spelling & Grammar to turn off the automatic (and annoying) spelling and grammar checkers. Then just hit F7 when you want to check spelling.

Chess, life, and right answers

The games drew about 15 chess enthusiasts to a windowless conference room at City College in Harlem, where pawns and rooks were moved with such intensity of purpose that the scene could have passed for yet another high-stakes tournament.

The grandmaster and bona fide chess luminary Maurice Ashley was there, calling out commentary as he often does when championship matches are broadcast around the world. He is known to use lines like, "Pawns are attacking mercilessly!" and "The bishop is slicing and dicing!"

But what Mr. Ashley had to say about chess on this night was more academic. Literally. "A lot of times in education we try to teach kids the one right answer and that leads, in my opinion, to robotic thinking," he told the players, encouraging them to think of multiple possible moves before choosing the best play. "Real life isn't like that. Is there ever one right answer? Generating alternatives for the sake of alternatives is a good thing."

From an article in the New York Times on "Introduction to Logical Thinking Through Chess," a course for NYC teachers. You can read the article by clicking here.

[To read articles in the Times, use mediajunkie as your name and password.]

3009 Q & A

3009 students: What's the most valuable thing you learned from reading The Grapes of Wrath?

To respond, click on the comments link below, and then click on Post a Comment. For your identity, choose Other. You can add your name or leave it blank if you prefer.

As replies come in, they'll be available to read by clicking on the comments link for this post.

Faulkner bio

From a review of One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini:

"Now I realise for the first time," wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don't know where it came from. I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel."

You can read the review by clicking here.

3009 links

3009 students: Here are the links. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Current conditions for migrant workers

Agricultural Worker Health Initiative
On the health of migrant workers

Health of Migrant Farmworkers in California
A report from the California Research Bureau, available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Illegal Immigration in the California Strawberry Industry
On the crucial role of migrant labor in the strawberry industry

Mexican Migrant Workers and Lynch Culture
On violence against migrant workers

Migrant Labor in the United States
A report from the PBS series Now

Research on migrant labor in Pennsylvania
Available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Research on migrant labor in Wisconsin
Available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Seeds: The Agricultural Worker Health and Housing Program Quarterly
Available for download as a .pdf (requires Adobe Acrobat or another .pdf reader)

Two articles from the New York Times on migrant housing

*

Wages in Chinese factories

China as No. 1
On manufacturing and markets

China: Awakening Giant
From the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Chinese factory workers begin protesting low wages, poor conditions
An article from the Knight Ridder news agency

Factsheet on Chinese factory labor From nosweat.org

How China Gets Our Business
A report from the Boston Consulting Group

Just how cheap is Chinese labour?
From asianlabour.org

Migrant Workers Call the Shots
On the influx of rural men and women seeking manufacturing jobs in China's cities

U.S. Factory Shipped To China
CBS News report on the dismantling of an American factory

Steinbeck's Salinas

From an article by Carolyn Marshall in today's New York Times:

The reputation of this farming community, known as the Salad Bowl of the World, has been burnished by giants of American history like the civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, who organized the area's farmworkers, and John Steinbeck, a native son who borrowed images from the landscape and Depression-era residents in writing "The Grapes of Wrath."

The pride, fear and hope Steinbeck described were in evidence this weekend as residents, celebrities and best-selling authors gathered for a 24-hour emergency read-in to try to avert an unwelcome footnote to Salinas's legacy: the impending closing of the city's three public libraries.

Unless the city can raise $500,000 by June 30, the John Steinbeck, Cesar Chavez and El Gabilan Libraries will be shuttered, victims of the city's $9 million budget shortfall. If the branches are closed, Salinas will become the nation's largest city without a public library.

The read-in, organized by groups including Code Pink and the Salinas Action League, began Saturday afternoon and included a pitched-tent sleepover on the lawn of the Chavez library and readings by authors including Anne Lamott and Maxine Hong Kingston.

You can read the entire article by clicking here.

[To read the New York Times, enter mediajunkie as your name and password.]

Overheard

Someone talking on a cellphone:

No! A relationship is a 50-50 thing, Kevin.

Yet another word from the Greek

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day email:

sophomoric \sahf-MOR-ik\ adjective
*1 : conceited and overconfident of knowledge but poorly informed and immature
2 : of, relating to, or characteristic of a sophomore

Example sentence:
The class presentations were surprisingly thorough and interesting--not at all the sophomoric commentaries I had expected.

Did you know?

Sophomores get a bad rap. A lot of people seem to think they're foolish (no matter what they do), when they know they're pretty wise. The history of the words "sophomore" and "sophomoric," which developed from "sophomore," proves that it has always been tough to be a sophomore. Those words are believed to come from a combination of the Greek terms "sophos" (meaning "wise") and "moros" (meaning "foolish"). But sophomores can take comfort in the fact that some very impressive words, including "philosopher" and "sophisticated," are also related to "sophos."

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Robert Creeley died yesterday in Odessa, Texas.

Sparks Street Echo

Flakes falling
out window make
no place, no place--

no faces, traces,
wastes of whatever
wanted to be--

was here
momently, mother,
was here.

From Selected Poems (1991)

*

Why poetry? Its materials are so constant, simple, elusive, specific. It costs so little and so much. It preoccupies a life, yet can only find one in living. It is a music, a playful construct of feeling, a last word and communion. I love it that these words, "made solely of air," as Williams said, have no owner finally to determine them. The English teacher all that time ago who said, "You must learn to speak correctly," was only wrong in forgetting to say why--for these words which depend upon us for their very existence fail as our usage derides or excludes them. They are no more right or wrong than we are, yet suffer our presumption forever.

From the Preface to Selected Poems (1991)

Joe LeSueur's Digressions

I just learned that the following review (which I wrote in December 2003 and lost sight of) will not be printed in World Literature Today. No room. So here's a new home for it.

Joe LeSueur. Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003. xxvii + 302 pages, ill. $25. ISBN 0-374-13980-6.

"I just met the most terrific person!": That is what Joe LeSueur remembers saying after meeting Frank O'Hara. LeSueur and O'Hara met in 1951; from 1955 to 1965 they shared a series of Manhattan apartments in what LeSueur calls an "ambiguous" relationship as roommates, friends, and occasional lovers. (It was the ambiguity that brought their life together to an end.) With Bill Berkson, LeSueur edited the invaluable assemblage of memoirs and essays Homage to Frank O'Hara (1988). In this book LeSueur (who died in 2001) assembles his memories and speculations concerning 40-odd Frank O'Hara poems.

LeSueur writes in response to poems that prompt memories; while a number of O'Hara's best-known poems are here, others ("Meditations in an Emergency" and "Why I Am Not a Painter," for two) are conspicuously absent. LeSueur does indeed digress, freely, wittily, and generously. He resists at almost every turn the impulse to provide critical commentary on poems: "I am not … so audacious as to delve into the singular depths of this poem" he writes of "Joe's Jacket" (named for his jacket, a seersucker from Brooks Brothers). Instead, he focuses on what Allen Ginsberg in his elegy for Frank O'Hara, "City Midnight Junk Strains," calls "deep gossip." A chapter on "Personal Poem" collects affectionate memories of artist Mike Kanemitsu before turning to less-friendly recollections of Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). A chapter on O'Hara's Jackson Pollock poem, "Digression on Number 1, 1948," turns into an unflattering portrait of Pollock's wife Lee Krasner. At times deep gossip threatens to make O'Hara's poetry peripheral, most dismayingly when LeSueur tries to find a "personal response" to the dense, dazzling "In Memory of My Feelings." He finds that the poem triggers "nothing" and proceeds to recount painter Grace Hartigan's gaucheries. (The poem is dedicated to Hartigan.) Here and elsewhere LeSueur seems to be settling scores, and the relation between commentary and poem becomes reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire (a resemblance LeSueur no doubt consciously makes use of).

A claim that one is unable to "analyze" ("Make of it what you will" is one recurring phrase; "What can I say?" is another) might seem merely a pose--LeSueur did, after all, major in English. But I think that LeSueur's claim is genuine: he is without the luxury of critical distance. And unlike Nabokov's Charles Kinbote, LeSueur shared a world with the poet of whom he writes, making Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara a uniquely valuable adjunct to O'Hara's poems. LeSueur offers countless details of New York at mid-century: the jobs available to a young man with a "worthless" liberal arts degree, the pieces one would hear on classical radio stations, the various subcultures of gay Manhattan. LeSueur offers a fascinating commentary on O'Hara's use of blond and blonde and identifies numerous film references in the poems. His digressions bring relatively neglected poems--"John Button Birthday," for instance--into view. And he recounts events for which there are few if any other surviving witnesses, including the aftermath of the famous "4:19 to East Hampton" train that O'Hara has on his mind in "The Day Lady Died." As the details of Frank O'Hara's world--rotary phones, unfiltered cigarettes, old movies on late-night television--recede further from view, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara honors O'Hara's poems by providing contexts for their further appreciation.