Who Gets the Benefit of Peer Review?

Recently, my wife and I had a discussion about the effectiveness of peer review.

For context, the discussion took place in a chat room for English instructors at BYU-Idaho. Screencapped here:

Says my wife:

I've been thinking about the breakout groups we had during our meeting the other night. As English teachers, we seem to have such a love-hate relationship with peer reviews. Is the purpose really to have the students help each other? Or do they do more damage than good sometimes? I told my breakout group that I cringe when bad advice is given, such as the student who told another student they needed to "put more fluff" in their paper, in order to meet the word count. Ack! For my own students, when they express nervousness over just how well they'll be able to review someone else's paper, I tell them the real reason I like peer reviews is so that the reviewer gets experience by looking at someone else's paper and then thinking about what worked and what didn't, and how that may influence their own writing. I realize different teachers may see the purposes of a peer review differently, but I had this thought: what if everyone was required to offer a review to at least one classmate, but it's a review only the teacher ever sees? Then I can see that they are using their powers of observation to help them grow as a writer, and the student having his paper reviewed can't be damaged by less than helpful comments. Is the result worth the effort, or is this just busy work?

Says me:

Is the result worth the effort, or is this just busy work?

That's a tough question to answer because it's subjective. We all know our students arrive at different writing skill levels. Some really crave the feedback and are open to it, whether they're good writers or not. Some don't care what others have to say, no matter their own skill level -- we see this when we offer our own feedback.

From my perspective, peer reviews are more to the benefit of the person doing the review than the one receiving it. For example, I recently had a friend ask me to read a snippet from a novel she's editing to check if the French being used was accurate. I put on my wobbly French copy editing hat and went to work -- but then realized there's a lot more to the scene than just correct French.

One character was a native French speaker, but a child --- so their French was going to be more French, but also prone to the shortcuts one takes when learning a language. The other character was a native English speaker speaking in French, so their French needed to have a more "translated from English" feel.

But then that got me to thinking -- how long has this second character known French? Maybe she's better at it than I give her credit for. And as for the second character, do I know how a French child would speak?

So. Many. Questions. And questions that I take back to my own fiction writing as I develop my characters. Less flying by the seat of my pants, more planning things out.

Maybe the author I helped in this instance will appreciate my effort. But I learned a bit more about characterization in the peer review than I expected.

To sum up: I think both my wife and I agree that the one who gets the most out of peer review is the one who performs the review, not the one who receives it.

That is of course, subjective (see the above comment on adding fluff to meet the word count).

So to say the benefit goes mostly to the reviewer is problematic. The reviewer has to be advanced enough in his or her writing career to be self-aware enough to recognize when advice given to another writer is advice that could also be applied to himself or herself.

I think I might be at that point.

Not that I'm a genius. I am not. But when I spend time reading others' writing in peer review situations, I look at what I'm telling the author and think, "Yeah, that's something I need to work on as well."

So I need to do more peer reviews. But they're hard to find unless I want to review romances. Ew.

MY GOOD PILLOWS!

We have two couch pillows that have followed us through three houses. The collection has been added to over time, but these two. Perfect for napping.

One is rather flat, but firm. A foundation pillow, ready and willing to work in combination with the other to grant perfect head and neck placement.

That second pillow. Soft as the proverbial downy chick, yet resilient, able to maintain its shape and fluffiness to swaddle the head in a cloud. Cumulo-nimbus.

Over the years, they grew tatty. The flat one's blue faded from bright to grey. The white fluffy one fought valiantly to retain its color, but yellowed as the years passed like a wise man's tooth.

Both pillows were in the trash when we pulled it out to the curb last night. I wept like a child.

Mrs. Judson was right to be upset about the state of her pillows.

Really Good Sci-Fi: Star Trek Lower Decks

WARNING: Trek purists, I've noticed, REALLY hate this show. Probably because it's the only modern Trek that hasn't continued to stuff its bum with tweed. But I digress.

In just a few quick sentences, Ensign Beckett Mariner sums up what I find most appealing about Paramount+'s slightly seasoned (in its second season) Star Trek Lower Decks.

While cleaning up leftovers of senior officers' away missions and cultural explorations, Mariner tells Tendi the following: "Every day isn’t gonna be some pristine exploratory adventure. Sometimes it’s work, and it sucks. Get used to it." While the prime crew of the USS Cerritos muddles through second contact missions and comically being forced to deal with increasingly militant Pakleds, the lower decks crew gets assigned grunt work after grunt work. It's dull. It's boring. And it occasionally involves getting pooped out by strange space creatures.

It's also fun.

And while the wackiness does penetrate to the lower decks, this crew's adventure doesn't always end on some grand philosophical high note; bums are stuffed with crew members quickly expelled, not tweed.

And while I love the TNG era this series pokes fun at, it's fun to see Star Trek enjoying being Star Trek again, rather than everything else in the modern Trek world, being some gritty reboot and supposed moralistic reflection on our own troubled times. We can enjoy Rutherford being unable to stop his bloated barrel body because we can't ever see that happening to us. And it's fun to see writers and actors taking the rater stiff Trek tropes and flipping them on their heads.

That this crew isn't preaching moral superiority at every turn is probably why the Trek geeks don't like it all that much. Fine. More for me.

Really Bad Sci-Fi: Solar Attack and The Europa Report

 Today, I watched this: 

When the movie title is this ‘70s throwbacky – even with the modern font – you know it’s gonna be good.

And wow, it was good.

This film, 2006's "Solar Attack," had everything: Proto-Buck Rogers, a gormless, corn-fed Joe Johnson, blown out of the sky in a purchased Russian spacecraft that did not in any way look like a Salyut capsule by a corona mass ejection that momentarily set a pocket of dangerous greenhouse gas methane on fire.

The ship was purchased and launched by a proto Elon Musk, late of the national space agency, but also a multi-billionaire running his own company or something; I’m not sure if his fortune is ever fully explained and I don’t really care in the slightest.

The Sun fries a Sun-observing satellite, which squeals in pain as it’s cooked. And then cooks a US weather satellite which crashes in Detroit, BLOWING A KID CLEAN OFF AN URBAN PLAYGROUND. (Which was when I knew I was going to like this film.)

Add to this confusion is more CMEs, the Pentagon monitoring Russian submarine activity in the North Atlantic, and the typical forgetting that massively fast CMEs will slow down when the plot requires it. And another CME demolishes a Russian military communication satellite, set to communicate with the Russian subs. A stunning sequence shows two F-16 jets blowing up the satellite before it can smash into downtown Buffalo, which would have been no great loss. Sadly, the Russian satellite doesn’t squeal as it dies, nor utter a cynical “billyat” as it expires. Just a sad little Sputnik beep.

Improbable moments:

1.       The Elon Musk prototype knows a commander on a Russian submarine which has the only nuclear weapons capable of turning the North Pole into a giant fire extinguisher to put out the fires the CMEs are going to cause in the atmosphere.

2.       The Elon Musk prototype does a Jack Ryan to get on the Russian sub, commanded by an old friend. He manages to convince the Soviet Premier to authorize a nuclear strike on Santa Claus.

3.       The ex – or whatever, I assume it’s the ex – works at an observatory in Albany, New York, studying the CMEs and expects that once Musk gets to the submarine and despite the great distances, massive power outages caused by the CMEs and other variables, will be able to make a phone call to her.

4.       He does.

5.       By calling an observatory that’s just been hit by some random space debris.

At least it’s the American sub commander who is being the buckaroo.

This is really a mix of your typical end of the world with a fan drubbing of scenes from Hunt for Red October.

THE SUB COMMANDER BASICALLY DID A CRAZY IVAN BUT STILL THE COMPUTER DISPLAYS IN THE SUB EXPLODED.

Proto Elon Musk is now communicating with the American sub. Apparently they have orders not to destroy submarines with celebrities on board.

YAY! The fires are out! No matter we have to deal with fallout from five nuclear missiles. The blast put the fires out but did NOT scatter the ordinary clouds above the destroyed observatory at Albany. And they’re celebrating in the nuclear-induced snow.

Now they’re all riding off in the presidential limousine, even the Elon Musk sidekick who should, by all rights, be standing there, disheveled, hollering “I want to go with them” as the Red Cross wraps him in a blanket and shuffles him off.

And another: Europa Report from 2013.

I tried to watch the film on its own merits. But I have to confess this: It wanted to be 2001 so bad. And it was not 2001. Nor even 2010, which might not have been as artistic as 2001 but was at least a film that created characters you cared about.

This film did not. It offered a bland palette of astronauts who were, frankly, interchangeable. Even those who were supposed to be Russian, I couldn't really tell them apart from the other astronauts. And they were all young and beautiful. Experts, Bob, experts in their fields, except everything they did ended in disaster. They bragged about going further than the Apollo astronauts. But these folks couldn't astronaut themselves out of a paper bag.

The premise was good -- exploring Europa in the hopes of finding life. And they do. But it was too Lee Gentrified -- the scientific discovery had to come at way too much loss of life. It wasn't good enough to leave us with a film that left us wondering, like 2001, or a film that left us crying and wondering, like 2010. It just had to kill everyone for the sake of cheap thrills.

And I didn't care. Because I couldn't tell one astronaut from another. Only one really got a backstory -- his kid would be six when he got home. And that was it. End of backstory. I guess you could clutter a film with backstory, but too many of it sci-fi predecessors put in way more backstory without cluttering, so it can be done.

L.H. Puttgrass and Facebook Jail

 

Facebook jail again.

This time for quoting Berkeley Breathed's L.H. Puttgrass on a random thread about eliminating the Electoral College.

I'd blame an ahumorous censor, but I'm about 99.9% certain this all comes down to an algorithm. I guess they have to err on the side of caution when anyone uses the word SHOOT.

But still, please.

Also, at first, this was a "warning." When I disagreed with their algorithm/ahumorous android's decision, it became a 24-hour bannination.

Recording it here because if I discuss it on Facebook tomorrow after the bannination is lifted, I'll get it all over again.

All I wanted was to be a pundit for the people.

Urge

First, came this letter.

Pretty simple, straightforward, right?

The key word is "urge."

Some people insist the "urge" is a suggestion, not a commandment. Some have gone as far as to say this isn't from God, but echoes of politicians and medical personnel. So they don't have to obey.

Nevermind that Russell M. Nelson, our current prophet and renowned heart surgeon, got the vaccine as early as they could, along with other church leaders.

Or that time and again, the church has urged members to take care of themselves physically and to get vaccinated, not just for covid but for other serious ailments.

People have latched on to the idea of free agency -- which is fine, it's been mentioned by the church public affairs office -- but in context with not being free of consequences of their choices.

And nevermind the scriptural precedents, either, viz:

So Naaman came with his horses and with his chariot, and stood at the door of the house of Elisha.

10 And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and awash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou shalt be clean.

But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper.

Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean? So he turned and went away in a rage.

And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?

Let's look at the word urge again:

This is more than a suggestion, folks.

On Virginia Hamilton's "The House of Dies Drear"

 Like many of a certain age, I was first introduced to this story by PBS’ “WonderWorks” version of the tale, put out in 1984. A few clips of it are available on YouTube, but they’re of poor quality.

Nevermind that.

This story is excellent and has drawn me back over the years to read and re-read it.

On this, maybe my fifth reading, passages from Chapter Fifteen stuck with me:

“[L]et’s get back to the nice Sunday-morning church folks who never once cared whether my father lived or died. No, you can have them. They’re the reason I left town. Even when I was small, I always hated them for their stupid ways. I guess I hated you folks before I saw you because I figured you would be no better than the rest.”

Mr. Small glanced at Thomas, who stared at Mayhew Skinner with something close to awe. Thomas had never heard anyone talk the way Mayhew talked, at least not in front of his father.

“You shouldn’t hate,” Mr. Small said. “It will destroy you.”

“That’s a well-meaning lie,” said Mayhew. “Folks have hated other folks for centuries, and the same business is still with us.”

That business, of course, is hate itself, in all its forms. And while perhaps its cynical to believe hate will always be with us, I think that’s a realistic point of view. And we can’t change that with platitudes; we have to change it in ourselves. We all know those Sunday-morning folks. Chances are, in some ways and to some people, we *are* those Sunday-morning folks. Maybe learning about them is a good thing, so we can learn about ourselves.

Further:

“We left [the land] finally,” Mayhew said, “but my father wouldn’t leave. I blame him for that. I still blame him for forcing us to leave. He had grown obsessed with the tunnels, with the haunting figure of Dies Drear. He became fanatical about protecting the house and its history and even its legend. I would say he is like you, Mr. Small, in his taste for what he calls our heritage.”

“Indeed,” said Mr. Small softly. “We always tend to belittle that heritage in our zeal to be free.”

“I’ll take freedom any day over all the romantic nonsense about slavery,” said Mayhew.

“I mean not to glorify it,” said Mr. Small. “I simply want people to know about it. It’s a part of our history, and yet no one tells the truth about it.”

Here, two voices on one subject, opposed. Where do we see that today? Where there is zeal and glory, there is also heritage and freedom. All fine on their own, often fine in combination. But any put on too aggressively – even freedom – can lead to ruin.

That’s neither here nor there with Virginia Hamilton’s book, which I love for its description and storytelling.

I may address a few nits:

Some reviewers wonder why Thomas is so suspicious of others. Were they never kids who had to move into a new place and fret that everyone they meet is silently laughing at them behind their backs? I come from a family where the streak of paranoia is wide, so I understand the suspicion.

A few have compared this to a Scooby Doo story. So what? This kind of costume-party trap has been around in literature far longer than Scooby Doo has existed. The ending makes for a much more satisfying tale than if this had turned from a mystery to a police and law procedural, where the Darrows were legally barred from farting around on the Drear property for fear they might find something. This is fiction, and fiction sometimes needs to be a pinch overdramatic. One way to tell the story makes more logical sense. The other way to tell the story makes it a far better story to be told. So pooh-pooh to those particular Whos.

On The Great Pretend Coin Shortage of 2020/21

Walmart, c'mere a minute.

You appear to be the only retail entity in the universe still participating in the Great Pretend Coin Shortage of 2020/21. We shop at a wide variety of stores, both colossal and mom and pop. Everyone else -- and I mean everyone else -- has coins to pass out as change.

If you want people to provide exact change, or shop with their cards, or whatever, just say so. Don't hide behind a pretend, nonexistent crisis to justify a change in policy.

Also, you appear to be taking in a lot of change from your customers. Are you not recirculating that, or are you storing it in some big Scrooge McDuck-like money bin in Arkansas?

I had a long conversation in my head with the clerk about the stupid coin shortage but only managed to sigh out a "that's fine" to her question of "Since you're a loser and don't have change, do you want to round up and donate to Childrens' whatsis so we can add a corporate tax deduction insult to the no-change-back injury?"

What you're accomplished, Walmart, is shifting the blame from corporate policy or some nonexistent national emergency to the customer.

I don't want to yell at the clerks, because they do not set policy, they merely have to apply it. But if I demand change or refuse to round up for a good cause or make any kind of comment on the policy, it is me being rude.

I understand this might be wise corporate policy and that you may have learned something from the world of politics. But that doesn't make it right.

Signed,

An increasingly dissatisfied customer.

Way Too Late at the Movies: YouTube Edition

Since streaming is becoming a bigger thing -- we were Disney+ subscribers for an entire MONTH last year -- YouTube has been ramping up its offering of movies.

And since I'm a cheap bastard, as with the other services I use (IMDB, Amazon Prime, etc) I'm only watching those things that are free (or in Prime's case, what comes free with the subscription we have). That means, of course, I don't get to see a lot of new movies, but I do get to see a lot of movies that I would never pay good money to see, as you'll see in just a moment.

First up, Space Raiders.

I'll confess, it took me a while to get past the, uh, rather female characteristics of the ship. Not that it really matters. Nor does it matter I can't remember what the ship is called. Or the names of any of the characters. Roger Corman made sure this film was completely forgettable.

We're supposed to cheer, I suppose for the crew of roughs that ends up kidnapping a kid from a "company" planet or station or whatever run by a woman in a Clintonesque pantsuit. Because the "company" is bad or something. It just IS; trust the movie. And trust the conglomeration of space aliens and hippies and others who live or whatever on some space station because they're actually the good guys. Or something.

Then there's  Earthquake: Nature Unleashed.

Two things let me know right away it was going to be a winner:

1. Ah, Tibor, how many times have you saved my butt?

2. The film's Wikipedia entry reads as follows: "The people arrives at the Russian Nuclear Power Plant called the Kasursk Nuclear Power Plant. When the most catastrophic earthquake of all time rips through Europe, it levels Russia and sends shockwaves through the lives of Russian people who live there. An earthquake destroys a Russian Nuclear Power Plant and people in Russia need to survive. The cinematics of the film rely on other films scenes to hash out the story. Most notably, scenes of collasping (sic) buildings and highways from 'Dante's Peak'."

This tells the believable tale of an American company brought in to refit a Russian nuclear power plant whose core shield blocks covered maybe 20 square feet and looked as if they were made from DUPLO blocks. There's much more on this Facebook thread I did live as I watched. Can't seem how to figure out how to embed it. So much the pity . . . 

Also, there was 2004's Fat Albert.

I very much enjoyed the cartoon from the 1970s.

The film, well, it's meh.

Typical fish out of water stuff, including a long trip to the mall where lots of comic hijinx and product placement can take place. I guess it's better than bringing them to now when malls are dying and all that shopping occurs in the basement thanks to Amazon and wifi.

And the characters -- popped out of the cartoon to help a real-world girl gain friends -- are worried they're "losing their color" or at least they were at one time. The color changes, to their trademark bold cartoon clothing, is subtle to say the least.

OH NO THEY'VE LOST COLOR SINCE THEY TOOK A PICTURE OF THEMSELVES AT THE MALL AND QUAINTLY PRINTED IT OUT BECAUSE THEY CLEARLY DIDN'T GET A CELL PHONE PROMO FOR THE MOVIE.

Also quaint: They popped out of a CRT to come into this world.

More to come.

We Need MOAR Speilberg Preaching

It’s been a while since I watched Steven Speilberg’s “The Terminal,” so when I came across it on YouTube today, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

I saw it today in maybe the light Speilberg intended. Rather than a simple tale of a man without a country stuck in an airport, this is a tale of a compassionate society forming around a man stuck in an “unacceptable” situation.

That in microcosm comes when the characters played by Stanley Tucci and Tom Hanks confront the Russian man caught in a bureaucratic snafu not of his making. Simply because his plane from Toronto back to Russia had a stopover in the United States, he found himself – and the medicine he needed for his father – trapped in the bureaucracy. Tucci’s character, bound by the rules, wants the medicine confiscated, making this desperate man’s trip to Canada – likely only to buy the medicine his father needs – futile. Hanks’ character finds a loophole and urges the man to take it. Not because it’s his habit of taking loopholes, but because he can see that compassion, not strict adherence to the rules, is what is needed in this situation. Innocent ignorance of the rules should, in many times and cases, call for compassion, not a strict interpretation of the rules, and Viktor Navorsky knows it.

From there, a compassionate society builds, symbolized by Viktor’s photocopied palm, spread throughout the airport. Many people there begin to see Viktor – and each other – through a lens of compassion, of respect, that leads them to behave as humans ought to behave in a world so bound by rules they often rule humanity out of the equation.

Tucci’s character also shines through in this scene – but as a man who uses others as tools for his own advancement and means to an end that he wants. His boss advises him he ought to show more compassion, see the humans in the story that he’s watching, but that’s advice that is not heeded.

I’m sure that message was there all along, but it took a casual viewing years after the fact to notice it.

I know Speilberg gets chastised for being preachy. Maybe we need more preaching.