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.