Counting Swans

A juicy argument has emerged among the cast and crew of Black Swan over who did most of the dancing that we see from the protagonist on screen: Natalie Portman, or her dancing double Sarah Lane.

According to Contra Costa Times, director Darren Aronofsky has counted.

He declares Portman the clear victor. The article in question borrows the following Aronofsky quote from Entertainment Weekly: "I had my editor count [...] There are 139 dance shots in the film. One hundred eleven are Natalie untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math, that's 80 percent Natalie Portman."

Sarah Lane, meanwhile, has maintained that "95%" of the time you think you see Portman dancing on screen, it's really Lane.

Those appear to be very different numbers.

So one of them must be lying, right?

Mmmm, not necessarily.

If I had to guess, I'd say both numbers are accurate. I know that seems strange, but if you pay close attention, you'll notice they're counting different things: Aronofsky is counting shots, but Lane is counting total screen time.

If you've watched much film, you will have noticed that shots -- the length of time the film goes before there's a cut -- vary a bit in length. You might get a long take of 1 minute, as a camera bounces back and forth between two actors, or as it lingers on a dancer's movements, followed by a 1-second shot of a facial expression.

If it's true, as Aronofsky himself has stated, that digital images of Portman's face were dubbed over Lane's performance for "two complicated longer dance sequences," then it's entirely possible that Lane is the dancer for 95% of the on-screen dancing time, while Portman is the dancer is the vast majority of shots.

I'm not saying that's in fact what happened -- merely pointing out that the two apparently-contradictory statements aren't necessarily in conflict with each other. It's possible for both to be true.

Scholars call this behavior -- making Portman look like she did no dancing by focusing on screen time, or like she did lots of dancing by focusing on shots -- framing. Depending on how you frame information, you can change the way your audience perceives it.

One great example I like to use is from the California gubernatorial debates between Schwarzenegger and Angelides. The challenger, Angelides, argues that Schwarzenegger has raised tuition at UCs and Cal States so much that a four-year education now costs thousands of dollars more. The Governator replies that he only increased tuition by less than something like 10% a year, on average. Anyone doing the math would find that they were both right -- it's just that one of them used scary dollar figure totals, while the other one used an average yearly percentage.

I'm used to seeing these framing and reframing moves in politics, but it's quite refreshing to see them among artists who once worked together. Fascinating, even.

Oh, Those Little Trivial Details

Faculty often have a lot of rules they expect students to follow.

Most students look at the long lists and figure, "Rather than read this, I'll use my common sense, and hope for the best."

This is understandable. However, there were reasons for the rules.

A colleague, Jenn, also a teacher, recently had an experience that illustrates this perfectly.

I'll warn you that this is a dizzying (if amusing) story -- pay attention.

In the last week before final exams for one of her classes, a student (whom we'll call Courtney) told Jenn that she didn't think she could make the final exam -- Courtney was pretty sure it was scheduled at the same time as one of her other finals. This shouldn't happen, unless a student has enrolled in two classes that meet at the same time, so Jenn was puzzled. Jenn asked Courtney to doublecheck and to email her the specifics.

Later, Jenn got an email from Courtney, who was using a personal (off-campus) email account, apparently restating that Courtney had a schedule conflict for the final exam. Courtney asked if she could take an Incomplete in the class.

Jenn said it would depend on the reasons for the absence, and asked what the other class was. After the final exam had taken place, and Courtney had missed it, Courtney emailed again, providing Jenn the name of another professor (let's call him Smith) and another class. Sure enough, Smith's class had been scheduled at the same time as Jenn's class -- not just for the final, but for regular class sessions as well.

Had Courtney, like Hermione Granger, somehow been attending two classes at once? Jenn emailed Dr. Smith, who confirmed an interesting fact: Courtney had missed four of his classes, while she had only attended four of Jenn's classes. That seemed to settle it: Courtney appeared to have been concurrently enrolled in two classes at the same time, without permission. Jenn talked to the department chair (let's call him Dr. Jones), who said to stop looking into the matter and simply fail the student. Jenn, following Jones's instructions, emailed Courtney to say she had talked to Dr. Smith, and based on what he'd said, that Courtney couldn't make up the final or have an Incomplete.

Courtney showed up at the department, demanding to speak to "the department chair," saying Jenn had unfairly denied her a chance to make up her work, without giving her a chance. Departments are used to this sort of thing, so they nearly blew it off. However, Courtney thought the department chair was named "Smith," and when she was told that Smith wasn't the department chair, she asked who the heck he was -- an odd question for someone enrolled in his class.

Something was amiss. (Are you with me so far? I know: It's dizzying.)

Here's why it's dizzying: Jenn and the department secretary started looking through files to try to figure out exactly what classes Courtney was in. They discovered there were two Courtneys -- Jenn had been talking to two different girls, each one in a different class. Both Courtneys were using personal email accounts, and signing only with their first names. Both were saying they couldn't make the final exam (though they were talking about different finals). Both spelled their first names exactly the same.

One Courtney had, after talking to Jenn, figured out she was wrong about the schedule conflict, and without saying another word, had shown up and taken her exam with Jenn (in a class that Jenn didn't think they were talking about). The other Courtney had then started emailing Jenn about a different schedule conflict, having nothing to do with Smith's class. Eventually, that Courtney missed her final exam, for reasons we still don't know anything about.

Jenn had no reason to imagine these were two different students taking turns making very similar requests. The freaky coincidences -- including the bizarre fact that one Courtney had missed four of Smith's classes while attending four of Jenn's -- simply hammered in the impression that the two women were one person.

So, what's this have to do with nit-picky faculty rules?

Well, we frequently insist that students email us from their campus email accounts (not personal accounts), that students put their full names (not just first names) on any communication meant for the professor, and that students indicate which class they're enrolled in. Both Courtneys ignored these customs, figuring they were the only Courtney, that Jenn was only teaching one course (the course for that particular Courtney), and that it didn't really matter which email account was being used. But if either one of them had done any of these things, there would have been no confusion.

So how common is this kind of event?

To be frank, this particular story is unique.

However, incidents like it are common: students often use off-campus email accounts and fail to sign with their full names, leading to confusion and bewilderment.

Some, shockingly, sign with no name at all, like so:

From: SexxxyHottPrincess6969@hotmail.com
To: Dr.James@university.edu
Subj: im so confussed

what r we suppose to do for this assignment im cnfused thx

That leaves us wondering who SexxxyHottPrincess6969 is, what class she's in, what assignment she's talking about, and (let's be honest) whether she should really be in college.

So when we say we need these kinds of details, we have reasons, even if they aren't quite as extreme as Jenn's. And every once in a while, other things -- not the same as Jenn's, but just as weird and preventable -- happen that drive the point home.

Why Rebecca Black's "Friday" Is Better than You Think

The past week or so has produced two universal conclusions:

• Now is not a good time for that trip to coastal Japan you've been planning.
  
• The Rebecca Black song, "Friday," isn't very good.
  

That said, it's not the "worst song ever."

In fact, you can pretty much count on it that any song ever nominated or selected for title of "Worst Song Ever" ... isn't. If tomorrow, another song comes out, everyone watches it, and everyone agrees "it's even worse than 'Friday,'" that song will also not be the worst song ever.

To draw this kind of hatred, a song has to be at least a little good.

Think about it this way: You don't spend a lot of energy telling people how much you hate things that no one likes. You reserve your energy for the stuff that you think people might like, but shouldn't. You don't go on and on about how you hate the taste of feces. You don't even bother with it. But lots of people will rail about mayonnaise. Similarly, I like to beat up on movies like Armageddon -- movies that could have been brilliant, should have been better, and even have cool little moments in them. (Despite myself, I still get misty eyed at the end of Armageddon, when Liv Tyler gets saluted.) Because they're almost good, I find their weaknesses and flaws all the more painful, and I'm acutely aware other viewers will like the movies. Maybe they didn't notice the flaws? Or they didn't care? I'll fix that!

The same thing happens with any other kind of argument. As I've noted before, no one spends a lot of energy explaining why murder is wrong. They don't expect any opposition. Instead, they argue about things like abortion or the death penalty or torture -- subjects that are guaranteed to trigger divided opinions.

We don't hate the really bad stuff. We're apathetic about it.

What we really hate is the almost good.

That's what's happening with "Friday." Those of us who dislike the song nevertheless see the potential for a runaway pop hit (however slim) and feel the need to weigh in. Sure, the lyrics are bad, but the idea to create an age-appropriate pop song about spending time with friends has some real marketability. And the tune is kind of catchy, even if we don't want to catch it. Plenty of one-hit wonders have that characteristic. Ms. Black may be young and her talent may not be fully developed, and the auto-tuning may be annoying, but we've seen auto-tuned talent at her level succeed before -- she's not bad enough to guarantee failure. If all of this stuff were truly, truly terrible, we wouldn't bother to watch, comment, or think about it. We discuss it because we can imagine someone liking it. (As, in fact, some people have admitted to.) We imagine that five years from now, we'll be in an elevator, listening to a muzak version of "Friday." That's why there are so many comments about it.

And, ironically, if her critics continue, they'll almost guarantee that result -- something that Ms. Black seems to understand better than her haters. Indeed, I think this event could spark a whole career for Ms. Black, not necessarily in music, but in public relations. She has handled the unexpected hate brilliantly. People in business and public relations courses will be using her experience as a case study in five years, regardless of what happens with her song. She'll be the new Odwalla.

Blue's Clues and High-Definition Writing

My two-year-old son is a huge fan of the children's show Blue's Clues, though he doesn't fully understand it yet. Watching the show recently with him, I came up with a way to illustrate a point I often try to make with students about what good writing does, and I thought I'd share it here.

Let me start with a claim that will seem strange to anyone who knows Blue's Clues.

CLAIM: Blue's Clues always has more than three clues, in every episode.

If you've ever seen the show, you'll probably recall that Blue leaves her paw prints on the clues, but you may be wondering if I can count, since she always leaves three paw prints. One of the catchphrases of the show is, in fact, "We've found all three clues!"

Now, I could just leave you with my thesis statement: The show always gives more than three clues. But by itself, that's pretty cryptic. You might reject it outright, since you don't know why I said it.

So now I have to defend it. Let's consider an example. In one episode, Joe and friends are putting together an "alphabet train" -- a series of boxes, each labeled with a letter of the alphabet and containing an object that starts with the appropriate letter. Joe asks Blue what should go in the "Z" box, and Blue leaves three paw-print clues to tell him what she thinks should go in the box (a stuffed-animal zebra). By the time you or your child is sitting in the "thinking chair" and trying figure out the puzzle, you have the following clues:

1. You know it goes in a box.
2. You know it starts with the letter Z.
3. You know it involves the color white.
4. You know it involves the color black.
5. You know that every time the clues are shown, Blue's Clues plays a snippet of African drum music that's unique to this episode.

That's more than three clues. Only three came with paw prints, but the others are still clues. The show regularly (and cleverly) tucks additional clues into its program. Sometimes there are musical clues, like the one above, or there are pictures hanging on the wall in the background related to the puzzle's answer. But there's always more than three clues for the viewer to think about.

What's this have to do with writing?

Well, from time to time, students will complain to me about writing or reading assignments, saying that we college folk seem to like stuff that's really long-winded. Last term, a student asked me, point-blank, "Why not just come right out and say what you mean? I don't think it's necessary to go on and on about it."

But if I'd done that with my observation about Blue's Clues, you might have rejected my point entirely -- it's a strange point, and without an explanation looks like it must be wrong. To make my point clear -- or even remotely acceptable -- I had to explain what I meant. I had to give an example.

Now, if I'd said, "Blue's Clues has three clues," I wouldn't have needed to explain much. It's a fairly obvious point and not immediately controversial. What's to explain? It can be stated in a single sentence and left at that.

The same dynamics apply to thesis statements in student papers or assigned readings.

If your thesis is familiar and noncontroversial ("Murder is wrong!"), writing three pages on it probably feels strange. It should.

On the other hand, if your thesis is controversial or surprising ("Computer hackers are worse than murderers, and should be executed"), you need to do more than just "get to the point." The point isn't enough. You need to give reasons. (The computer hacker example is real, though Landsburg is playing Devil's advocate a bit, and having fun. Click the previous link to read his argument.)

Which brings us to two of the most significant problems in student argumentation:

1. Some students write three pages about why murder is bad, and thus say way too much on something that didn't really need it.
2. Others say we should execute computer hackers (or something similarly surprising), and don't explain sufficiently why they hold such a strange position.

The best writers, conversely, stake out a thesis that requires defense and then engage in what I like to call high-definition writing.

To understand what I mean by "high-definition writing," imagine watching Avatar in high-definition 3D, and compare that experience to watching the same movie on a small black-and-white television with poor reception.

They both have the same plot. They're the same movie.

Would you get the same value out of each of them?

No, of course not. As a skilled film viewer, you'd probably prefer the high-definition experience. It enables you to immerse yourself in James Cameron's vision much better. The tiny, fuzzy, black-and-white image has too much distortion -- sure, you can follow the plot okay, but you're probably going to be distracted by all the technical issues.

That scenario is very similar to two essays about executing computer hackers: a low-definition one that makes its point, but leaves the reasons murky or muddles them with distracting errors; and a high-definition essay that states reasons clearly, provides examples, anticipates objections, and is edited closely enough that we're not distracted by errors. Both papers say we should execute hackers, but one of them is far more likely to persuade us that the writer isn't ... well, insane.

High-definition writing enables us to immerse ourselves in the author's strange, personal world without being distracted by technical issues. We emerge at the end of the experience having seen the world differently, having seen the world through another person's eyes. We can go to our friend and represent your point of view accurately, even if you're not there to speak up for yourself.

In short, while Blue's Clues highlights three clues for its viewers, I prefer to emphasize just two clues for student writers:

1. Practice coming up with points of view that require defense.
2. Practice defending them, perhaps by getting into friendly "Devil's Advocate" arguments with friends.
   

Of course, just like Blue's Clues, I might have embedded a few other hidden clues along the way.

The Value of Duh

A recent article on Foxnews.com is titled "Duh! The Most Obvious Scientific Findings of 2010."

Although writer Jeanna Bryner makes some unexpected moves in the article that I find refreshing, acknowledging that some of the "duh" studies she describes might actually have some value, the tone of the headline disturbs me, in part because it echoes a message I've been hearing a lot lately in radio commentaries, editorials, and student papers.

The gist of the message is, "Those silly scientists! They could have just asked me, and I would have saved them a lot of time and money!"

The people sending these messages are often missing the message themselves.

Let's set aside, for the time being, the very real possibility that the journalists are only focusing on the headlines and are missing critical, important, helpful details in the deeper parts of the studies they're discussing. That's often the case, but even if it weren't, the commentators are missing the point.

The point is this: There is value to "duh" studies.

Look at it this way: Every time someone releases a study that surprises us by coming up with an unexpected finding, we pay respect because they've taught us something new.

But the only way they could arrive at an unexpected conclusion is to test the "obvious" stuff we think is right. Scientists learn not to trust instincts. What we think is right is often wrong. So they test everything.

When researchers come up with something surprising, we are illuminated.

• We discover that all objects fall at the same speed, no matter what their weight is, even though many people (even today) would never predict that.
  
• We discover that time passes differently for satellites than it does for people on the ground -- you'd think, if you go with "obvious" instincts, that a minute is a minute is a minute. But no, the satellite's minute isn't the same as yours -- we actually have to make regular adjustments to satellite clocks or else your GPS and cell phones will stop working.

But any search for the unexpected is by its very nature unpredictable: You don't know where the unexpected stuff is going to be. So you're going to hit some dead-ends, and end up verifying some couch potato's half-drunk observations. It's inevitable. And then he'll laugh at you -- as he reads about your work on the Internet, even though the Internet would never work at all if we only relied on our instincts about what is obvious.

Fine, you say. But why report the findings, if they turn out to be obvious?

That's a good question, and, as it happens, there are two good answers:

1. It's useful to researchers to know when the obvious stuff is right. As I noted before, scientists (and other sorts of researchers) learn after a while that gut instincts and "obvious" conclusions can be wrong. So it's reassuring every once in a while to learn, "Oh that assumption I've been making all these years is correct. It means the 30 articles I've written over my career are still possibly valid!"

2. Huge misunderstandings can develop when people don't report results.

Let's say 1,000 scientific studies have determined that, surprise, broccoli is good for you. They don't bother to publish the findings because, well, everyone knew that. Then scientist 1,001 comes along, and simply because incorrect results pop up randomly from time to time, he ends up with numbers that say eating broccoli is worse for your health than eating rocket fuel. Wow. He's wrong, but he doesn't know that. He reports it. Now the only study published on the health effects of broccoli says it's worse than eating rocket fuel. If the other 1,000 scientists had published their work, it'd be easy to take that weird finding with a grain of salt. But as far as the world knows, the only study done on the effects of broccoli shows it'll kill you stone dead.

This principle cuts both ways: It's important to report results, no matter how expected or unexpected they are.

Economist Steven Landsburg (the first freakonomist, before Freakonomics was ever written) wrote a column in Slate a while back in which he talked about minimum wage studies. Years ago, economists had decided that minimum wage increases must kill lots of jobs. It seemed obvious: There would be less money to go around -- you can hire 100 people for $1 each or 10 people for $10 each. And, in apparent support of that obvious conclusion, studies were sometimes published showing that increasing minimum wage reduced the number of jobs on the market.

But it turns out the impacts of minimum wage increases aren't so severe or obvious. Later, statistical analysis showed something suspicious about those previous studies: The findings didn't get stronger when sample sizes increased. If the pattern were real, they should. Economists eventually concluded that lots of their colleagues had been doing studies on minimum wage impacts, but throwing out the results when they didn't match expectations. Self-censorship led to confusion for a whole field.

Similarly, although there are very good reasons to think that alarms over climate change are legitimate and deserve attention, skeptics frequently argue that dissenting opinions frequently get squelched in official channels. If so -- if only articles that report on expected findings are getting published -- that's as bad as publishing only the unexpected would be. (The famous article by Naomi Oreskes, in which her analysis showed no disagreement with the established consensus on global warming in more than 900 scientific abstracts, may be a bad sign, viewed in this light.)

I'm not saying that the majority is wrong in the latter two cases, or that there's no such thing as a waste of grant money. Without doubt, there are studies that didn't deserve a penny. But they should be judged by their methodologies, not their conclusions.

In our age of rapidly disseminated information and promiscuous skimming of headlines, we need safe-text practices to keep us clean of memetic diseases. A good start is to be wary of any commentator who snorts with derision at a study simply because its conclusions are expected or unexpected.

Misplaced Modifiers

Most grammatical errors are distracting, frustrating, or confusing.

Not so the misplaced or dangling modifier. Usually, they're funny. Particularly to English teachers. They crack us up because the sentences almost always make sense -- but they make the wrong sense. They say something the author never intended. (What's a misplaced or dangling modifier? It's a phrase or word that the author has put in the wrong spot, so that it applies to the wrong thing. An example from Groucho Marx, who also liked them because they're funny: I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I'll never know. The phrase in my pajamas is the modifier, and it's been misplaced, so it sounds like the elephant, rather than Groucho, is wearing them.)

I collect misplaced modifiers. Because the press is so good at them (it's the journalists' most common grammatical goof), and I'm also a news junkie, my collection is large.

The first modifier I put into my collection was this one from a news story about a fire: "Suspected to have been started by an arsonist, the fire investigation team made up of the California Department of Forestry, the USDA Forest Service and Rancho Cucamonga Fire continue their search for the person (s) responsible."

Wow: The fire investigation team was started by an arsonist. That goes into the "it takes one to know one" file, I suppose.

I added a new one today.

Here it is, from a headline in the Southwest Riverside News Network:

State fines Murrieta hospital after failing to follow proper surgical procedures, policies

What a gem!

The state failed to follow proper procedures? Really? It's pretty petty to take it out on some hospital, if you ask me. Shame on the state. Leave the poor hospital alone.

I may start posting my collection here as it develops. These are sometimes too funny to keep to myself.

That's What I'm Saying

It's been ages since my last blog post.

Sad to say, what's bringing me back--despite my busy writing schedule--is a need to vent. I have these little rants that I keep putting on back-burners, and now something has to hit the page or I'll explode rather messily.

The straw that broke my back-burner's back is tech support. Not terribly surprising, if you've dealt with tech support. I'm not anti-tech support. I know tech-support people. I like the competent ones. We'll call them gnomes. I like the gnomes. But those offices are also cages for people who have a lot of undeserved ego and no listening skills, and for some reason, the rest of us have to deal with them more often than we get to deal with the competent folks. Call them goblins. I hate goblins.

This post is not about the blessed, beloved gnomes who make the world work better. It's about the other guys. The goblins.

Here's the triggering event:

I wrote to the tech support guys who manage the Blackboard systems for a campus where I'm teaching, asking them to combine several of my classes into one single Blackboard page.

This was a reasonable request, one they've granted every term since, oh, about 2005. The Blackboard sites I want combined are all for different sections of exactly the same course, all using the same readings, the same syllabus; all doing the same assignments.

I want to do this because it's good time-management. Having to bounce around making redundant updates to multiple sites is very inefficient and takes time away from grading, mentoring, writing letters of recommendation, and other things that I consider to be part of my job. I like being efficient.

This year, however, I encountered goblin resistance. I was warned that if I do this, the roll sheets on Blackboard will be blended, and I (gasp) won't be able to tell which student is in which class.

Well, yeah. Like I said (and like I told them in my request), I've been doing this for a long time. I know that the Blackboard roll sheets end up blended. But I don't use Blackboard for roll sheets.

I told them their problem was no biggie: "I use the roll sheets on iGrade, so I'll be cool. Please combine the sites, etc."

Besides, I added, Blackboard's roll sheets have never been that accurate anyway.

Whoops

Okay, so that last comment, in hindsight, was a mistake. Never criticize a goblin. He'll throw dung at you.

Needless to say, my comment provoked an entirely different, additional conversation, also with tech support, so now I'm in two frustrating discussions with prickly people who resist everything I'm saying.

"Blackboard's roll sheets are identical to iGrade, because they're drawn from the same source," one writes to me (I'm paraphrasing).

Sigh.

Here's the thing about goblins: They look at the contraption but not at what it produces. They judge it by its purpose, not by its effects. It's a mindset: The documentation says it does this. I set it up to do this. Ergo, it does this.

No, it doesn't. Check the results. It's a critical step in designing anything. You design the car. You say it'll drive. You designed it to drive. At some point, get in the freaking thing, turn the ignition, and try to drive it. Not just up and down the driveway. Take it on the freeway. In traffic. Please. It's what a gnome would do.

It's clear, abundantly clear, that the folks at Blackboard and the campus computing people never drive their stuff. They're overrun by goblins.

After ripping from my scalp some hair (which was graying anyway), I replied: "No, they're not the same. Blackboard is good at adding students from the same dataset as iGrade. But when students drop the class, Blackboard doesn't remove them. If you go off of Blackboard, you think students are still enrolled in your class when really they aren't. You have to check iGrade or the originating dataset to find out who dropped. Every term, I have to go into Blackboard and clear out the students who have dropped."

The goblin reply, in a nutshell, said: "You're wrong. They are in sync. The only reason they wouldn't be is that you are adding students on Blackboard, but not on the official rosters, so if they're out of sync, it's because you made them that way. If they were really out of sync, that'd be a big deal, and we'd need to know about it."

More hair loss ensues.

There are several things about that response that are truly frustrating.

1. I never, ever said I added students, but goblins can't read. I had said that the two systems end up naturally out of sync, without any interference on my part. My interference brings them back into sync.

2. More importantly, never say "you're wrong" and "if you're right, I would need to know about it" in the same message.

Really.

I just told you about it, and you didn't listen.

If you're a goblin, it's a fair assumption that this happens a lot to you: People tell you things you really need to hear, and you tell them they're doing stuff wrong, instead of listening.

If things are really going wrong, the goblin tells himself, someone will let me know.

Great idea, gobby.

Want to know what it will sound like? Hit REWIND.

Tech support goblins have been drawing my wrath for a while now--in general, not just at one particular office.

On some other campuses, the tech goblins are security "conscious" to such an insane degree that the campuses are no longer actually secure. Again, the gobbers have a system with a stated purpose, and they assume it does what they designed it to do. Tell them that it doesn't, and you get lip.

To truly appreciate the insanity, you need to know three facts:

1. Increasingly, computer security protocols on many campuses require that all college employees change their passwords every six months. We're also told we can't recycle passwords we've used in the previous six semesters. Moreover, the passwords have to be these complex monstrosities with capital letters, lower-case letters, numbers, special characters, two hieroglyphics, and a telepathic Vulcan signal, with a minimum character length of here-to-the-moon. Basically, they want you to come up with a random string of unguessable noise every six months. If you're a normal software firm with mostly full-time employees, this makes sense. Those protocols would, in fact, make things more secure. Much more.

But we haven't factored in everything yet...

2. The primary security concern is student data/student privacy. We don't want Johnny's grades posted on Facebook somewhere.

So far, everything still looks good. Til we hit item #3.

3. A great chunk of university and college instruction is now carried out by part-time, non-tenured instructors who are given just enough classes to cover the teaching, but not quite enough (each) to qualify for benefits. As a result, the vast majority of students are taught by people who are teaching on multiple campuses.

Put these together.

Dr. Smith teaches on three different campuses, two classes each. For each campus, there are entirely different, constantly changing security protocols, such that he cannot use the same password on each campus.

So, Dr. Smith needs to come up with different passwords for each, change them regularly, and come up with passwords complicated enough he can't possibly memorize them.

So what do Dr. Smith--and the thousands of others like him--end up doing?

They write down the passwords.

I've seen them scribbled on post-it notes attached to the monitors on their desktops. That's the worst of the coping strategies.

Others put them into little black notebooks that they carry with them as they shuffle from campus to campus, carrying armloads of other books and papers, occasionally, uh, dropping things.

Either that, or they create a Web page with all of their passwords on it, so they can look them up easily, because they can't possibly remember them all.

Or they store them on portable devices like cell phones that can be read from 30 feet away by a 15-year-old kid with tips from a warez site and some cheap tech from Radio Shack.

Listen up, goblins.

I realize you think you've made information on campus safer. I hear you say it in speeches and emailed announcements. And clearly, that's what your documentation and memos say has happened. That was the purpose of your protocols.

But that wasn't the effect of the protocols. At some point, someone will tell you this.

I know I have.

But when that happens, you'll say they're doing things wrong. That's what you told me.

And then you'll wait around, imagining that if something urgent pops up, someone will let you know.