What is this about? I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried! Why in the WORLD should they apologize? If anything, CHINA should be apologizing to the athletes for forcing them to breathe such crap air!

Four US Olympic cyclists who caused an outcry when they arrived at Beijing airport wearing smog masks have today apologised to Games organisers.

The four - Mike Friedman, Bobby Lee, Sarah Hammer and Jennie Reed - said that they were wearing the masks because of pollution fears, a touchy subject for the Chinese authorities.

I was looking at Britain's government website today that they setup for their citizens to create petitions. I wonder do they take the petitions seriously or do they do it to keep the public at bay? Then I started wondering about other petition sites, the general everyday types. Does ANYONE take those petitions seriously? At least with paper and pen petitions you knew you were getting individual people. With epetitions, you don't know what you're getting.

Summer 2010 Special Issue
dot mil: Rhetoric, Technology, and the Military
Guest Editors: Mike Edwards and Alexis Hart

Call for Papers
Service-learning in the Composition Classroom

I thought some of you would be interested in this story about file sharing of PDFs of textbooks. I found the story on FARK, and while I know the comment thread is long, it's worth reading; it's remarkable, some of the ingenious scams these students and former students have concocted to save money on books. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: it's time to make textbooks affordable.

From the Chronicle -- an interesting power play for control over intellectual property:

In what appears to be a new policy, the American Psychological Association will require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories — and it will charge them $2,500 to do so.

This from HigherEd.com:

Blackboard, the dominant player in course management software, has the ability to inspire devotion and, for the more fervid open-source adherents, not a little contempt. So today’s announcement may cause a stir among those more apt to liken Blackboard to the devil than a gentle giant: The company is partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai, one of the primary open-source alternatives.

The whole story

Lee Drutman has a good review in the July 5 LA Times of a book with a really long title. In fact, since I am on the internets so often doing the google and other stuff, this title is actually longer than my attention span enables me to read.

Just in case Matt Barton is too shy to mention it himself, his recent book Dungeons and Desktops has been slashdotted.