A Blend of Absurdism and Humanism: Defending Kurt Vonnegut’s Place in the Secondary Setting

This essay argues that Kurt Vonnegut blends a unique humanist stance into his absurdist plots and characters, ultimately urging readers to confront the absurd with a kindness and human decency his protagonists often find rare. As a result of this absurd and humanist synthesis, I defend and promote Vonnegut’s place in the secondary English curriculum, despite his rank on many banned books lists, since his characters’ journeys correlate thematically with the growth and process of postmodern adolescents and encourage moral responsibility without sentimental manipulation. Focusing on Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five as primary sources, specifically for Vonnegut’s view of their success and their more frequent use in the secondary setting, I explore Vonnegut’s unique postmodern style. Using personal and recorded interviews as well as literary scholarship, I attempt to forge a new outlook on the connection between Vonnegut and adolescent learners. His protagonists struggle with the same philosophical questions that adolescents are beginning to ponder as they develop their ability to think abstractly. I argue that Vonnegut’s moral response to these questions will provide students with a framework from which they may begin to formulate their own answers in a universe they cannot control. Vonnegut’s novels strive to better humanity, and in teaching our youngest generations how he sought to do so may better the society in which we exist together

Toward Intelligent Support of Authoring Machinima Media Content: Story and Visualization

The Internet and the availability of authoring tools have enabled a greater community of media content creators, including nonexperts. However, while media authoring tools often make it technically feasible to generate, edit and share digital media artifacts, they do not guarantee that the works will be valuable or meaningful to the community at large. Therefore intelligent tools that support the authoring and creative processes are especially valuable. In this paper, we describe two intelligent support tools for the authoring and production of machinima. Machinima is a technique for producing computer-animated movies through the manipulation of computer game technologies. The first system we describe, ReQUEST, is an intelligent support tool for the authoring of plots. The second system, Cambot, produces machinima from a pre-authored script by manipulating virtual avatars and a virtual camera in a 3D graphical environment

The Collision Between New Discovery Amendments and Expert Testimony Rules

The young litigator\u27s nightmare was always the same. He was in medieval Europe, ready to engage in a sword fight with the expert swordsman representing his arch rival. After countless hours of preparation, he felt confident that he would be able to hold his own against the swordsman. But when the swordsman drew his lengthy rapier from its sheath, the young attorney pulled only a short dagger from his scabbard. Realizing that he was doomed to defeat, he tossed his dagger into the air and ran from the scene with the laughter of the onlookers ringing in his ears. The young litigator needed no dream analyst to tell him the nightmare\u27s symbolism. He knew that the sword fight represented cross-examination and that his swordsman opponent was simply an expert witness. As hard as he practiced and studied and researched, he never felt comfortable crossexamining his opponent\u27s expert about the expert\u27s field of expertise. He might as well admit his failure now and become a tax attorney, he thought. Fear of expert witnesses can indeed be disabling. With the increase in litigation about complex business transactions, products liability, and professional malpractice, expert testimony continues to become more important. The modern litigator must learn to deal effectively with opposing experts or be faced with the embarrassment of his worst nightmares. Handling the opponent\u27s expert has become more difficult because the rules of evidence have been liberalized over the years, while the rules of discovery recently have been restricted

Criminal Adjudication, Error Correction, and Hindsight Blind Spots

Concerns about hindsight in the law typically arise with regard to the bias that outcome knowledge can produce. But a more difficult problem than the clear view that hindsight appears to provide is the blind spot that it actually has. Because of the conventional wisdom about error review, there is a missed opportunity to ensure meaningful scrutiny. Beyond the confirmation biases that make convictions seem inevitable lies the question whether courts can see what they are meant to assess when they do look closely for error. Standards that require a retrospective showing of materiality, prejudice, or harm turn on what a judge imagines would have happened at trial under different circumstances. The interactive nature of the fact-finding process, however, means that the effect of error can rarely be assessed with confidence. Moreover, changing paradigms in criminal procedure scholarship make accuracy and error correction newly paramount. The empirical evidence of known innocents found guilty in the criminal justice system is mounting, and many of those wrongful convictions endured because errors were reviewed under hindsight standards. New insights about the cognitive psychology of decision-making, taken together with this heightened awareness of error, suggest that it is time to reevaluate some thresholds for reversal. The problem of hindsight blindness is particularly evident in the rules concerning the discovery of exculpatory evidence, the adequacy of defense counsel, and the harmfulness of erroneous rulings at trial. The standards applied in each of those contexts share a common flaw: a barrier between the mechanism for evaluation and the source of error. This essay concludes that reviewing courts should consider the trial that actually occurred rather than what “might have been” in a different proceeding and proposes some new vocabulary for weighing error