天美影视传媒

September 2005 -

FIRST TAKE

UW People and Places

Nate Robinson

The Alter-Nate

Why in the world did Nate Robinson spend the first half of June 28桸BA draft day梥ending out r閟um閟? For one thing, he抯 not that Nate Robinson. He抯 Nathaniel Joseph Robinson, a bespectacled white kid from Bellevue. And unlike the former Husky point guard, whom the New York Knicks acquired midway through the first round, this Nate Robinson has chosen a field that抯 truly difficult to break into: editorial cartooning. 揑t抯 ridiculously competitive,� says Robinson, who for the past three years has tickled readers of the Daily with his quirky 揘atetoons,� as well as his name. 揑 read an article recently comparing it to the NBA, interestingly enough, and it said that cartooning was actually harder to break into, because there are fewer jobs.� Indeed, there are only about 85 editorial cartoonists employed full-time by newspapers in the United States, making pro basketball roughly five times as promising as a career prospect. Regardless of the long odds, Robinson is off to an impressive start. His panels have already appeared in the Seattle Times and, through a summer internship with the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, about a dozen other papers around the state. A journalism/political science double-major, he抯 currently on track to graduate one or two terms early, despite the dual distractions of drawing for the Daily and fielding phone calls intended for the other Nate Robinson. 揑抣l tell you right now,� he says, 揑 will not miss the 7-o抍lock-in-the-morning calls bitching me out for no apparent reason.�


Bad Check

Sandeep Krishnamurthy has three words for Microsoft抯 grammar checker: Physician, heal thyself. Earlier this year, after becoming fed up with error-riddled student papers that had somehow survived the Word program抯 built-in grammar check, the UW Bothell professor decided to call some public attention to the tool抯 failings.Bad Check He e-mailed evidence to friends, colleagues, and the media, and created a Web site full of . One, a mock-e-mail message that had passed its grammar check, includes the sentences 揔now sweat. I can due tomorrow, but I knead to leaf by 1 p.m.� The problem, according to a statement issued by Microsoft, is that the grammar checker is designed to catch common, easily overlooked errors, not outrageous ones. Krishnamurthy agrees. 揑 am convinced that this feature works well for good writers and not for bad ones,� he notes on the Web site. 揟his is, clearly, a problem.� Krishnamurthy抯 campaign did get the attention of some news outlets, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and even MSNBC. Most memorable was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the Onion-esque headline 揗icrosoft Word Grammar Checker Are No Good, Scholar Conclude敆a sentence that, according to an editor抯 note, had itself cleared the grammar checker.