Jan. 27
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January 27, 2010 6:57 AM
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FR!NGE should not be rated by star system Re: “Life on the fringe,” Jan. 20
As the producers of the WLU Fr!nge Festival, we sincerely thank you for the coverage in last week’s Cord.
The interest of the local arts community is important to us, as is support of the creative arts. This is especially true in the Laurier community where we lack a dramatic arts program. The support of the Cord has helped us to improve our visibility on campus, and we are truly grateful.
That said, there has been some discussion on the way we were reviewed, especially in regards to the use of a ‘star rating’ to evaluate the merit and success of our contributors.
The Fr!nge Festival is a non-adjudicated collection of original work, meant to provide a space for creative endeavors outside the mainstream.
If your reviewers were expected to quantitatively evaluate our festival, we would have preferred them to justify what the numbers in this scale represent. The issue is not that each review was not glowing, but that the reasoning behind the reviews was not well thought out.
A star does not replace a worded critique. Essentially, what is a ‘star’? The use of these graphics detracts from space that your reviewers could have used to write more than three short sentences to critique a work. Your article seems to reduce the reception of the festival to arbitrary scoring and generalized statements.
We hope that future reviews of the festival present themselves as more justified in their evaluation, and with more understanding of the spirit of Fr!nge.
–Kate Cooper and Adam Cilevitz
Error in global article Re: “A global view,” Jan. 20
Always enjoying a worldly perspective I decided to take a read of “A global view” and came to a section entitled “Pillaging the Planet” that struck a chord.
Its opening paragraph stated: “The trafficking of wildlife … is driven by Asia’s desire for fine cuisine and medicinal usage of rare wildlife and Westerner financiers who enjoy exotic animals.”
Being a “greedy capitalistic fat cat” banker, I decided to investigate the National Geographic article mentioned by the Cord.
Much to my chagrin I found no mention of Wall Street or large bonuses in the article. In fact the only mention about the demand for exotic wildlife came in the form of this statement: “In Asia, wildlife ends up on the banquet table or in medicine shops; in Western countries, in the living rooms of exotic-animal fanciers.”
So I guess the moral of the story is: when you are doing your best to avoid plagiarism ensure that you don’t end up changing the intended meaning of the fact you are trying to convey.
–Brian Highgate
Sodoku unsolvable
I came across a page from The Cord dated 2009-01-20 that had the Classifieds and a puzzle. After some study, I realized that it does not have a unique solution.
If pursued to the limit without guessing at any squares, all cells can be filled in except for four, namely the intersection of rows 4 and 9 with columns 8 and 9, and these four cells all have the same possibilities for completion, both 5 and 9, each.
I suggest that the puzzle with a 9 in Row 4, Column 9 is the more interesting of the two.
–Leroy J. Dickey