Cyberculture: December 2002 Archive Page

"Mr. Serkis is the human actor behind the computer-generated (CG) character Gollum, a wizened Hobbit who's part manlike, part evil beast. More than just giving voice to the character, Serkis provided all its movements and facial expressions, which were later 'painted over' by animators." Gregory M. Lamb --The Rise of "Synthespians"CS Monitor)

Gollum is a Hobbit? Tolkien hints at the possibility, but in the book it remains only a hint. More amusing is the article's reference to the most recent Star Wars movie as "Episode 11" rather than "Episode II". At any rate, for more on computer-generated acting, refer to the Miranda sequences in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age.

"EverQuest has a decidedly constructive and cooperative tone to it. There is no blood in the game. No disemboweled intestines splatter on your screen. Instead, players often find themselves chatting while waiting for a mob to spawn. The ranger may be fletching as he recounts a particularly close battle. The warrior chugs some Dwarven Ale. There may be some emotes with playful, sexual overtones. In contrast with Quake or Diablo, this scene feels awfully relaxed and idyllic." Nick Yee --The Virtual Skinner BoxNickYee.com)

The "Skinner box" is the laboratory contraption that features a lever that dispenses food when a rat pushes it. The article observes that Everquest carefully conditions its players to perform ever more elaborate quests, by changing the reward system.

From the FAQ page: "7. Does Rock crush Scissors or is Scissors dulled by Rock?
There is no clear answer to that question. Younger and aggressive (or American) players tend to favour the Rock crushing Scissors view. More liberal-minded players take the view that scissors are dulled by the Rock. The World RPS Society created a task force in 1987 with a hope of eventually resolving the issue but it has been locked in debate and we no longer hold much hope of quick resolution."

--The Official Rock, Paper, Scissors Strategy GuideWorldRPS)

The Slashdot crowd seemed to enjoy the concept of creating 'bots to out-strategize each other. Still, some people have way, way too much time on their hands.

"As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002." Jakob Nielsen

--Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002UseIT)

Quibble: Stating that "websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users" is misleading, since none of the "mistakes" is really new. Still, I did particularly like Nielsen's complaint about companies that place marketing propaganda in FAQ pages.

Discovering Jakob Nielsen's venerable UseIT.com was a fantastic experience for me back in 1997... his articles supplied vocabulary and a methodology that helped me articulate plenty that I had intuited about hypertext and web design (such as why George Landow's visionary Hypertext made sense in terms of elite literary scholarship but didn't seem to apply to anything that I did on the World Wide Web). At any rate, Nielsen's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2002 compresses all the rhetoric/writing related issues into a singe mistake: "Blocks of Text". (Okay, he also complains about fixed font sizes and horizontal scrolling, but those are hardly new issues.)

Maybe I'm just grumpy because professional websites seem to be better-written than they were before -- either more people have learned what makes good online text, or the post-bust economy means that fewer companies are hiring inexperienced web writers to puff out their pages. For whatever reason, I find Nielsen's columns to be less and and less useful. The comic-strip illustrations didn't add much to my undestanding of the issue, though a few made me smile.

Trent Lott comes to mind, when we consider the permanence of a celebrity/politician's statements, of course. Few of us who were alive in 1980 have to be concerned that any of our statements from that year will come back to haunt us, let alone some of our more obscure comments, aimed at audiences that we feel might be sympathetic. But that won't be the expectation of the generation of kids growing up today. Even their most casual instant messages will be 'on the record'. Anil Dash

--Privacy Through Identity ControlAnil Dash)

During the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings of the early 1990s, when casual comments that either Thomas or Hill had made were dredged up and scrutinized under a microscope, I remember hearing stories that students in the law school at U.Va. were stealing each other's notes from bulletin boards and papers from the stacks of papers to be returned, on the odd chance that opinions voiced might one day become controversial, and potentially lead to the downfall of a rival. On an interesting side note regarding the Lott/Thurmond controversy, conservative attack dog Ann Coulter writes: "Back when they supported segregation, Lott and Thurmond were Democrats. This is something the media are intentionally hiding to make it look like the Republican Party is the party of segregation and race discrimination, which it never has been."

"But since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply, and complaints are becoming more common. Many people publish [weblogs] as if they were untouchable, assuming that because what they write appears in a virtual world, it won't come back to burn them in the "real" world. Many overlook the fact that their rants can potentially reach millions of people when posted on the Internet. The same law that relates to publishing in the offline world, generally speaking, applies to material posted publicly on a Web log..." --Free Speech -- Virtually: Legal Constraints on Web Journals Surprise Many 'Bloggers' WashPost [registration; link will expire])

"In the real world, everything you put into space is going to be visible to visitors by default. The designer of the space has to choose to hide something. With an information space, everything is hidden by default. The only parts of the space visitors can see are those the designer has chosen to reveal." Jesse James Garrett --The Psychology of NavigationDigital Web Mazagzine)

"Freshman Bobby Berg says he sought out UW-Stout this year because he knew he would be assigned a laptop computer. What he didn't know is that most of his freshman classes aren't structured around the computers as Berg initially thought. 'We don't use them hardly at all,' Berg said."

--UW-Stout students find laptops helpful, but some faults foundLeader Telegram)

UW Stout runs a cheesey advertisement on local TV showing streams of ones and zeros floating around the heads and into the school-provided computers of well-scrubbed happy college students. Truth in advertising? Yesterday my freshman comp students took their final exam in the computer room. (Full disclosure: Nearby UW-Stout has a larger technical writing program than UWEC; few students come to UWEC in order to be technical writers; rather, students who are here for other reasons find their way into the technical writing program at a late stage, and then rush rather frantically through it. When Stout started its laptop campaign, the number of tech writing majors and minors at UWEC dropped, suggesting that students who might otherwise have studied tech writing here ended up at Stout instead. More recently, our numbers are picking up, though.) (If the above link is dead, let me know -- I've saved a copy.)

You may have heard that an early version of computer translation software took the input "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak," and changed it to "The whisky is strong, but the meat is foul." Or maybe it was "Out of sight, out of mind" translated to "Invisible idiot." Or maybe the mistranlsated phrase should have been "Don't believe everything you read." --"The whisky was invisible", or Persistent myths of MTMT News International)

"Internet-based surveys, although still in their infancy, are becoming increasingly popular because they are believed to be faster, better, cheaper, and easier to conduct than surveys using more-traditional telephone or mail methods. Based on evidence in the literature and real-life case studies, this book examines the validity of those claims." Matthias Schonlau, Ronald D. Fricker, Jr., Marc N. Elliott --Conducting Research Surveys by E-Mail and the WebRAND)

This book is available as a free PDF download.

"We recognize the capacity of digital instruments to simulate so many of our elements and forms of living, and thinking, and imagining. But just because the book has been our simulation machine of choice for centuries, we need to study and understand it now more than ever -- not as a place of retreat, but as a profound source, and resource -- at a moment when we are trying to design and control digital simulation tools." Jerome McGann --Literary Scholarship in the Digital FutureChronicle)

At U.Va., I remember that McGann had a laptop computer on his desk around 1988, which was pretty unusual for an English professor.

I admit it... once I started stumbling across my own name on the Internet, I began using Google to find out who has linked to me and how my visibility compares to that of other people whose names I come across. Now Userati automates all that pesky ego-surfing, and even quantifies the result.

Userati uses Google to see how many times person X is listed on the same page as person Y. Then, all these connections are added up. Understandably, Jakob Nielsen tops out the list. A few days ago, I was ranked second to last, with my rating being about 1% of Jakob Nielsen's and 10% of WebWord's John S. Rhodes. Since then, however, new people have been added to the bottom of the list, so my ranking doesn't look quite as shameful. In addition, Google has found the Usearati list... so while it was flattering to see my score jump from about 110 to about 250 in just a couple of days, I am being credited for my connections to people with whom I have nothing in common other than being listed on Userati. --DGJ --Userati ConnectionsUsabilityViews.com)

"Time was, when a writer said: 'Kierkegaard observed that...,' there was at least a fighting chance that he had actually read Kierkegaard. Nowadays it is much more likely he just used Google to flesh out some dimly-remembered quote he heard from a college lecturer or a TV talking head, or came on by chance while browsing. John Derbyshire --The Age of Google: It's Even a VerbNational Review)

Google doesn't return hits that are correct -- it just returns hits that most people who make web pages people think are correct.

"What sort of recreation has the ability to absorb people to the extent that marriages break up, jobs are lost, and they lose friends? How does playing a game on a computer make someone lose functionality in the REAL world, because they want to spend too much time in some imaginary reality? For crying out loud, I thought, it's just a game." Jewels finds out the answer. --But in the End, They're Still Nothing More than VideogamesJive Magazine)

The author is credited as "photographer" for the screen shots of gaming action. That may be stretching it, but I did find the visuals stunning.

"In fact 60 percent of Americans who use e-mail at work receive 10 or fewer messages on an average day, the study released Sunday found. Only 6 percent receive more than 50. And among those power users, only 11 percent say they feel overwhelmed by all the e-mail."

--Study Refutes E-Mail MythWired)

It makes sense... those few people who really are overwhelmed by e-mail are more likely to complain about it online, where such memes spread very quickly. Nevertheless, if you shut off your telephone and answering machine, there's no record of the phone calls you ignore. If you don't check your e-mail for a while, it piles up, and hits you all at once when you go back to it. You can't even pick up all your e-mail and dump it in the trash can so that it makes a satisfying "whump", though I guess you could record the "whump" noise and set up your computer so that the "whump" sound plays when you empty your recycling bin, but that wouldn't be nearly as satisfying. Er... what was this post about again?

Error 404. You do not have the permissions necessary to view the contents of this address. Do you wish to launch a bypass attack?

Yes | No

--Forbidden: You Do Not Have Permission to View the Contents of this Address. English 110)

An engaging animated intro to an "alternate history" creative hypertext project, created by my freshman composition student Aaron Styx. I hope he expands this idea into a full narrative. See also "The Ed Report" by William Gillespie, Dylan Meissner, and Nick Montfort.

Why would anyone want to consult Allied Computing ("Due to our unique location in Kalispell Montana, Allied Computing is able to offer zero sales tax on all purchases. We also consider trade-ins and trade ups on most new and some used computer systems.") while researching religious aspects of birth control? And if Allied Computing has such a great search engine, why did it return a link to one of my medieval drama pages (which has nothing to do with birth control)? Maybe that page includes all the words "religious, aspects, birth, control," but so, now, does this page. That doesn't automatically make it worthy of high placement in a list of search engine results. (Link goes to Google's cache -- the live results don't include my website.) --DGJ --For Religious Aspects of Birth Control, Trust a Premier Apple Authorized Reseller and Service CenterAllied Computing)

"The theater has been transformed into a multi-player gaming center in which patrons can challenge one another on some 80 computer games. Unlike a video arcade, players will compete against each other on such popular game systems as Microsoft's XBox, Sony's PlayStation 2 and Nintendo's GameCube. Where there used to be stadium-style theater seating, there are now comfortable executive leather chairs and computer monitors. When the gaming center opens in January, there also will be video screens of varying sizes hanging from the walls so gamers and spectators can view several different contests at once." Jennifer Davies

--Theaters Getting Game: Stadium-style room is transformed into a gaming centerSignOn San Diego)

The article doesn't clearly specify that this is about the transformation of a movie theater into a gaming arena -- so this article is really about the blending of movies and sports, rather than games and theatre. A few weeks ago I taught the 1990 play PICK UP AX, which features a "mood room" that uses a computer to interpret the physiological readings of the people in it. We also discussed selections from The Diamond Age, which features theatrical events in which paying customers interact with professional 'ractors (short for "interactors") in virtual reality.

"Writing software should be treated as a creative activity. Just think about it -- the software that's interesting to make is software that hasn't been made before. Most other engineering disciplines are about building things that have been built before. People say, 'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?' The answer is that we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that's been built." From an interview with Richard Gabriel

[Another quote from the interview: " So, the idea behind the MFA in software is that if we want to get good at writing software, we have to practice it, we have to have a critical literature, and we have to have a critical context. It looks like we may be able to start a program like that in the next year or so at a major university that I'm not free to name. It's probably going to be called a Master of Software Arts." From the other side of the coin, as a literature Ph.D. who programs on the side, I sometimes face great difficulty talking about my programming activities with non-coding colleagues (which is, in my case, everybody else in my department). Of course, books like The Soul of a New Machine and Hackers already provide a useful vocabulary for examining the values and practices that are -- pardon the pun -- "encoded" in cybercommunities. I find that many of the CS majors I teach are eager to contribute to classroom discussions on such topics as values and ethics, but that in their CS courses they are so busy learning code that they have little time for such discussions. Maybe that's not typical? Our CS department has no graduate program, so the vast majority of students are focused like a laser beam on graduating and getting a job.--DGJ] --The Poetry of ProgrammingSun)

"[T]he best news sources have always felt like a rich, somewhat mysterious pageant. And in many ways, this is an exciting experiment. Lately I've been visiting Google News several times every day, to see how the media world looks through the emotionless eyes of an algorithm." William Powers --The Play's Not the ThingThe Atlantic)

"The link is the basic element of hypertext, and researchers have long recognized that links provide semantic relationships for users. Yet little work has been done to understand the nature of these relationships, particularly in conjunction with the purposes of organizational/informational Web sites. This paper explores the semantic and rhetorical principles underlying link development and proposes a systematic, comprehensive classification of link types that would be of use to researchers and Web production teams." Clare Harrison

--Hypertext Links: Whither Thou Goest, and Why?FirstMonday)

Harrison's taxonomy of links: Authorizing, Commenting, Enhancing, Exemplifying, Mode-Changing, Referencing/Citing, Self-Selecting. I think that "Mode Changing" is too general a category to be useful, though it is a useful step towards acknowledging that hypertext is often an interface to some other real-world activity (such as booking a plane ticket or buying a gift).

"The project was developed by the BBC to create a computer-based, multimedia version of the Domesday Book, marking the 900th anniversary of the 1086 archive. But the snapshot of in the UK in the mid-1980s was stored on two virtually indestructible interactive video discs" which, just 15 years later, were so obsolete they were illegible to modern computers. Engineers have developed emulation software that make the files accessible once more. --Digital Domesday Book UnlockedBBC)

While the websites that traditional journalists tend to read and cite are written mostly by men, most people who are even vaguely familiar with weblogs would have little trouble finding good 'blogs written by women. "Was there really a gender gap in Blogville? The answer, I soon learned, was complicated. And it was wrapped up in knotty issues like the power of celebrity, the male tilt of the computer industry, the grip of sexual stereotypes (women keeping diaries, men droning on about politics) and the preciousness of time - specifically, the fact that women with children and jobs have almost none to spare." Lisa Guernsey

--Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)NY Times [registration])

Guernsey praises weblogs for giving men a chance to talk about their families and women a space to discuss politics, but I find the whole premise of her article troubling and ill-informed. James Lileks often writes humorous and detailed rebuttals of elitist or anti-American editorials, but he also writes fondly about his baby girl "Gnat." "I, Cringely" is a geeky technology column on PBS (not a 'blog, but regularly cited by bloggers) wrote an essay on the death of his infant son Chase (in his arms, while his father was reading e-mail) that moved me to tears: "as a grieving nerd, I feel the need to do something." Both sites are widely cited by the kind of political and/or geeky bloggers that Guernsey dismisses as not interested in such "feminine" topics as raising children.

"Costing me money? I don't pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet--and check it after they leave, just to make sure nothing's missing....And it's difficult to convince an educated audience that artists and record labels are about to go down the drain because they, the consumer, are downloading music. Particularly when they're paying $50-$125 apiece for concert tickets, and $15.99 for a new CD they know costs less than a couple of dollars to manufacture and distribute." Janis Ian --The Internet Debacle -- An Alternative View (JanisIan.com)

Ian is not a megastar recording artist, but she's had a long, satisfying career, and she says that the music industry isn't to be trusted when it says that file sharing is bad for recording artists.

"I was at the mall today and I was waiting forever in line to tell you what I want for Christmas," wrote Nichole, 8, from Tucson, Arizona. "So I really like that I can e-mail you right away without lining up. Well except for after my little brother." Steve Kettman --Dear Santa: You've Got E-MailWired)