Technology: February 2003 Archive Page

"And now with Blogger, they can watch the people who are building the pages that comprise Google's map to gain knowledge about their map that they can't get from scraping." Jason Kottke --Google is Not a Search CompanyKottke.org)

"Hence its note to Word Spy, an online dictionary that compiles and defines new words popping up in the media. At issue is this Word Spy entry: 'google (GOO.gul) v. To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend.' | Google lawyers sent the site's editor a letter (portions of which were later posted to an online discussion board) saying that it wants 'to make sure that when people use "Google," they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general.'" [My wife insists on sending me to the store for such items as Kleenex, Tylenol, Kool-Aid, and Band-Aids. Sometimes she wants me to purchase the cheaper store brand instead, and sometimes she insists that she really wanted the brand name she specified. If your office copier is not a Xerox but a Canon, do you canonize copies? Thanks for the link, Mike.--DGJ] --Protecting Google Brand "Tricky Business"Boston Internet)

Legendary scientist James Watson advocates therapies or screening to elimiate low-intelligence people from the population. That's called eugenics, an ideology that the Nazis were happy to adopt for their own purposes. Watson also wants to breed prettier girls. Apparently, even the most brilliant scientists can say things that are not only stupid, but also racist and sexist. -- DGJ --On 50th Anniversary, Co-Discoverer of DNA Now Advocates Racial Engineering (New Scientist)

"The cardiac unit at Derriford Hospital, the biggest hospital in the South West, is one of the most modern in Britain. It is equipped with three up-to-date operating tables costing about £50,000 each. | The tops of the tables slide on to the electronically operated base so that the patient does not need to be lifted onto a trolley after surgery. The operation was taking place last Thursday when the top of the operating table became detached. The woman, who has not been named, was 'jolted forward' as it slipped." --Heart Patient Dies After Operating Table CollapsesThe Times)

This table was designed to reduce stress on the patient after the operation is over. A malfunction during the operation had fatal results. Very sad.

"That happened to Cornell University on Wednesday: It sent welcoming letters to 1,700 high school students who had submitted early-decision applications, including nearly 550 who had already been rejected in December. 'Greetings from Cornell, your future alma mater!' the e-mail letter began... Within a couple of hours the university followed with an 'oops' letter, admitting that it had made a mistake..." --(Big) Red Faces at Cornell over E-Mail ErrorNY Times (Registration Req'd))

Here's a little salt for that wound, kid. Oh, whoops... sorry about that.

"Just as Icarus did not heed his father?s warning to stay away from the sun, NASA engineers ignored warning signs before and after liftoff that the shuttle was doomed to burn up when it re-entered the atmosphere. Like Icarus, they were guilty of hubris. | But the hapless engineers are not the only ones to blame. The entire shuttle program is corrupted by incompetence, arrogance, jingoism, and corporate greed. It is a dinosaur from the Cold War whose reason for existence has exhausted itself." Regis T. Sabol --It Didn't Have to HappenIntervention)

I'm not sure that Sabol's poetry adds much of value to this rant. He seems delighted to have this opportunity to lay into NASA, and has nothing but opinions to offer.

The lone link on this page disappears when you try to click it. Actually, your browser automatically loads another page that is completely blank. That link is labeled "FAQ". I'm sure the most frequently asked question on this page is "What the...!?" --DGJ --From the "I Don't Get It" DepartmentPurple)

"Similar-looking drug brand names can confuse doctors, nurses and pharmacists, causing patients to get the wrong medicine.... A patient confusing lente with Lantus could end up with his or her blood sugar seriously out of whack. Doctors insist that errors like these can be corrected if caught early enough.|The simplest way of fixing the problem would be banning brand names. Generic names are more descriptive and less confusing." Matthew Herper --Lethal ConfusionForbes)

"Newly disclosed e-mail inside NASA showed senior engineers worried a day before the Columbia disaster that the shuttle's left wing might burn off and cause the deaths of the crew, a scenario remarkably similar to the one investigators believe actually occurred.... After intense debate -- occurring by phone and e-mail -- the engineers, some supervisors and the head of the space agency's Langley research facility in Hampton, Va., decided against taking the matter to top NASA managers..." --NASA's Worst Fears Realized AP/Wired)

Engineers worry all the time, about all sorts of things. Before the Challenger disaster in the 80s, most of those worries, and the dismissals of them, were oral, presented via teleconferences. Diane Vaughan's The Challenger Disaster suggests that some engineers who worried the most weren't able to get their concerns through the administrative layers, to the people who could take action.

"The new building is planned to be taller than the trade center towers, which briefly stood as the world's tallest at 1,350 feet. Libeskind's tower also would surpass Malaysia's 1,483-foot Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest buildings in the world.|The choice was made by a committee with representatives of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the governor and the mayor. The committee met briefly on Wednesday afternoon and decided on the plan that was favored by Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, according to a source close to the process." --New Twin Tower Plan ChosenAP/CNN)

This article will whip your head around a couple of times... take it slowly, and don't stop until you get to the Looney Tunes references. "To mainstream researchers, Loebner is a self-aggrandizing fool and his contest is hokum: at best irrelevant and at worst a public disservice that encourages bad science..... [T]he closer one looks at the history of the Loebner Prize, the more it appears that Loebner's real offense was showing up the biggest stars in "real" artificial intelligence as a bunch of phonies. Thirty years ago, Minsky and other A.I. researchers were declaring that the problem of artificial intelligence would be solved in less than a decade. But they were wrong, and every year the failure of computer programs to get anywhere close to winning the Loebner Prize underlines just how spectacularly off the mark they were." John Sundman

[Sundman identifies himself as a technophobic cynic, but he clearly had so much fun writing this piece that his allegiances don't really matter. This character study of Loebner is a peach: "Loebner has many enthusiasms. He likes prostitutes. He likes marijuana. He likes pornography. He likes the Loebner Prize. He likes wine and fine paintings. And he likes Hugh Loebner. He spoke enthusiastically about all those things. But I was surprised to learn that he didn't seem to care much about artificial intelligence, per se. |His interest in the field has always been pragmatic, he told me, never philosophical. He's a hedonist who thinks work is an abomination and sloth is our greatest virtue. He got interested in A.I. because he hoped the day would come when robots and A.I.'s could do all the work and people could play all the time." That line sounds like something from R.U.R. Except for the parts about prostitutes, pornography, and marijuana. --DGJ --Artificial StupiditySalon)

"Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA....|hink of DNA as software, and enzymes as hardware. Put them together in a test tube. The way in which these molecules undergo chemical reactions with each other allows simple operations to be performed as a byproduct of the reactions. The scientists tell the devices what to do by controlling the composition of the DNA software molecules. It's a completely different approach to pushing electrons around a dry circuit in a conventional computer." Stefan Lovgren --Computer Made from DNA and EnzymesNational Geographic)

Can the robot uprising be far away?

"Margaret Bourke-White hung out of bombers to take pictures, climbed out on a gargoyle high atop the Chrysler Building to take pictures, was the first Western photographer to go to the Soviet Union, covered the dangerous days of India's partition....Margaret Bourke-White was in love with the shapes of industrial design -- the mechanical muscle and sheen of it." Susan Stamberg reports on an exhibit of Bourke-White's extraordinary photographs of the mechanisms and infrastructure that were revolutionizing American society in the Age of the Machine. --Bourke-White's 'Photography of Design': Early Work Found the Hidden Beauty in IndustryNPR)

"The template system is also good for the audience. Apcar says that when readers come to a NYTimes.com multimedia project, it will look familiar to them -- they will know how to navigate it. That's not so for a news site that treats every multimedia project as an independent entity, not bound to existing practices or guidelines. Make it easy for the Web user to view your multimedia, he suggests, while still allowing yourself plenty of flexibility in how a package looks and what content elements are included." Steve Outing

--Breaking News Multimedia: Not an OxymoronEditor and Publisher)

In the Middle Ages, every book was a hand-crafted work of art, but the printing press led to standardization that vastly increased literacy across Europe. While the elite still enjoyed their hand-illuminated manuscripts, the populace had ready access to mass-produced versions. The current backlash against Jakob Nielsen's minimalist design aesthetic (if you can call "industrial ugly but dang efficient" an aesthetic) and the slow decline of Nielsen's once brilliant Alert Box suggests that the hypertext aesthetes are regaining some ground, but there's a lot to be said for templates, which free the individual author (whoops -- I meant "content creator") from having to master all aspects of a design system, and which is one important reason why weblogging services are bringing hypertext authorship to the masses. Thanks for the link, Mike.

"They aren't videogames, after all; except for the occasional cut scene, we almost never use video. We use images rendered on the fly--and the images are the surface of the game, the interface, the cotton candy. The meat of the game, the heart of it, is in the underlying code. These are games that run on processors, not on magnetic tape; algorithm and interactivity is what they are....Indeed, given the visual crudity of the original videogames, it's hard to believe that even non-gamers could have thought that 'video' was the single factor about those games that needed mentioning. But of course, the prevailing culture has never understood the game qua game." Greg Costikyan --Death to VideogamesGames * Design * Art * Culture)

A post from a few weeks ago, which I missed.

The article is worth reading, but I'm quoting from the "Procedures for Shuttle Bailout" box at the bottom: "Although no formal requirements or plans exist for crewmembers to bail out of the orbiter during uncontrolled flight, they may be able to do so under certain circumstances. The hatch jettison pyrotechnics do not require orbiter power to function and can be activated even if orbiter power is lost. Each crewmember is wearing his or her own emergency oxygen bottles and parachute, and if the crew cabin were not spinning rapidly, at least some of the crewmembers should be able to get to the side hatch and get out." NASA

--Analysis Hints at Shuttle's Last SecondsM$NBC)

The phrasing is clearly designed to give the crew confidence in a hopeless situation. There's something almost touching about "uncontrolled flight" as a euphemism for "tumbling out of control". And note the positive phrasing of "at least some...should be able to...get out" as opposed to "all may die, and some certainly will". For cryin' out loud, these instructions are for bailing out at 40,000 feet!

"When writing a website the writer needs to be focused on the reader; that is write for readers. Even though human readers are those who are going to be active and do something about your site, one of your primary readers is Googlebot. Writers need to be aware that building information has an effect on your site and also any site to which you create links within that information. The web is a connected world and what you do on your site may greatly affect not only your position in search engine results, but also other people's position and how Google perceives their web pages." Elwyn Jenkins --Writing for GoogleGoogleVillage)

While Elwyn does acknowledge that human readers (or at least scanners and skimmers) are the primary audience for your web site, I think it's also worth noting that if your writing appears to be optimized to attract Google hits, expert readers may be able to detect the Googlebot bias, and may find themselves less likely to link to the page that you have designed to be so useful to the Googlebot. Just a thought.

"Baseball - a slow, serene game played with a wooden bat, a cloth ball, and cowhide mitts on a broad, grassy field - surged in popularity just when the industrial revolution was taking hold, leaving masses of urban workers and shopkeepers yearning for the pastoral peace and quiet of the fabled agricultural age. They could relive this for a day by attending a baseball game. By extension, no wonder stock-car racing - a fast, furious sport contended on a paved roadway with snarling, smelly machines operated by hand - is surging in popularity at the very time the computerized information revolution is transforming our society from top to bottom." --Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR's Biggest SuperspeedwaysFirst Monday)

The above speculation is from an article by David Ronfelt, who credits "long-time race promoter and track owner H. A. 'Humpy' Wheeler" as quoted in Scott Huler's A Little Bit Sideways: One Week Inside a NASCAR Winston Cup Race Team. This line of reasoning also accounts for the popularity of BattleBots.

"People will soon be able to publish their own website via their phones as blogging goes mobile." --Blogging Goes MobileBBC)

Sounds a bit much like drafting a press release to fill a Sunday evening news gap, but journalists have been quick to grasp the social significance of weblogs. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

"A NASA engineer warned of the possibility of grave damage to the shuttle Columbia days before the spacecraft broke up on Feb. 1 and complained that it was hard to get relevant information, according to e-mails released by the U.S. space agency on Friday.|The e-mails by safety engineer Robert Daugherty expressed concern that a debris impact on Columbia's left wing shortly after launch on Jan. 16 may have gouged a hole big enough to cause excessive heat in the shuttle landing gear." --NASA Engineer E-Mails Warned of Columbia DamageWashPost)

Dave Winer on scripting news quotes from my "On the Trail of the Memex" in order to disagree:

Here's one for the history books. "For all intents and purposes, Google owns the Web, by virtue of its superior and highly popular search engine." I don't agree. Teoma appears to be as good a search engine as Google...

Maybe Temoa is just as good, but at the moment anyway, Teoma isn't nearly as popular. Winer does make an excellent point that I didn't address: "BTW, anyone who believes that Google actually owns the Web should remember that Microsoft owns the browser. Google is a good search engine and blogging tool. We don't know how they will connect them yet. I bet they don't either." --Google Don't BlinkScripting News)

DADDY: Peter, the weather is so nice... let's play a game.
PETER (age 4): I do NOT want to play any game that's in the world. I want to play a game that's NOT in the world.
DADDY: Peter, what kind of game is not in the world?
PETER: (pointing towards computer) On a CD.Games: Not in the WorldLiteracy Weblog)

"The arts and the sciences are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort?on either side of C.P. Snow's old divide?are at the center of today's intellectual action. They are the new humanists.....In too much of academia, intellectual debate tends to center on such matters as who was or was not a Stalinist in 1937, or what the sleeping arrangements were for guests at a Bloomsbury weekend in the early part of the twentieth century. This is not to suggest that studying history is a waste of time: History illuminates our origins and keeps us from reinventing the wheel. But the question arises: History of what? Do we want the center of culture to be based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the real world? One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; "social constructionist" literary critics uninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology." John Brockman --The New HumanistsEdge)

"When we view the computer as an interactive artifact the computer exists as our partner in the completion of important tasks. We ask the computer to do something and it, by proxy, does it for us. We should, instead, view the computer as a tool that we use to perform tasks: we use it so that we can do the important task. Calling the computer a tool may seem a simple matter of word choice but changing the view of the computer from interactive artifact to tool has a significant impact on how we think about the computer, what we expect of it, how we design for it and how we train for its use." Chris Dent --The Computer as Tool: From Interaction to AugmentationBurning Chrome)

"Hypertext as mediated by the Web browser has not proved to embody the qualities of the ideal post-structural text longed for by literary theorists such as George Landow; neither has the World Wide Web fulfilled the document-association function of the memex, the hypothetical research tool Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 essay, As We May Think. Bush’s memex was not merely a form of photo-mechanical hypertext, but also a means for the full-scale transfer of complex collaborative thought processes, as encoded by individual researchers via their own personal document association schemas. While weblogs, the most influential textual genre truly native to the World Wide Web, do facilitate the exchange of information across the Internet, that information must be carefully filtered in order to be useful. Google’s February 2003 purchase of the popular weblogging platform Blogger signals a shift towards content production that may create a conflict of interest; nevertheless, Google’s proven ability to mine the data encoded in annotated trails of linked documents may create the synergy necessary to fulfill Vannevar Bush’s vision." Dennis G. Jerz

--On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google GalaxyDichtung Digital)

Thanks to Nick Montfort, Clancy Ratliff, and Charlie Lowe, each of whom responded within hours of my request for help on my rough draft. I had this article ready to go this weekend, when Google's purchase of Blogger sort of threw me for a loop.

"Andy Serkis' computer-aided performance was one of the best things about 'The Two Towers.'... Is Hollywood ready to acknowledge and honor digital performances, or even human-digital hybrids? This year, the answer seems to be a resounding no." Ivan Askwith --Gollum: Dissed by the Oscars?Salon)

"Unfortunately, most will just view the team projects, class presentations, software life cycles, and ambiguous problem statements as 'hoops they have to jump through' to graduate. I recall a meeting with a student who was having trouble working with her project team in a recent class. She actually asserted with some confidence that the problem she was having with her team members...wouldn't happen in industry. She was stunned when I explained..." William Harrison --The Software Developer as Movie IconIEEE)

What Prof. Harrison says about computer programming projects can also be said about techncial writing, or about almost any project. In the real world, rarely do workers have complete project specs handed to them; rarely do they have enough time and/or resources; rarely do all the team members have all the required skills; rarely are key personnel available to consult at convenient times; etc, etc.

"The dot-com economy is long gone, but that hasn't curbed the public's appetite for shopping, banking and generally amusing themselves on the World Wide Web, according to a recent study.|Significantly more people are using the Web to send pictures and videos, shop, download music, play games and do their banking, according a study that compares last year's habits with those of 2000.... That surge comes too late, however, for many now defunct Internet start-ups that tried to capitalise on people's urge to spend online." --Survey: Web Use Trends Ever UpwardZDNet)

--Google Blogging Right AlongWired)

There's nothing new in this Wired story that wasn't already covered by blogs over the weekend.

"Vatsim allows virtual pilots (but real people) and virtual air traffic controllers (also real people) to see each other and communicate. The result is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game patterned after the government's dullest bureaucracy." --Always a Dull Moment: The hottest game in the sky is simulating a holding pattern. Fasten your seat belt.Wired)

Dan Gillmor's column reports that Google has purchased Blogging Company Pyra, which means that Google is becoming the AOLTimeWarner of the Internet. So far, I've been happy with whatever Google has done... but think about it -- I search the web with Google, I search Usenet with Google, I read the news with Google, and now (while I won't swtich to Pyra for my blogging software) potentially millions of bloggers will be using Google software. Is Google any less cool? No... but competition is good, and this news worries me just a bit. --DGJForget AOL -- Google will Bring Blogging to the Next LevelLiteracy Weblog)

We all know that technology makes it easier for some students who are tempted by academic dishonesty. I just recently used a little-known feature of MS-Word to cast doubt on a fairly standard -- and fairly lame -- student excuse.

Fifteen minutes before an assignment is due, I get an e-mail from a student who says he is too sick to make it to class. This happens all the time, but this particular message is a little fishy: instead of simply e-mailing the paper as an attachment and apologizing, the student lauches into excuses: he won't be able to get a doctor's note, he says, because he doesn't have insurance. As for the paper itself, the student says he'll give it to his roommate, who is "un-reliable at best." I suspect that the paper hasn't yet been written, and that "The Tale of the Unreliable Roommate" is intended to explain why the paper will not appear in my box until Monday. And, of course, his message indicates that he expects me to send him a personal e-mail that summarizes the material that he missed in class (see: "I Was Absent -- Did I Miss Anything Important?").

Unfortunately for the student (who probably thinks he's free to start his weekend now), I reply within seconds: "If you can e-mail it now & get me a hard copy ASAP that will be acceptable." The document arrives three hours later.

Another misfortune for the student: MS-Word has a feature (File | Properties | Statistics) that will display when a document was created and how long the author has worked on it. The screen capture suggests that the student started the paper at 12:30, just a half hour before it was due. The e-mail arrived 14 minutes later, apparently after he realised he wouldn't make the deadline. Despite the sudden illness, he managed to work on the paper for another 70 minutes over the next few hours.

It really ticks me off to be disrespected in this manner. I consulted with several faculty members, each of whom said I had no choice but to refuse the late paper. Fortunately, this assignment is only worth 5 points, and the student, who has otherwise been perfectly fine, will have plenty of time to redeem himself.

Dennis G. Jerz
Technology Catches Student in a FibLiteracy Weblog)

"There are two types of people -- those who prefer to communicate via e-mail, and those who prefer the phone. What the phone people don't realize is that their need for information means that they're going to interrupt someone else's day to get that information. E-mail, on the other hand, is just as quick and non-intrusive. Whenever possible, I try to send an e-mail before picking up the phone. I love e-mail, it's the way people were meant to communicate -- I'm sure of it." Joezilla

--I Hate PhonesDissociated Presszilla)

While I sometimes complain about all the e-mails I get, I do like the fact that I can deal with them on my own time -- at 2am, if I feel like it. Unreturned phone calls don't pile up like unanswered e-mails, so the psychological pressure of that long list of messages in my in box mounts up; but that's nothing compared to the frustration I feel when a telephone call catches me at a bad time. I know, I know... I could just pay extra money for caller ID.

"If recent rumours are to be believed, AOL is getting ready in the next month or so to add blogging to the home-page services it offers users.|It is a sign of how far these regularly updated pages of web links with personal comment have come in the past five years." --Blogging for DollarsThe Age)

Hrmm. The article mentions "recent rumors" about AOL but doesn't invite comment from an AOL spokesperson. Maybe AOL is planning to join the blogging scene, but this article is speculation and reflection, not news.

"Google adds fresh pages to its database everyday. You can search these fresh pages to find new information from today, yesterday or over the last 7 days if you wish. The only thing is, do not head to Google." --Search the Fresh Internet in Google with GooFresh!Smoogle)

A description of GooFresh, a website that lets you filter your Google results by date. About that name... "FreshGoo" would have more character.

"Things like the Back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it." An interview with Netscape creator Marc Andreessen --Web Browsers: 10 Years Old ("Conversation With Marc Andreessen")Wired)

"Over the past month, the U.S. military has periodically sent e-mail to Iraqi military and government officials urging them to protect their families by helping U.N. inspectors and turning away from Saddam Hussein.|U.S. government officials won't comment on the campaign, but according to sources in Iraq and Iraqis living in the United States, each time the e-mails are sent, Internet access all over Iraq soon suffers a 'service outage.' Service resumes after the U.S. military missives have been purged from inboxes. " Michelle Delio --U.S. Tries E-Mail to Charm IraqisWired)

"In its relentless pursuit of the power curve of Moore's law, at the expense of the much less interesting price curve, the entire electronics industry may be unknowingly trapping itself in a giant and attenuated version of the dot-com bubble--living years into the technological future, only to be painfully snapped back to the human and economic present." Michael S. Malone --Forget Moore's LawRedHerring)

Moore's Law observes that computers become twice as powerful every year and a half. But who really needs twice as much computing power every 18 months? The CEO of Google announced that he wasn't planning to upgrade Google's computers to make use of the newest, fastest computer technology -- instead, he will use the same money to buy a larger number of cheaper computers.

"When you play a multiplayer FPS video game, like Counter-Strike, you enter a complex social world, a subculture, bringing together all of the problems and possibilities of power relationships dominant in the non-virtual world. Understanding these innovations requires examining player in-game behavior, specifically the types of textual (in-game chats) and nonverbal (logo design, avatar design and movement, map making, etc.) actions." Talmadge Wright, Eric Boria and Paul Breidenbach --Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-StrikeGame Studies)

"Remember, too: you've just been wounded, and in addition to the adrenaline that's just been dumped into your system, you're likely looking at anywhere from a few drops to a steady flow of your own blood - a highly upsetting experience for many. Which means you're shaking, and most likely trying to do this all one-handed. Under the circumstances, the odds of you landing four successive drops of liquid on a cotton-swab size applicator are not wonderful." Adam Greenfeld [Mac's comment from WebWord.com: "Does Adam cut himself more often than the rest of us?"] --Suspect device 003: Band-Aid Liquid BandageV-2)

I got an e-mail from Bob Mosley, compiler of the Columbia loss FAQ, which called to my attention the latest updates to the Columbia FAQ resource, which was assembled rapidly by scores of volunteers on the day of the incident, --STS-107 "Columbia" Loss FAQsci.space.*)

"A homepage really has two main goals: to give users information, and to serve as their top-level navigation for information that's inside the site.... [S]ample sites allocated less than half the screen space to useful pixels." Jakob Nielsen --Homepage Real Estate AllocationUseIT.com)

"The computer industry defies the pattern of all previous technological revolutions, making little or no progress toward convenience. It takes much longer to turn on your machine in the morning now than it did 20 years ago. The reaction of the clueless masses is to grumble and crack wise and then meekly accept the commands of our techie masters." Marc Fisher

--Royal Standard Has Given Way To a Royal Pain WashPost)

I don' t think Fisher is right when he says computers take longer to boot up now. Maybe the c:> prompt would pop up right away, but then you had to load a program -- perhaps from a tape cassette, which involved pressing the "play" button and listening to the computer squawk and bleat for a few minutes. Then, you had to swap out the program cassette and insert your data cassette. And if you were in the middle of working on one file, you couldn't just hit ALT TAB to open up a new window. Of course, Fisher could save himself that trouble by not shutting down his computer in the evening -- just leave it on. The power-saving utilities will kick in, shut down the monitor and power down the CPU. But Fisher's main complaint is that he doesn't want to learn anything new -- which is kind of sad. When Sugatra Mitra installed a computer in makeshift outdoor kiosk in a slum in India, the street kids taught themselves how to use the machine almost instantly, with no formal instruction: "I contend that by the time we are 16, we are taught to want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers." That mindset reminds me of the student who wrote on a recent course evaluation: "Why do you give us all these papers to do when instead you should just teach us to write?"

"[R]esearchers had seen a precipitous drop in the use of books and an equally steep rise in the use of Web sites. Books composed 30 percent of cited sources in 1996, compared with 16 percent in 1999, with continued declines in the following year. Web sites, meanwhile, grew from about 8 percent of cited sources in 1996 to more than 20 percent in 1999. Most of those Web citations, around 40 percent, came from commercial sites." Scott Carlson previews a forthcoming article by Cornell librarian Phillip M. Davis --Web-Loving Students Can Be Prodded to Cite Peer-Reviewed Works in Term Papers, Study SuggestsChronicle)

The headline seems to contrast web resources with peer-reviewed sources, ignoring the fact that researching online does not automatically exclude peer-reviewed sources. Students who cite library databases often access those databases via a webpage interface, so they are both using the web and finding good sources. (The full article does not seem to be readily linkable.)

"There are dozens of well-designed studies that show that TV, movies and other media affect what viewers believe and how they behave. This is true of many different kinds of attitudes and behaviors -- positive and negative -- but many studies conclusively show a statistical link between watching violent programs and behaving aggressively. And, of course, billions of dollars have been spent on media advertising because it is well established that even brief messages can be powerful in shaping behavior. However, there are very few studies of whether exposure to media violence causes criminal behavior." Diana Zuckerman --What is to Blame for Youth Violence?: The Media, Guns, Parenting, Poverty, Bad Programs, Or? Nat'l Center for Policy)

I found this link on Donna Hibbs's Media Issues Weblog," which looks like it will be worth watching.

"But after being heralded on the cover of Newsweek and on '60 Minutes,' the $25-million 'Sims Online' has turned into an expensive letdown for Redwood City, Calif.-based EA. Sales are sluggish, reviews have been merciless, and many in the video game industry wonder whether online games will ever find a large following." Alex Pham --'Sims Online' Gives Creators a Painful Reality CheckLA Times)

A Slashdot poster sums it up well: "With The Sims Online, you basically end up with a graphical chat room. The tasks you perform are repetitive and dull. Each involves clicking on something and staring at the screen until that task finishes or your happiness levels go down far enough to finish it for you. Fix that up, rinse and repeat. All in all, the game ends up being a glorified IRC chat room that you pay for." And this is the next big thing in gaming?

"The genetic code is truly digital, in exactly the same sense as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth. Moreover, unlike computer codes, the genetic code is universal. Modern computers are built around a number of mutually incompatible machine languages, determined by their processor chips. The genetic code, on the other hand, with a few very minor exceptions, is identical in every living creature on this planet, from sulphur bacteria to giant redwood trees, from mushrooms to men." Richard Dawkins --Genetics: Why Prince Charles is So WrongCheckbiotech)

Note: The title of this piece most likely refers to a 2000 lecture series in which Britain's Prince Charles spoke against genetic engineering.

"In a milestone of scientific eccentricity, local astronomers have announced that they want to simulate the behaviour of falling meteorites by dropping bowling balls from aircraft - though the plan has gone down like a lead spaceship with government officials." --Utah Bowled Over by Meteor Plan Observer)

"There: that red coal burning on the horizon. We?re going. And we?re not sending smart toys on our behalf - we?re sending human beings, and one of them will put his boot on the sand and bring the number of worlds we?ve visited to three. And when he plants the flag he will use flesh and sinew and blood and bone to drive it into the ground." James Lileks --Lileks on Space Exploration: Mars and BeyondLileks (The Bleat))

What looks like an unrelated introduction about a kid's mylar balloon actually fits perfectly with the essay's main theme.

"Once you get into space, you check to see if any tiles are damaged. If enough are, you have a choice between Plan A and Plan B. Plan A is hope they can get a rescue shuttle up in time. Plan B is burn up coming back. | But let's not worry about the tiles. The tiles should be okay. They're certainly spending enough time on them. So once you get back into the atmosphere, the mad joyride begins. You have no power now, the engines are spent and switched out. You get one shot at a landing. Originally the plans called for a couple of regular jet engines to give you enough power to maneuver, or maybe go around for a second approach if the first one doesn't line upright. But jet engines got killed in the cost-cutting. A billion-dollar ship, and this is how they were cutting costs .... " Gregg Easterbrook

--Beam Me out of This Deathtrap, Scotty: 5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Goodbye, ColumbiaWashington Monthly; from 1980)

A haunting essay, written over 20 years ago, that criticizes the NASA shuttle program. This was extremely painful to read, since the tone is somewhat flippant and "in-your-face," and thus seems insensitive. But the author, writing over 20 years ago, was trying to point out flaws in the system. Any grand human endeavor will attract naysayers, who will jump up and down and shout "I told you so" when given the chance. Easterbrook's recent article, "Environmental Doomsday," shows he is still publishing unpopular views: he claims that ecological journalism silences good news about the environment and focuses only on bad news.

"But here's the dirty little secret that may go farther in explaining why usability stinks: Most developers and designers don't give a rat's ass about it. The developers want the thing to have lots of features, so usability is the designers' problem. The designers want the project to look great, so how it works is the developers' responsibility. And most companies never even bother to test their sites or applications for usability." Fredric Paul --Putting a Bad Interface on ThingsTechweb)

"The Fake CNN News Generator was online only a week, but generated a lot of controversy after ersatz news stories were picked up by local outlets and reported as real. Phony stories about the death of musician Dave Matthews, or the Olsen twins attending local universities, for example, appeared in a number of local newspapers, as well as regional radio and TV news reports. Fake stories were generated the site's visitors, who filled out a form with the story's headline and text. After hitting a button, the site created a convincing facsimile that included CNN's logos as well as live links and banner ads." --Fake CNN Website Taken Offline Wired)

Humph. I thought the "Olsen Twins Attend UWEC" spoof required some effort on the hoaxer's part, and accordingly publicized it as a creative achievement -- but it turns out to have been a fill-in-the-blank exercise. For example, the Wired story includes a partial screen capture of a story about the Olsen twins attending Notre Dame.

"By providing a basic FAQ addressing what are expected to be the most common questions asked by persons new to the sci.space.* heirarchy and/or those regulars who are only now finding out about the tragedy, it is hoped that the degradation of the groups' signal-to-noise ratio that usually follows events of this nature will be curtailed to a tolerable level, as well as hopefully reduce the level of baseless and unfounded speculation that tragic events such as the loss of Columbia tend to foster." --STS-107 "Columbia" Loss FAQGoogleGroups)

An Internet community devoted to space science posted this FAQ page in order to protect itself against the inevitable rush of newbies. Note -- this FAQ page seems to have been compiled in advance of the onslaught of questions, which means that in this case, perhaps FAQ stands for "Fearfully Anticipated Questions"? (Found via Robot Wisdom.)

"NASA warned members of the public Sunday against trying to sell purported Columbia debris on eBay, as local law enforcement agencies struggled to cordon off and protect the hundreds of pieces of wreckage." --NASA: No Debris Sales on EBayWired)

"Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) members in Nacogdoches, Texas, have been assisting local emergency management officials and NASA to locate and catalog debris from the Columbia shuttle." --Texas Amateurs Aid in Shuttle Debris Recovery, CataloguingNat'l Assoc. for Amataur Radio)

My wife and I were married in Dallas and honeymooned in south Texas, which included visits to Nacogdoches and the Houston Space Center. I teach about the Challenger disaster in my advanced tech writing class. I don't have any deep thoughts or words of wisdom to offer... but I was watching CNN Saturday evening, and found the words of the Israeli ambassador to the US to be very moving. Thank you, ambassador Daniel Ayalon.