Cyberculture: September 2003 Archive Page

--Battlestar Galactica 'Launch When Ready' Bridge Girl Fan Page (SarahRush.com)

Today my five-year-old son was watching one of my wife's old Battlestar Galactica videotapes, and I remembered that when I was about 11 I had a crush on the cute bridge crewmember who told the Viper pilots stuff like "Transferring core command to probe craft. You may launch when ready." To my knowledge they never made a subplot about her... Starbuck never made a pass at her. She just sat there on the bridge, with her little headset microphone. Did they use the same clip over and over? I wanted to know.

Good Lord, the Internet is scary... somebody has already posted what appears to be every frame from the TV show that she was in: Sarah Rush Photo Gallery.

By the way, this fan website is a good argument for why you should avoid making web pages with frames... when I want to send you directly to a subpage on the site, you can't navigate back to the home page from there, becuase the author hasn't provided any navigation on the internal pages. (Well, there's a NEXT link, but that's it.) Frames trick beginning designers into thinking that they don't have to provide navigation on every page. The site also has a splash page... blech. Put your best content on your home page, and add links to the major sections. Somebody who has followed a link to your home page doesn't need to be told to "Enter" someplace else -- they're already there. Don't waste your chance to show them what you've produced.

The Internet has become a grossly commercialized Wild West in so many ways. But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and well. The Net depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in the physical world: a commitment to solve problems and make life better for those who might otherwise not have the resources or expertise. --Dan Gilmor --Remembering the People who Give Back to the Net, and All of Us (Silicon Valley)

In an elaborate scheme to dupe security companies and journalists, McWilliams acknowledged last night that he purchased the domain name last March and registered it under the name of "Abdul Mujahid of Karachi." He also left a legitimate mirror site in place on a server in Pakistan and by his own admission has been receiving e-mails from people looking to join the actual terrorist group. He then posed as Abdul Mujahid in his communications with people and the news media. --Dan Verton --Journalist Perpetrates Online Terror Hoax (Computerworld)

I missed this when it happend back in Feb 2003. Found via Cyberjournalist.net: Cyber Slip-Ups

If I was to get a fake diploma, I'd pick a forger who could SPELL! But then, I have most of the real diplomas I need. Perhaps what this tells us is: if you are clever enough to figure out that a fake diploma needs to be free from typoes and look real, that means you don't need it, and the spammers are adhering to some weird darwinistic logic. -- Torill Mortensen --They Have to be Kidding (thinking with my fingers)

My guess is that this spammer, who promises a "full dmlpoia form non accieertdd uneveriitiss," is trying to get through spam-blocking programs that search for the properly-spelled keywords.

--Who Buys Rainbow Hector Weblog Shares? (Blogshares)

Who is deb_c and why, why did she purchase 2,500 blogshares of my Rainbow Hector Weblog just a few hours ago? According to Blogshares (fantasy blog stock market), deb_c's homepage is www.sugarfused.com.

Microsoft is closing internet chat rooms because their misuse by spammers, paedophiles and others is damaging the reputation of its MSN service and the internet as a whole. --Chris Nutall --Microsoft to curb chat room abuses (Financial Times)

• J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism
• Hildy, You're a Newspaperman: Collecting Screen Scribes
  ("One film I never see on anyone's list is "Doctor X," an uneven 1930-something thriller in which the reporter not only climbs a drainpipe to look in a window, but crawls under a sheet to impersonate a corpse (complete with toe-tag) and eavesdrop on conversations at the morgue. Skills to remember!")
• Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
  (See the AEJMC job page, which looks good. I'm not sure about the news page -- would be more helpful if it had dated entries, so I can gauge how frequently it is updated.)

Notable Journalism Links (

Thanks to Rosemary Frezza for suggesting that I check out Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

The Keyword Variation Checker is a tool I wrote using the Google Web API. It will go through all kinds of variations of a given keyword and google the result. All that was needed is a little text-file with possible endings for a word from a free dictionary I found online. For example, the word is "Googl", then I append "ology", "ist", "y", and so on. --Philipp Lenssen --Googling Word Variations (Outer Court)

Cool idea. Too bad this isn't actually available to the general public.

Google offers lots of cool features, like the synonym search.

It's true — we learn far more than we are ever able to use.... This may seem harmless, but does it, in fact, hinder our ability to produce? Does all this learning and all the attention span we spend on new technologies detract from what we should be doing in the here and now? How many applications have gone unwritten because we think some new technology will obviate them in the next few months? How many ideas languish because we're playing around with the new hyper-whizzbang protocol, convinced that this is the solution to our problems and will make every application fly off our keyboard with ease? -- Deane --Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning (Gagetopia)

This article is written for an audience of geeks. It's not so much an anti-intellectual diatribe as it is a reminder that having great ideas is not enough, since the business world demands practical results.

I spend an awful lot of time reading textbooks and novels and student papers -- and I have sacrificed reading and writing about the art and craft of teaching. I want to more self-consciously research and study pedagogy, learning from the experiences and speculations of others. Even the very definition of the "scholarship of teaching" is something I want to explore... I hear a lot of talk about it, but I know I haven't read nearly enough. | Have you? --Mike Arnzen --Pedablogue: A New Purpose (Pedablogue)

In his Pedablogue, my colleague Mike officially comes over to the Dark Side, with a blog that he will use to examine the "scholarship of teaching". Among other things, the "scholarship of teaching" is an effort by faculty at teaching institutions (that is, where we are primarily teaching undergraduates, rather than conducting our own research or directing the indepenent research of graduate students) to legitimize and sytematize the way we think and evaluate that part of jobs (the teaching) that our institutions have decided is most important. Composition teachers and ESL teachers have done something similar. Most college faculty members were trained in specific disciplines (English lit or critical theory) rather than the art of teaching. And the environment in which younger faculty teach is very different than that in which our more experienced colleagues earned their wings (and their tenure). So it's good to have a space to work out these issues in a public, collaborative space.

Mike and I have had several good, long meatspace conversations about teaching and blogging... he graciously reviewed a draft of an article I'm about to send out, and he's been a great supporter of the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University weblog project.

He surprised me by deciding to use his blog to focus so specifically on this issue. I see a lot of good blogging in the future.

The [1938 Homes & Gardens] article depicts Hitler in glowing terms, such as the "Squire of Wachenfeld," and extols him as a talented architect, decorator and raconteur who "delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, singers, and musicians." --Old Hitler Article Stirs Debate (Wired)

The above article provides some context for what came across to me as a Pittsburgh Symphony musician's gushing admiration for Hitler's estate.

...I thought [blogs] were stupid and confusing, but now that I have my own, I think its very fun, and its not that hard, I do suppose I'll get used to it and perhaps eventually I will become and expert. Its nice to know I am not the only one that thought it was confusing. --Lori Rupert, commenting on "I Think I've Got It!" --Blogs: Stupid and Confusing?

In the past couple of days, I've unleashed about 30 newbie bloggers on the world. Most of their first posts are of the "Gosh this is new but kind of fun" variety, but Lori's stood out because of its honesty. It's good to remind myself every so often just how different and... well... freaky blogs can be, especially to people who aren't familiar with the genre.

Thoughts on Language in the Blogosphere

Some thoughts I'm putting together for a paper...

In the Blogosphere, one set of emotionally charged terms such as “link love” and its assorted extensions (“link slut,” “link whore”) emphasize proximity and interface. Blog A bestows “link love” on blog B by creating a hyperlink that encourages readers to visit blog B. By extension, a “slut” links promiscuously rather than selectively, and a “whore” links not out of genuine feeling but rather to secure personal gain. Another term related to proximity, though perhaps not obviously so, is “fisking.” The eponymous term refers originally to the activity of bloggers offering a systematic and usually disdainful rebuttal of a news article by Robert Fisk, but the term has generalized.

The text produced by a fisking alternates between the targeted author’s text and the critic’s response; the critic inhabits the body of the primary text, quoting from or paraphrasing it profusely. Because the target text is fixed in space and time, it cannot respond to the fisker’s frequent interruptions, and therefore can easily be forced into the “ignoramus” role in a one-sided Socratic dialogue. Earlier terms for similar activities, such as “flame” and “rant,” both seem to emphasize the emotions emanating from the author, but “fisk” seems to emphasize not the author’s response to a textual subject, but a persuasive act encouraging the involvement of third-party readers. A fisking is thus more deliberate and more targeted than a flame or a rant (even if it is typically no less ad hominem).

Everyone should agree that good AI certainly creates more enjoyable games (see Barney in Half-Life). This is probably a correlative of the fact that bad AI ruins some games. But query: does smart AI create better communities? | Of course, real-life bots are the subject of a vast amount of pop literature. Asimov is a good place to start, but golems (not gollums) have an older pedigree. --Terranova: Golems and Community (TerraNova)

A pleasant introduction (via GrandTextAuto) to a group blog that's new to me. Even more pleasant because it links to my RUR website (suggesting that Google is doing a good job teasing out the new location of my webpages.)

A stylistic note... the passage that I copied above has lots of links. A passage that I chose not to excerpt has even more links -- and I am simply too lazy to re-create (especially when the source text is just a click away).

But I'm conscious that leaving those links out changes the tone of the original. Of course, removing the excerpt from its original context and inserting it into my own context also changes the text... but the omission of hyperlinks seems like a silent form of censorship. I often find myself selecting blocks that don't contain hyperlinks, simply so I won't have to wrestle with this problem. Hmm. Maybe I'll post this comment on KairosNews...

We write on paper, but we write to a magnetic disk (or tape). Part of what the preposition contributes here is a sense of interiority; because we cannot see anything on its surface, the disk is linguistically refigured as a volumetric receptacle, a black box with a closed lid. --Matthew G. Kirshcenbaum --Write To (MGK)

Thus Spake Google (completely unscientifically):

• "save on disk": 3440
• "save to disk": 76,400
• "write on disk": 366
• "write to disk": 14,500

Variations?

• "write to" disk: 537,000
• "write on" disk: 49,100 (the top hits seem geekier than those for "write to")
• "save to" disk212,000
• "save on" disk: 132,000

Just poking around a bit...

• "write on" paper: 273,000
• "write to" paper: 1,300,000

As Steven Johnson recently pointed out, Google's results will skew in favor of the geeky.

1. You think everyone cares about your opinions: They don't. They care about mine.

8. You will stop having normal conversations with family and friends: Real life conversations will go like this. "Oh, hey, I saw So-And-So in concert and the weirdest thing happened..." Friend, "Yeah, I know, I read about it on your blog." Silence. Friend, "Did I tell you that I'm..." You, "Blog." Friend, "Yeah."

10. You demand that your witty and clever friends be blogging. Constantly: Why aren't you all busy shirking your jobs and entertaining me? I need INTELLECTUAL STIMULATION.
--Top 10 Dangers of Living in the Blog Space  (Sarcasmo's Corner)

A good find from Julie Young's Work in Progress.

It wasn't until the package arrived last week that the secret was revealed. The man who sold Kunath the cookie jar was a brother he has never met. --Quest for cookie jar leads to long-lost brother (Orlando Sentinel)

That's a wonderful story, but that's one ugh-lee cookie jar.

Media conglomerate AOL Time Warner plans to drop "AOL" from its corporate name on Thursday, according to reports. -- Reuters --AOL Time Warner drops 'AOL' from name (News.com)

One more bit of Internet silliness becomes a subject for a future history lesson. It was a wild ride while it lasted (which was, unfortuantely for AOL Time Warner, not very long).

The Buckner brothers had no criminal record or any history of trouble-making. In court last month, they pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. They were sentenced to indefinite detention. District Attorney General Al Schmutzer told the court: "They said they got the idea from a video game called Grand Theft Auto and that they were bored, that they went out and began shooting." | In a letter to victims and their families, Joshua said: "I did not mean to hurt anyone. I hate that it happened. This will stick with me for the rest of my life." Maxine Frith --'Grand Theft Auto' makers sued over teenage killing (Independent)

Protect your Email address from Spam (unsolicited Email advertisements).

The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to Email harvesting robots. --Hiveware E-Mail Enkoder (Hiveware)

Software suggested by oldtimey, whose secret identity is safe with me.

The Hivelogic Narrative is unusual because it is a weblog written in the second person:

You have no car.

Well, technically speaking, you do have a car, except your wife is driving it.

Is the Hivekeeper an interactive fiction fan? Google turns up an example of a few posts, but no survey of second-person blogs.

Jill/txt describes Beadgee

At first you see a collection of gizmos, each connected to a rhyme. Choose a gizmo and explode it into its separate pieces and a dot will start to dance along the words of the rhyme attached to it, just as a nun runs her fingers slowly along the beads on her rosary as she prays. Click a piece of the gizmo and it appears in your building area, bringing with it the word that the dot had reached when you clicked. Choose another piece, and another, and soon you'll have made both a new gizmo and a new sentence built from the pieces you took apart.

--Beadgee (Tamar Schori)

The links are down for the moment, but I'm blogging this so I remember it and try it later.

Big Idea Productions, makers of the best-selling VeggieTales video series, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday, as part of a deal to sell the financially troubled company. | Big Idea has agreed to sell its assets?including copyrights to Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber and other VeggieTales characters?to Classic Media LLC, which owns or manages media properties such as "Rocky and Bullwinkle," "Lassie," "The Lone Ranger" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." --VeggieTales Creators File for Bankruptcy (Christianity Today)

I put this under "cyberculture" because the characters are computer-generated. Apparently the buyers do plan to keep the characters alive, but the creators will be employees now instead of owners.

The very idea of giving up perfect control over how and whether content is re-used is treason among insiders. But as the BBC understands, it does not live in Disney World. And in the course of its internal review an obvious question has become increasingly pressing: if the BBC could make its archive available cheaply, what reason is there for keeping it from the people who have already paid for it? Moreover, such access would increase the BBC’s chances of selling content commercially and make it more likely that the technology to cultivate this content (computers) will be more eagerly bought. -- Lawrence Lessig --Lawrence Lessig: The BBC's lessons for America (Financial Times)

Reflection on the BBC's decision to open its entire archive up to the public. This makes sense, because the British public has already paid for the content through high taxes and licenses for television sets. But it is the exact opposite of what Hollywood wants to do.

Who Cares About Andy Roddick -- So today I read a quick story about Andy Roddick. He just won the U.S. Open. I did a search for him on Google to learn more, and I found his official web site. Fine. No problem. Then I clicked on a link to read about his U.S. Open victory and I'm told that "You have reached a Members Only area" -- say what? Are you kidding me? Why the &$%^#*! would I register for this site? Whatever. I'm not going to spend any more time at Andy's site. What a complete waste of my time. --John S. Rhodes --Who Cares About Andy Roddick (WebWord)

From one of the comments:

Well, there is a Netiqette rule that whoever comes first across a site that requires 'free' registration, will create a 'guest account' using 'username' and 'password' as the username/password combination

Locking content behind doors will cause a few people to pay for it, but most people will probably give up and look elsewhere for free stuff -- and there goes your audience (and your potential future customers). Often, the value of any particular online document is not worth the cost in time and loss of privacy. What will Andy Roddick do with his knowledge of my e-mail address, gender, and birthday? Send me a blue e-card to help me celebrate my 35th next month?

I've been fretting and procrastinating over another definition I'm writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, you see, this one's on cyberpunk (the genre) and I've never published a thing on cyberpunk. -- Jill Walker --Definition: Cyberpunk (jill/txt)

Jill is taking comments on the draft of her definition of cyberpunk. Neal Stephenson says that cyberpunk is dead. Spider Robinson recently said that SF is in decline because young people are no longer excited about space and science -- they're already living in the future.

The automated essay scoring engine behind Criterion, called e-rater, has been used to score more than 1.5 million essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, in tandem with human readers. The machine score and the human score are in agreement 97 percent to 98 percent of the time. --For Student Essayists, an Automated Grader (NY Times)

Last fall, the Criteria people contacted me and asked me to participate in a test. I never got to look at the algorithm, because the interface was so buggy -- about a third of the students reported some problem, including their text window blanking out when they used the spell-check or dictionary. The person running the test admitted (via e-mail) that they were having big problems, and that the other tests they had run weren't showing much correlation between the human-assigned and computer-assigned scores.

I was supposed to mark the papers and submit the scores to Criteria, which makes perfect sense, but quite frankly the students were so stressed by the experience that I had to tell them midway through that the assignment wouldn't count as a grade. Upon hearing that, some students stopped taking the assignment seriously. Furthermore, once I realized that the Criteria system was recording my students' real names in its internal database, I didn't like the idea of telling the company what grades my students were getting -- that would be a violation of the students' privacy. And, since so many students reported problems with the interface, the assignment wasn't really worth my time to evaluate -- I just treated it as one of the many "did they do it or not" exercises that compose the class participation score.

I can see this being a useful tool in huge lecture courses where it's impossible for one person to read all essays, in which case the tool can be used to normalize the scores (that is, to tell graders whether they have a tendency to give unusually high or low marks).

Link found via Slashdot, where at least one poster says that knowing an essay will be computer-scored provides a good rationalization for submitting comptuer-generated essays. Of course, the amount of effort that it would take to program essay-generation software would probably be a lot harder than the effort it would take just to write the damn essay, but a true hacker doesn't care about mundane stuff like that.

The professor of a huge art history course or a history or philosophy survey (where the point of the course is to communicate a lot of facts in the hopes that the students will be able to relate them and synthesize them during the course and perhaps build on them later in more advanced classes) might use a tool like this to help students practice working all the names and dates into coherent narratives. Although multiple-choice tests are easy to grade, they are a lot harder to create than a couple of short-essay prompts -- so I can imagine using such a tool to help me evaluate short quizzes that are designed to ensure that students have done the assigned readings.

Composition teachers and creative writing teachers do so much more than mark errors in grammar and punctuation. There's little danger that these teachers will turn to software like Criteria for any heavy-duty assignments.

I'd much rather see a tool that trains students to evaluate their peers' papers. Someday maybe I'll ask for a sabbatical to develop it as an open source projet, but until then I'll just dream.

Recall is a search engine at the Internet Archive that indexes the text of over 11 Billion pages. The archive has pages dating way back to 1996 through the present day. --'Recall' Search Engine (Internet Archive)

The engine is in beta. I tried typing in a quoted two-word query, but the results came back as if I had typed two separate words.

Naked and empty-handed, I ran back to the forest in search of my body. As I approached my corpse, I was attacked by a half-dozen zombies. An hour later, after being continually slaughtered, I decided to call it a night. -- Aaron Delwiche --Warning: Do not follow strangers into Kithicor forest at night.  (Aaron Delwiche's Journal)

Delwiche taught "Ethnography of Online Role-Playing Games" at the University of Washington last spring.

Java and .NET take vastly different approaches to development, said John Rymer, a vice president with Forrester Research. Java's philosophy of development is to expose low-level system interfaces to give developers greater control. Microsoft simplifies the development process; the developer has less control -- but the tools are easier to use. -- Vincent Ryan --Is Java Finished? (News Factor)

Update: This blog has set off Will's FUD-sensors:

I read the article you posted on your blog. I don't have time to detail all the innacuracies, but this is my favorite: ".NET's ease of use and lower licensing costs also will be a draw." Lower licensing costs?!? How is microsoft offering lower licensing costs than "free"? They weren't giving away their software the last time I checked.

Oh, good... now I can live in denial for a little while longer.

Update: Will responds again:

And you may be thinking to yourself "What if java/jsp goes away? Will I have learned all this stuff for nothing?" I say - it's not going to go away. Even if microsoft gains a decent market share in the dynamic web page market, I don't see them giving away their server software any time soon. Which means java/jsp will still be your best choice, because it's free. In addition, I would like to point out that Sun is not the only company backing java. IBM also puts a lot of support into java (the free IDE you're using, Eclipse, is actually made by IBM). And Oracle is a big backer of java as well.

I'm sure in 20 to 30 years (just like C++), java will be outdated by some new programming language/paradigm that probably doesn't even exist now. But it's still the longest lastest technology that you could learn today.

Update, 06 Sep: Will sends a link to "blah blah blah," whose author tells technological doomsayers "stfu."

Thanks, Will.

just finished a draft of an encyclopedia entry about "artificial intelligence." It's for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and so, of course, it deals with how AI relates to narrative. Following Jill's example, I have posted this draft in case anyone has comments on who I might have slighted, how I might have misrepresented AI, etc.... --Nick Montfort --Nick Montfort on Artificial Intelligence (Grand Text Auto)

For those with time to notice, blogs are also a great cheap farm system for talent. You've got tens of thousands of potential columnists writing for free, fueled by passion, operating in a free market where the cream rises quickly. | Best of all, perhaps, the phenomenon is simply entertaining. When do you last recall reading some writer and thinking "damn, he sure looks like he's having fun"? It's what buttoned-down reporters thought of their long-haired brethren back in the 1960s. The 2003 version may not be so immediately identifiable on sight — and that may be the most promising development of all. -- Matt Welch --Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld (Columbia Journalism Review)

Excellent overview of weblogs from the perspective of a journalist. Welch laments that the alternative weekly newspapers, once famous for their offbeat egalitarianism, have become comformist and stodgy. But he also warns,

[A]lmost every criticism about blogs is valid - they often are filled with cheap shots, bad spelling, the worst kind of confirmation bias, and an extremely off-putting sense of self-worth (one that this article will do nothing to alleviate).

In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us - through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear. -- Tom Coates responds to Clay Shirky's Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing. --(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurization of (Nearly) Everything (Plastic Bag)

There are the always-in-fashion temptresses -- DeepThroat, Hooker, FunLove, Love Letter, NakedWife, Paradise -- and the ones that seem to refer to the person who created the worm: Annoying, Brat, Coma, Faker, Glitch, SadHound, Slacker, Small, TheThing and Yo Momma.

And there are also names that seem to make no sense at all: Gokar, Klez, Nimda, Welyah, Yaha.

A name is expected to have some relation to the capabilities or concept behind the virus, but antivirus researchers admit that more than a few viruses have been named in a rather whimsical fashion. -- Michelle Delio --Viruses, Worms: What's in a Name?  (Wired)

Via blacklily8 on KairosNews.

Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of "cut-and-paste" plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior trivial or not cheating at all. | Only 10 percent of students had acknowledged such cheating in a similar, but much smaller survey three years ago. --Sara Rimer

--A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism (NY Times)

I wish I had the answer. I don't, but I've taken some small steps of my own.

First, I will not open e-mail attachments, period, unless I know the item is coming beforehand or have extremely good reasons to believe it's not carrying an evil payload. If you want me to see a file such as a PDF document, post it on a Web site and let me know where to find it.

Second, I'm being more selective. I have several private e-mail addresses that I give out only to a small number of people for vital communications.

Third, I'm trying to get away from e-mail as much as possible in any event. My favorite way of communicating online is instant messaging.

Dan Gillmor --Spamming sleazebags ruining e-mail (SiliconValley.com)