Technology: October 2003 Archive Page

This Vampire Killing Kit complete with a wooden stake and 10 silver bullets sold for $12,000 as part of Sotheby's sale of 19th century furniture and decorative works of art in New York, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003. The kit, a walnut box that also contained a crucifix, a pistol, a rosary and vessels for garlic powder and various serums, was bought by an anonymous phone bidder. (AP Photo/Sotheby's)
--19thC Vampire-killing Kit (Yahoo/AP)

That doesn't look like a crucifix to me -- it should have a representation of Christ "fixed" to the cross. That's just a metal cross.

The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find "the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon" or "where to find the best airfare to Cuba" by using Amazon's search feature instead. --Monica Soto Ouchi --Amazon's inside look irks authors: Search function previews any page  (Seattle Times)

I think Mike Arnzen said it best -- "As a scholar, I love it. As an author, I hate it."

--Canstruction

Model of Independence Hall, birthplace of the American Revolution. Made out of cans. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Please -- Never Do This!E-Mail)

This message, with the uninformative subject line "November Hours," an empty body, and a 45K MS-Windows attachment (see tips #1, #2 and #3 of "Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips") went out to about 450 people

By my count, this single message consumed 20MB of storage space on computers across Seton Hill University. A better alternative would have been a plain text list, or posting the file online and inviting people to download it if they want it.

On the other hand, it also motivated me to learn how to use the "pixellation" feature on my image editor.

How Amazon can make money from books you already own.

We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of "find me something I've never seen before." But real-life search is often different: You're looking for something you have seen before, but you've somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution's impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it's in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can't remember which one. | "Search inside" could be the perfect solution to this common problem. --Steven Johnson --The Best Search Idea Since Google (Slate)

Amazon's "Search Inside" is starting to feel more and more like Vannevar Bush's memex.

Recent years have seen an explosion in electronic media marketed directly at the very youngest children in our society, yet very little is known about how these changes have played out in young people's lives. In order to help understand the implications, the Foundation conducted a national study of more than 1,000 parents of children ages six months through six years. The findings are published in the report Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers. --Children and Electronic Media (Kaiser Family Foundation)

I imagine that, if today is a slow news day, you will probably see this make its way into TV news shortly. At the moment, there are only a handful of news stories in Google News.

For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google's database, say people close to the discussions. | How that content would be presented is not clear, but it would likely not be provided in excerpted passages to customers, as it is on Amazon. Instead, the material would go into a database that Google spiders would comb, then turning up relevant links. If a user clicks through, they would be sent to a separate page that contains a book abstract and the opportunity to buy the title. Who would actually be responsible for the sale would be a decision presumably left to the publisher. --Steven Zeitchik --Google Studies Creation of Book Database (Publishers Weekly)

If Google is following Amazon.com's lead, it's a sign of Amazon's strength, and a sign of yet another New Media assault on the fortress of Old Media.

P.S. A breaking new story by Steven Zeitchick? Really? ("Zeit" = German for "time," as in "Zeitgeist".)

He never imagined just how unenthusiastic his research sponsors -- and others with a financial stake in atrazine -- would be about his discovery. | Six frustrating years later, Mr. Hayes and his defenders say they know only too well the lengths to which those companies will go to undermine his findings that atrazine may be harmful. --Goldie Blumenstyk --The Price of Research (Chronicle)

The author of this article is careful to check with scientists who say they were unable to repeat Hayes's findings. It would be an irresponsible exaggeration to claim that all corporate research is biased, or that research funded by non-profits or governments is free from similar pressure. In my "Practice of Journalism" class, we are learning to be skeptical of the statistics quoted in agenda-driven press releases, but this article shows the opportunities for the misuse of science are much broader.

P.S. Goldie Blumenstyk? Really?

The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters -- peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit -- who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people's electronic mailboxes comes not only from the sewers but also from the office towers of the biggest and most well-known corporations. --Saul Hansell

--Big Companies Add to Spam (NY Times)

It begins to creep in, almost unnoticed. The levels are further apart. You begin to notice that newly acquired skills are carbon copies of the old ones, with a different coloured icon and a two percent damage increase.... You try out all the little distractions the developers have put in the game to make things 'deep', only to find they're broken, bugged or plain pointless. But you're a trooper. You stiffen that upper lip and press on, certain that if you can only hang in there the good times will arrive and the game will be FUN again. | It is at precisely this point, that me and others like me will part ways with our more determined MMORPG brethren. I, you see, am a quitter. --The Trouble with MMORPGs (Ferrago)

I was approved to be part of the "There.com" beta-test, but when the actual invitation came, I was too busy to follow through. Oh, well.

[B]ooks at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of some willing colleagues, could print out the entire texts of books in the program. --Authors GuildAuthor's Guild Question Amazon's Full-text Search FeatureThe Imprtance Of)

I found the above via Slashdot, on The Importance Of's overview of the Amazon search controversy.

Microsoft's menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it's especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th "Inside PCMag.com" newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it's still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was the last time you saved a file on a floppy? --Lance Ulanoff --Icon See It Now (PC Mag)

Hmm... this may be true in the business world, but the ledge of the whiteboard in the front of every computer room starts collecting abandoned floppy disks around midterm time, and there are often ten or twelve there by the end of term. I suppose this could be taken as evidence that students are abandoning such floppies, but my point is that they are still in use. Only once or twice have I seen an abandoned Zip disk. Nevertheless, I have a little keychain USB drive that I use to bring files back and forth from the office.

In critiquing the "cut" and "paste" icons, Ulanoff says "What a clipboard and a document have to do with pasting is beyond me." It sounds almost like Ulanoff doesn't know that "cut" and "paste" are references to actually taking a pair of scissors (or a razorblade knife) and clipping a chunk of text off of one page and actually sticking it on top of another page. When I was working for the (sadly defunct) University Journal as an undergrad, we would re-use graphics and logos, and while I don't recall whether we actually kept them on a clipboard, I think we kept them in the front cover of a notebook. So the clipboard icon makes sense to me. Ulanoff's point is, of course, that these images come from the print world -- a world that is more and more remote, and more and more metaphorical, to users of electronic text.

Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it's still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books. --Gary Wolf --The Great Library of Amazonia  (Wired)

Brewster Kahle wants the world to know that old software is an important part of our cultural history and -- like books, films and other media -- should be preserved. --Daniel Terdiman --Fighting to Preserve Old Programs

Problem? The DMCA prohibits the archiving of software, on the grounds that doing so violates intellectual property rights.

..the most evocative and atmospheric experiences were conveyed entirely through text. Text adventures, with their terse locations, thrived on the role of objects, which were there to be discovered, smashed, used, examined and combined: you find the lamp, but now you need the oil to fill it and the match to light it. Only then will the dark room become illuminated. --In the early days of computer gaming... (Things Magazine)

I really enjoy this author's writing style. The paragraphs are a bit long as far as Internet conventions go, but numerous inline links break up the paragraphs, so that the author can cover a wide range of territory in just a few condensed sentences.

Update, 25 Oct: Torill picks up on this blog entry and offers far more thoughtful comments than I did.

At one prestigious university, a sophomore imported 30 biology books from England this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit. Next semester, if all goes well, he plans to expand the operation. | "The only difference is that they say `international edition' in little print on the cover," said the student, who added that he was not certain whether his project raised any legal issues, and therefore asked that neither he nor his college be identified. --Tamar Lewin --Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas (NY Times (Reg; expires))

Via KairosNews.

1.) Weblogs deal in the golden rule, modified to read: link unto others as you would have them link unto you.

6.) The quality of any weblog in journalism depends greatly on its fidelity to age old newsroom commandments (virtues) like check facts, check links, spell things correctly, be accurate, be timely, quote fairly. And as Roy Peter Clark says, if you?re telling a story and there'sa dog, get the name of the dog. --Ten Things Conservative about the Weblog Form in Journalism (PressThink)

A good counterpoint to an earlier article "Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism"

Together these articles are a tremendously well-written (and well-linked) introduction to weblogs in the world of journalism (or journalism in the blogosphere).

Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless. --Bob Blaisdell reviews Todd Oppenheimer' s The Flickering Mind --Why Computers Have Not Saved the Classroom (CS Monitor)

Oppenheimer argues that when technology is working, it is because enthusiastic teachers have made it work. He notes with alarm that politicians and parents seem more comfortable with spending money on technology than spending money on teachers.

I can say with certainty that all the technology in the world won't help if the teachers don't have the training to use it; and that translates to giving them time to learn for themselves what the technology can do for them. Many teachers who think of a curricular website as a photocopying machine (just stick the handouts up there so students can download them and print them out) will never reall understand how the Internet has changed the process of researching a paper.

Parents have been advised to consider making their own babyfood after the discovery of a toxin linked to cancer in jars of manufactured food sold all over the world.... The European agency said that the toxin was getting into food through the plastic gaskets used to seal glass jars with metal twist-off lids, although experts could not say how much. --Valerie Elliott --Mothers told: 'Make your own babyfood' in cancer alert (Times Online)

Note that the experts quoted in this story are much more cautious than the headline suggests.

1.) The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.

4.) In the weblog world every reader is actually a writer, and you write not so much for “the reader” but for other writers. So every reader is a writer, yes, but every writer is also a reader of other weblog writers—or better be.

--Jay Rosen --Ten Things Radical about the Weblog Form in Journalism (PressThink)

The "gift economy" thing is something I often find myself explaining to my old-media colleagues. While I do wonder, sometimes, why I spend so much time blogging, the truth is, I enjoy it immensely.

Still, here I am, giving away my thoughts "for free," instead of carefully hoarding them and compressing them into a conference paper that I intend to read out loud to an audience of ten or twenty people, at a cost to my university of up to $1000 (for conference fees, airfare, hotel), and a cost to my family of two or three days of my absence.

I'm grading student blogging portfolios. The students were asked to include about four of their best blog entries, and samples of comments that they made on other students' weblogs. Some students reported feeling disappointed that their best blog entries didn't generate a lot of comments from readers. They can "gift" each other by posting comments on each others blogs, of course. But since it's probably fair to say that even the most enthusiastic bloggers are blogging more than they really want to (since I do give "forced blogging" topics), their experience as student bloggers doesn't really mesh too well with the gift economy.

Would today's tykes tolerate the classic games you grew up with? Kids do say the darndest things... --Kids Play (EGM)

The premise: force a bunch of tweens to play the games my generation grew up with. Just how badly do yesterday's games suck... and how badly to today's kids suck while playing them?

The article is annoyingly laid out without a table of contents, so you have to click blindly through chaining "next" links... so...

• Pong
• Donkey Kong, Football, Tetris
• Super Mario Bros, E.T., Space Invaders

Found on MetaFilter.

Is there such a thing as 'bad genes'?

(The fifth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

If there are bad genes, then there must also be good genes. It is perhaps unfair to bring up Nazi Germany's aryan supremacy theories every time such a question comes up, but if we want to talk about good and bad genes, we have to talk about who decides which genes are good and which are bad. In the 1947 Arthur Miller play "All My Sons," a character who lost a son in WWII ponders idly that a doctor who invented a way to bring baby boys into the world without trigger fingers would be a millionaire; parents who did not want their sons to be drafted to fight in wars could rest assured that their boys wouldn't be physically capable of firing a rifle.

James Watson, of the famous duo Watson and Crick credited with the discovery of DNA (though let's not forget Barbara McClintock, upon whose early work Watson and Crick built), recently gave a BBC interview in which he says people who score in the lower 10% of achievement tests probably have a gentic disease, and that he feels it is society's duty to screen for stupidity. He downplays the impact of poverty (an environmental concern). He also advocates breeding women to be prettier.

Watson says that low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.

"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."

Watson, no stranger to controversy, also suggests that genes influencing beauty could also be engineered. "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."

(From "Stupidity should be cured, says DNA discoverer.")

I didn't see the interview in question so I can't comment on the context -- maybe Watson was joking when he talked about scientifically breeding women to look pretty. But the dark side of that is, who decides? Because Watson is talking about "helping" that lower 10%, I presume he means coming up with some way to fix their genetic problem, rather than, for instance, sterilizing all people who fail a certain test, or using abortion or contraception to "breed a race of thoroughbreds" -- which was at one point the slogan of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood).

Side note: Sanger is on record as stating that the woman, not the state, should make decisions about childbearing, but and many of her contemporaries did support programs that encouraged the sterilization of illiterates, the "feebleminded", etc. A 1927 Supreme Court case upheld the forced sterilization of certain classes of people, so her eugenic beliefs were not that far from the mainstream at the time. Naturally, pro-life activists want to play up Sanger's involvement in the eugenics movement, and pro-choice activists want to distance themselves from Sanger's more controversial statements.

Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not?

(The fourth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

I've only seen the first two movies, so I can't really comment on the technical details as presented in the books (where I imagine they are presented in more detail). I hope I don't get asked this question. But a few minutes with Google yields the following:

• According to the BBC, a grove of plants that are survivors from the Jurassic age was found in Australia about 10 years ago, and cuttings from those plants will be marketed to gardners in 2005. But those plants weren't re-constructed -- they simply happened to survive all that time.
• Dolly the sheep was in fact cloned from a parent, but she started off as a living cell. And she was recently put to sleep because she aged prematurely -- suggesting that science has to progress a lot further to make a successful cloning even with live tissue.
• IN 2002, Japanese scientists announced a plan to clone a mammoth from frozen tissue samples. Somebody thinks this is possible, or they wouldn't be trying it. But the mammoth sample is about 25,000 years old. Success with a 25,000 year-old mammoth wouldn't necessarily indicate progress towards cloning an animal extinct for 65-million-years.
• I gather that fossilization is a lot more destructive than freezing. I don't know much about the digestion of prehistoric mosquitos, but I don't imagine that being in the stomach of an insect would be the best environment to preserve a blood sample.

Will the human genome diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life?

(The third of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

We've had the human genome all along; its been here all along, just like gravity existed before Newton. What's new is the Human Genome Project -- is a vast scientific effort to identify and catalogue all 3 billion DNA subunits that describe our genetic blueprint. Techniques for creating "designer babies," if legal, will be available only for the rich and the elite.

The ancients who were curious about the stars and the planets but couldn't comprehend them resorted to their imagination, telling each other stories about gods. Science has more recently turned those heavenly bodies into planets and solar systems, but we still managed to tell each other science-fiction stories about aliens and computers and robots. Now that computers and robots are part of our daily lives, and now that immigration and global communication has brought us into increasigly close contact with "alien" cultures in other parts of the world, our science-fiction has in recent decates been filled with stories of cyberspace and robot-human hybrids. Because I wear glasses and have a filled tooth, I am in some sense part machine; I am a cyborg. In very recent years, we've seen a rise in fantasy/mythology -- a return to magic and a retreat from technology. Are we going full circle? Probably not.

My point is that we are soo good at imagining that I don't think we will run out of unexplainable things that bother us. Case in point -- the rise in conspiracy theories, or reports of crop circles, alien abductions, tabloid sightings of Elvis and JFK, auctions of Beatles memorabilia, people who collect PEZ or structure their whole life around Disney theme parks.

The worst-case scenarious that have long been part of the science-fiction scene will increasingly penetrate to philosophers, who will write densely footnoted tomes, and somebody will write an incomprehensible postmodern epic interpreting the genome, which will be the subject of countless academic conferences and English Lit dissertations. But for the rest of us, making babies the old fashioned way will still be fun, and the information gained from the sequencing project will probably help more of those babies lead long and healthy lives.

What are the potential injustices or misuses of DNA information?

(The second of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.)

According to the Human Genome Project's website on genetic legislation, no laws have yet been passed regarding the use of genetic information in healthcare, employment, and so forth.

Already, insurance companies collect all sorts of statistical data about life expectancy and risky lifestyles. A smoker who gets a lot of speeding tickets and is a member of a skydiving club is a bad insurance risk -- but all of those risks are rootted in chosen behavior. Is it ethical for an insurance company to charge higher rates to a person whose genes might indicate an increased risk for, say, heart disease, or sickle-cell anemia? As it happens, heart disease and sickle-cell anemia are both conditions that affect people of African descent at a higher rate than other populations -- so if you permit companies to set different rates based on genetic information, that opens up a can of worms. Who determines which genes are desireable, and which are not? (My answer to this one spills over into my answer for "Are there such a thing as 'bad genes'?")

On average, internet users spend three and a half hours a day on the internet compared with 2.8 hours a day watching television. | The research, which is the first to suggest the internet has overtaken the television as the most popular medium among people who have both, will provide further grist to the mill of those who argue the web will eventually spell the end of linear television. --Owen Gibson --Surfers switch off TV for PCs  (Guardian)

China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, 38, was hurled into outer space by Shenzhou-5 spacecraft at 9 a.m. Wednesday from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu Province. --Xinhaunet --Shenzhou-5 launch successful (China View)

Just as a shark must swim to breathe, a hard drive must be in motion to receive or return data. This air bearing technology, as it is called (pioneered at IBM in the 1950s), explains why dust and other contaminants must be kept out of the drive casing at all costs. If the heads touch the surface of the drive while it is in motion the result is what is known as a head crash: the head, which it must be remembered is moving at speeds upward of one hundred miles per hour, will plow a furrow across the platter, and data is almost impossible to recover. Thus, a key aspect of the hard drive'smateriality as an agent of digital inscription is quite literally created out of thin air. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms: Grammatology of the Hard Drive (MGK)

Kirshenbaum is publishing excerpts from his forthcoming book, which examines the hard drive as an inscription machine. Here's part of a somewhat rambling comment I posted on his site:

I was at a zoo today and suddenly realized that the term "fledgling" has an orinthological origin -- it's not a metaphor to apply the term to birds. It's amazing that I've been using that word for decades and it never occurred to me. Thanks for similarly making me understand the term "hard drive crash".

A post on netwoman reads:

Dale Spender and Helen Fallon (1998) also assert that terminology such as 'abort', 'chaining', 'thrashing', 'execute', 'head crash', and 'kill' portray negative images of sex and violence to women, creating an uncomfortable and unfamiliar terrain. http://www.netwomen.ca/Blog/2003_09_01_archive.html#106427418616569858

I haven't read the specific article referenced, but I wonder if your description of the technology of computers as a physical environment (on the micro level) would place the percieved violence of computer terminology into another context.

I'll be going to an academic setting in order to become a game programmer. What's interesting is that just as there are film degrees (one of which I currently own) that combine the fields of literature and art with a variety of other disciplines, including physics among others, there are degrees in game creation. Places that do not seek to be known as giving out "degrees in playing games" as my aunt and uncle sometimes derisively refer to it call their degrees things like "Human-Computer Interaction" which, to be fair, can cover more than just games. Things like biofeedback for medical purposes are also examined. While gaming in education has yet to pan out, these people are doing some amazing things. As a part of the curricula, students also examine the historical place that gaming holds. In addition, they also examine how to integrate filmic and literary concepts into interactive computing. --Dade --Gaming in Education (Switchbox)

At the height of the Internet boom, e-books were hailed as the shining new tomorrow for publishers and paper books were heading for the scrap heap. | But the bubble has burst and electronic books are still the poor relation to the printed word with consumers preferring to turn the pages themselves when they curl up by the fire with a good book. --Paul Majendie --Bubble bursts for electronic books (SignOnSanDiego)

"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says. | But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues. --Jo Twist --Web guru fights info pollution (BBC)

A good interview with Jakob Nielsen. The bit about procrastination isn't new to anyone who's spent time on a college campus recently... and I'm definitely guilty of using my blog as a way to convince myself I'm being productive when I've got ten or fifteen minutes to kill... when in reality, I often read gad about online for an hour or more before I find something that really motivates me to blog.

P.S. Jo Twist? Really?

Monkeys can control a robot arm as naturally as their own limbs using only brain signals, a pioneering experiment has shown. The macaque monkeys could reach and grasp with the same precision as their own hand. --Duncan Graham-Rowe --Monkey's brain signals control 'third arm' (New Scientist)

Without getting into the politics (other than to say I find Sept 12 to be a useful, thought-provoking piece, and exciting new genre for games), I'm not sure why Greg and some of his commenters are so vitriolically opposed to calling Sept 12 a simulation. --Simulation Aggravation (GrandTextAuto)

"Sept 12" is an interactive political cartoon -- a very short game in which you, as the player, target a city that contains some terrorists and many civillians. The weapons you fire cause a great deal of collateral damage, so that you inevitably kill some civillians, causing more civillians to become terrorists. It's a simple message -- too simple, really, since it's easy to convince yourself that the problem is that you don't have the right kind of weapon. Wouldn't a sniper rifle make more sense? But that's not the question the makers of the game intend to raise. And the fact that there are already terrorists in the game before you fire the first shot raises a chicken-or-egg question that the game isn't equpped to answer.

At any rate, I enjoy reading (and sometimes participating in) the meaty debates that go on in the comments on GrandTextAuto -- it's like making a short, free visit to a really good academic conference, where you don't have to sit through pompous 40-minute presentations, but can instead get right to the Q & A with intelligent, articulate, and opinionated people.

These are your panel questions. You will be asked some of them, not necessarily in this order:

1. Is our fate in our genes or in our stars? Explain.
2. What are the potential injustices or misuses of DNA information?
3. Will the human genome diminish humanity by taking the mystery out of life?
4. Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not?
5. Is there such a thing as "bad genes"? Explain.

Please be sure to tell your students about this. I think it will be interesting and entertaining for everyone. I look forward to it.

Thanks,

Marcy



Marcia Pietrala

Reference and Public Services

Reeves Memorial Library

Seton Hill UniversityDNA Ethics Panel QuestionsE-Mail)

I was asked to participate in a panel on DNA ethics, to be held [at 6 pm] at the Seton Hill library Thursday evening. I'm hardly a genetic expert, but I thought, what the heck? I often ask my students to write and speak about subjects that are new to them, so it's only fair to give it a try myself. I have in the past ranted about eugenics in this blog.

In a statement, SunnComm Technologies Inc. said it would sue Alex Halderman over the paper, which said SunnComm's MediaMax CD-3 software could be blocked by holding down the "Shift" key on a computer keyboard as a CD using the software was inserted into a disc drive. --Ben Berkiwitz --Princeton Student Sued Over Paper on CD Copying (WashPost/Reuters)

Whoops -- I just saw an update: SunnComm backed down.

On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. "I still see my hands coming off the railing," he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable--except for having just jumped." --Tad Friend
--Letters from California: Jumpers (New Yorker)

Barriers are being destoyed at the same time as bridges are being built within the literary community just as in almost every other field affected by the almighty computer. Arguments fly on all sides especially as to what constitutes art. Progress constantly changes the determination--even when it may be that it is a subjective view, after all. Time and experimentation move things beyond the established (to date) criteria and may improve, but certainly expand the categories. Homo's red handprint on the cave wall can not remain the standard forever. --Susan --Interactive FictionSpinning)

One of Steve Ersinghouse's students tackles the 1999 text adventure game "Photopia" and reflects in broader terms on digital literature.

Once the system is in place, patrons will be asked to stand in front of a camera to have their picture taken and will then swipe their drivers' licence, or possibly show some other form of identification, that will automatically give the establishment the patron's name and age and show if he or she has caused trouble at any other bar on the network. --Lori Cuthbert and Amy O'Brian --High-tech targets bad bar customers (Canada.com/Vancouver Sun)

Does anyone remember when SCMODS was a joke?

Raelians have made fun of the media that gave such extensive coverage to their cloning story. --Brigitte McCann --Rael's Clones a Hoax? (Calgary Sun)

This article refers to the burst of media attention this odd sect got over claims that a human had been successfully cloned.

A very outgoing young man in my class ("Troy") keeps a blog (Internet diary) about his schoolwork, partying, and politics. As I read his entries, including his grousing about my class, I tell myself that I am not eavesdropping, and that he is entitled to write whatever he likes in a public forum. Yet his field is public-school teaching, for which I think his openness about his life might hamper his chances of getting a job. Should I advise him or let it go? -- Letter posted to "Ms. Mentor" advice column --Keeping a Lid on Your Blog (Chronicle)

I can't help thinking of the middle-school teacher fired over a website he created when he was 19. When does the online confessional become too public?

A study carried out by USA Today and seven other newspapers in 2001 concluded that faulty design, not punch-card machines, was responsible for voters' confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000. Despite this finding, states have focused their election-reform energies on upgrading old punch-card machines to optical-scan systems or on implementing electronic voting. They have dismissed or ignored the butterfly layout's problematic design as an aberration—a stupid mistake on the part of local officials. --Jessie Scanlon --Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot (Slate)

See also "Why Usability Testing Matters" -- my quick-n-dirty treatment of the Florida presidential ballot that caused so much controversy in 2000. While usability got a bit of broader exposure due to that flap, it looks like local officials haven't tackled the real problem yet.

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). --The Blogging Iceberg (Perseus)

Predictably, Orlowski is all over this one, especially because the news broke during Harvard's $500-a-head BloggerCon. Don't miss the comparison between blogging and a dog licking its own genitals.

KairosNews points to Oliver Wrede's reaction to the Perseus survey; Wrede notes that the survey was skewed towards the personal blog, and didn't seem to include users of the power-user weblog tools such as MovableType.

My trawling of BlogDex reveals "Deflating the Blog Bubble," which sensibly suggests that -- gasp -- blogs might not be the solution to all the world's problems. (That article suggests that blogs are mostly of interest to upperclass white men, which is interesting in light of Orlowski's assertion that most blogs are written by teenage girls.)

Surely not all the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials concede, but given the expectations of students who have grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete as an eight-track cassette.

"These are not frills," said Daniel M. Fogel, president of the University of Vermont. "They are absolute necessities."

The University of Vermont plans to spend up to $70 million on a new student center, a colossal complex with a pub, a ballroom, a theater, an artificial pond for wintertime skating and views of the mountains and Lake Champlain. --Greg Winter (registration; will expire) --Jacuzzi U.? A Battle of Perks to Lure Students  (NY Times)

And people wonder 1) why students can't find time to do their homework and 2) why college tuition is skyrocketing. Note that no single college has every one of the extravagant luxuries mentioned in this article -- the overall feeling of pandering to the whims of potential students is exaggerated because the author has chosen to focus on the most extravagant luxuries he found. Still, it is amazing. Via Arnzen's PEDABLOGUE, where I posted a relevant quote from Malcolm X.

What does it look like at exactly 25 degrees N, 8 degrees E? What about the other places on the globe where latitutde and longitude lines intersect? Find out at Confluences. --Degree Confluence Project (Orbitals)

Link via Rosemary Frezza, who also sends this BBC article: "A Unique Picture of the World."

Google is engaged in a battle royale with rivals Overture -acquired by Yahoo - and Sprinks for the lucrative classified text ad business. Initially welcomed as the potential savior of small websites, including blogs, Adwords payments have trickled away in recent weeks, webloggers note. --Andrew Orlowski --Google shafts blogger, adds gagging clause to Adsense (Register)

Is Google turning evil? Has Orlowski found a new target?

Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi's search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws were. All this, while his pages remained well ranked on Google. "I lost a quarter of my traffic," says Spooner. --Ben Elgin --Web Searches: The Fix Is In  (Business Week)

A while ago, I lamented that, when copying and pasting from an online source, it's a pain to have to re-create the links and other HTML embedded in the text. DrWeb sent me this e-mail, and gave me permission to post it here:

Just a note.. saw your post on the Kaironews site, and decided to write since I am not registered there to post or comment.. Re: http://kairosnews.org/node/view/3352

I found this pretty neat plug-in for Web Developers that works, from, um, Microsoft site, and it allows your wish for IE5.x versions. I tried it out tonight, and it works. You highlight text you want to blog and cite, and right-click, and on the menu, you pick "view partial source." It grabs the links and text in that partial source code --viola!

I found the answer via Blogzilla, see http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/ie_phantom_pain.html

and the small downloadable script/code is here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/previous/webaccess/webdevaccess.asp for View Selection [Partial] Source and a DOM tree.

Best,
DrWeb

--
P. Michael McCulley aka DrWeb
mailto:drweb@earthlink.net
San Diego, CA
http://drweb.typepad.com/

Quote of the Moment:
This tagline only to be removed by the consumer.

View Source add-in IE (to help in blogging)...E-Mail)

I've tested it out, and it works just fine. I'll still have to do some hand coding, but this is a great time-saver. I've been virtuously keeping my blogging to a minimum today, since I've got a backlog of student papers to grade.

"We now have a greater understanding of why biscuits develop cracks shortly after being baked." -- PhD student Qasim Saleem, quoted in an article by Christine McGourty --Broken Biscuit Breakthrough (BBC)

A biscuit in the UK is what Americans refer to as a "cracker". Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

[M]ore than 1,000 fans [were] turned away from turnstiles for up to 1-1/2 hours over a bizarre ticket snafu.|The fans - many of them season ticket holders - were forced to wait on line until as late as the fourth inning to get replacement tickets after accidentally tearing their ducats out of ticket books without the stubs. --Stuck at the Gate  (NY Daily News)

Blame the user -- a typical management ploy. I haven't seen a picture of the tickets in question, but if 1,000 people all made the same mistake, the ticket books were poorly designed. Period. Usability testing could have caught that long before it angered so many people.