Technology: December 2003 Archive Page

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work. --Web's Inventor Gets a Knighthood (BBC)

Definitely one of the good guys. If he had tried to keep control over his invention, of course it wouldn't have worked, since the web depends upon the contributions of thousands and millions of user-authors.

Patrice Moore, 43, had apparently been standing up when the books, catalogs, mail and newspapers swamped him on Saturday. Firefighters and neighbors rescued Moore on Monday afternoon and he was hospitalized in stable condition Tuesday morning with leg injuries. --Man Trapped Under Mountain of Books, Papers (CNN/AP)

Note to self: find a sturdy box and insert all the papers students didn't pick up last term. Mark box for recycling at the end of next term. Reuse same box at end of next term, so a mound doesn't start to grow. (What to do with all the abandoned 3-ring binders?)

--WebWord Returning Soon! (WebWord)

John S. Rhodes, whose WebWord.com has been down for several months, is planning to bring it back early in 2004. Hurrah!

--Blogging Changing Journalism (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A small number of my students noted in their end-of-term reflection that they weren't all that comfortable with blogging because they expected a course in traditional journalism, not all this cyberspace stuff...

--Virtual Punchcard Server (Facade.com)

I found this and a great Tongue Twister Database (if by "database" you mean "long list") via J-Walk Weblog.

Sites are getting better at using minimalist design, maintaining archives, and offering comprehensive services. However, these advances entail their own usability problems, as several prominent mistakes from 2003 show. --Jakob Nielsen --Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Alertbox)

Usually Nielsen's blurbs are more informative... the "summary" on his site reads more like a marketing tease. To give you a sense of what the page is like, I'll have to collect the first 5 subheadings: "1. Unclear Statement of Purpopse," "2. New URLs for Archived Content," "3. Undated Content," "4. Small Thumbnail Images of Big, Detailed Photos," and "5. Overly detailed ALT Text."

Since archived content, thumbnails and alt text (that's the descriptive text that sometimes pops up near your mouse pointer, usually in a yellow box) are all good things, Nielsen's observations are helpful for those who have implemented these good things in a less-than-optimal way. Observations six through nine are about information architecture, and thus not something my own students are likely to need; while the last item (warning designers about pages that link to themselves) is very relevant to my teaching of newbie web authors.

His full-time job is to keep software-loving scientists and engineers from burying their "whats" in their "hows." It's not easy, because PowerPoint's "hows" get more numerous and distracting with each new release. MORE, the original presentation software, was a 300k program that turned outlines into "bullet charts," its two-word noun for slides. The latest versions of PowerPoint want 10 megs of RAM and come with 25 megs worth of files. Nearly all of it is about "how" rather than "what." --Doc Searles --It's the Story, Stupid: Don't Let Presentation Software Keep You from Getting Your Story Across (Doc Searles)

From 1998, but very appropriate in light of all the PowerPoint links I've recently come across. Near the bottom I found this gem: "Edit aggressively. Less is more. Create a market for your next presentation by leaving the sequel out of this one." Of course, that assumes the speaker wants to present.

Hmm... much of the best advice on giving presentations doesn't address the needs of students, who aren't experts in the subjects they are asked to present on, and who are often not particularly interested in the course. I suppose from a marketing perspective that's not an audience that will pay for a book of presentation tips... but still, I'm interested in anything that will make canned presentations more bearable and educational for the other 29 students in the class (at least some of whom may, possibly, be interested...)

Found this one via Scott Adams (the Arkansas Tech University faculty member -- neither the cartoonist nor the programmer).

Some legal experts said that posting documents detailing the criminal charges against the 45-year-old entertainer was a breakthrough for public access. Others countered that it would undermine the spirit of the law and court proceedings, creating even more of a circus-like atmosphere. --Sue Zeidler --Jackson Web Site Unites, Divides Legal Profession (Yahoo/Reuters)

I've blogged about Jackson's defense website, so it seems only fair to link to this article, which mentions the prosecution's site and also comments on the trend towards online access to legal documents.

While many of my students are getting the hang of this, just as many aren't. I'm sure it's that some are simply more motivated than others, some feel more comfortable writing for an audience, others are more passionate about their topics, and some are just more confident in their abilities in general. But what those of us using Web logs are trying to articulate now are the strategies that will help students make the most of their blogging efforts while at the same time envision the ways in which they might be included in the curriculum. --Will R. --More Thinking on Student Blogging (Weblogg-Ed)

Same color palette: greens, blues, and reds on a synthetic base of white. Same kinds of curves and contours, same balance and proportions. Whereas once upon a time toothbrushes were made from a single plastic cast, contemporary models, like contemporary athletic shoes, are built up out of inscrutable deposits of layers and sediment that speak to some elsuive yet exquisitely refined ergonomic principle. --Matt Kirschenbaum --Of Sneakers and Toothbrushes (MGK)

This one made me smile. Does the target audience for Nike ads actually call them "sneakers" these days? Just curious.

You could dismiss this as nostalgia, GenX-ers pining for the simpler pleasures of their Cold War youth. But that doesn't really explain it, because half the people buying these games are teenagers at Urban Outfitters.

No, these Jurassic games are popular for a more powerful reason: They're the canon of video games, and they prove that keeping it simple still works. Chunky, low-fi games like Pac-Man show us why so many of today's more advanced games can be so paradoxically dull. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past (Microsoft/Slate)

A good application of a few basic elements of game theory to current consumer trends. (His earlier article on videogames as editorals was more trend-spottingly illuminating.)

Don't miss the final line: "Video games turn out to be just like sonnets and pop songs. Often it's restrictions, not freedoms, that inspire creativity."

In my opinion, Google today is far from the great search engine it was in those far-off days, yet I still use it.

Even knowing that it indexes only a small proportion of the web using a technique that too often gives precedence to pages that lack authority or coherence, that it is skewed by multiple blog links and can be manipulated by unscrupulous advertisers, doesn't stop me typing search terms into my toolbar and feasting on the results. --Bill Thompson --Is Google good for you? (BBC)

"A hole in the ground, like any other structurally engineered design, is just an artifact of human technology," said Will Whitfoot, mayor of the town of Michel Delving and a spokesman for the hole-dwelling community of Hobbiton. "Like any tool or technological artifact, it has no moral imperative per se, but performs strictly according to the needs of its user." --Hussein Capture Unfairly Stigmatizes Holes, Say Hobbits (Watley Review)

Perfectly silly.

Beneath the arena's grandeur lay a netherworld of gladiatorial schools and storerooms, all linked by corridors filled with pulleys and levers, animal cages and gladiators. | The system was run by teams of slaves who faced being fed to the animals themselves if their timing went awry.-Michael Leidig --Animal magic of Rome's Colosseum underworld (Sydney Morning Herald)

Well, that's one way to motivate your techies.

Bjorn Lomborg, the author of a controversial book attacking the environment movement, was cleared yesterday of "scientific dishonesty" by the Danish science ministry.

The ministry overturned a ruling in January by the Danish committee on scientific dishonesty (DCSD), part of the Danish Research Agency, that Mr Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist was "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice". --Houlder and MacCarthy --Danish writer cleared of 'scientific dishonesty' (Financial Times)

I've been following this one for a while. Well-meaning reporters and students often uncritically accept the statistics given by activists who misrepresent, misunderstand, or simply mis-emphasize scientific findings.

This bibliography was originally compiled by Scott Stebelman from 1996-2000. Scott, a librarian at Gelman Library at George Washington University from 1986 until 2000, retired recently. The page is currently being updated and enhanced by Dr. Seth Katz and Jim Bonnett at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. --Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography (Bradley University)

The pages I checked focus mainly on print resources published in the mid 90s, and the index page hasn't been updated since 2001, but it still looks very impressive. It led me to a site with much of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies online.

The pleasures of videogames are frequently enjoyed by those that commonsense might encourage us to consider as non-players -- "onlookers" that exert no direct control via the game controls. In this article, I want to suggest that videogame players need not actually touch a joypad, mouse or keyboard and that our definition needs to accommodate these non-controlling roles.

[...]

Many a great game has poor visuals -- an entire generation of players grew up with blips of light, @ signs and even text-only games -- but there are few good game with bad controls. --James Newman --The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames (Game Studies)

Some good observations on the complexity of the player's identification with elements within the game world.

When my son Peter was about 2, he was spooked by one of those little coin-operated riding machines. He still enjoys sitting in them, but he never wants us to put in any money. The employee at the arcade near the shopping mall food court in Wisconsin got to recognize my face, and noticed that I never spent anything; at one point he would drop two or three tokens into a machine where Peter was happily watching the demo loop. When the familiar sequence was replaced with a "get ready to play" screen, Peter would put up with the interruption, or say "You play, Daddy." After the game was over, he would resume his enjoyment of the demo loop.

During the coin-operated videogame craze of the late 70s and early 80s, I spent about two dollars on Asteriods, but I would often go to arcades to watch. Often, after having watched somebody play two or three games, the gamer would invite me to push the fire button, so that he (always a he) could concentrate on moving and accelerating.

Looking back, I wonder whether maybe I should have reciprocated; I never did, and I never recall getting glared at for my stinginess. It was my perception at the time that the paying player was, at least in part, rewarding me for being such an attentive audience.

This is not passive news consumption. Neither is it broadcasting. The average blogger has time to surf the web, but no resources to report stories. Some bloggers will follow a news story to the end, some may lose interest after a few days. Commentary will range from the fully-formed to the random blurt and can freely mix the public and the personal.

All this represents something new: participatory media. And it matters. Not because of its resemblance to familiar institutions, but because of its differences from them. -- Rebecca Blood --The revolution should not be eulogised  (Guardian)

A good article, in which a committed blogger speaks intelligently to the wider world of non-bloggers. I do, however, question her estimate that an "average weblog" will be updated "perhaps a dozen times a day". Blogs that show that much activity are very rare, indeed.

From a Guardian special report on weblogs, which I found on Scott Rettberg's site.

The fact that Google now "sucks" is in a large part not Google's fault: Google simply reflects what it can see, and most of the Web is simply invisible to Google, as it now lies behind closed doors. Google's aggressive, but essentially dumb robots can only get so far. We're painfully aware that Google's lack of specificity leaves its robots chomping through thin air, dead pages, or trackbacks, more often than not. --Andrew Orlowski --A Quantum Theory of Internet Value (The Register)

Orlowski ruminates on the impact of Google Print, a new feature from Google (see BBC's coverage) that searches the contents of selected print books, along with the Internet.

It's a sure bet that the scholarly books that don't have huge print runs or huge advertising budgets won't be the ones paying Google to "feature" their results, which means that Google will be even less valuable than it already is to students seeking credible scholarly information.

I get to add another detail to my list of "why you shouldn't rely on Google" freshman comp speech (which I have to repeat in every class, at every level. Many students, rewarded by their high school teachers for their ability to summarize plot or express their own personal opinion of a text, seem to write up their whole paper first, and only then look for sources.

I ask students to submit notes telling me what they would have done more of if they had the chance, and the activity of scholarly research is often described as "finding quotes that support my argument," rather than constructing an argument based on the reading you have already done.

A student who has already polished the sentences and paragraphs, and has a few hours before being overtaken by sleep (or, in some cases, the actual deadlie) tends not to be very descriminatory when Google returns a list of hits that "look good".

Note: I'd already blogged this article when Jim e-mailed to me a suggestion. Keep 'em coming, Jim.

Gaming Culture and Theory -- Or; Will Somebody Please Pinch Me?Literacy Weblog)

About a half hour ago, I returned from a meeting with the dean of academic affairs, at which I was planning to pitch a new course that I'm calling "Gaming Culture and Theory." I brought a short stack of scholarly books along with me, intending to justify the academic value of such a course, particularly as Seton Hill University continues admitting more men.

But before I even made it to the chair, the dean said, "Just so you know, I'm going to ask you teach this course next January. Tell me, what will it be about?"

In return for teaching a course in the first few weeks of January (during Christmas break), I would get a lighter teaching load in the spring.

In order to accomodate the needs of students who want to go home for Christmas break, the dean wants me to teach the course online, and to commit to teaching it every other year (which is typical of electives at our small school).

I had already roughed up a syallabus that had us meeting in virtural environments for all of the second week and using blogs throughout the term, so I didn't have to think very much about that. She also asked whether the course would meet the university's "artistic expression" area requirement, and I said that I thought it would -- graphic designers could produce storyboards, English majors could write branching dialogue trees, programmers could produce their own Elizas, etc.

I decided to go with a cultural focus, rather than a heavy theoretical focus, because one of my goals would be to get students to begin thinking critically about the games they play (and about the rhetoric of gaming as it is represented by the mainstream media). Perhaps after I've taught more upper-class SHU students, I'll have a clearer idea of what kind of theoretical concepts to attempt, but something tells me a three-week intensive course offered during the January break is going to have to have a lot of hands-on game time. Since three weeks is probably not long enough for students to become fully invested in an epic MMORPG, I don't think I'll be able to work with EverQuest in class. And I want to include an exploring/socializing game, such as There.com, SimsOnline (neither of which I've played). I'm thinking of assignments such as asking students to use their avatars for cross-gendered role-play, to discuss such issues as sexual harrasment or body image in virtural environments. I'm not sure I could teach stand a course on the mathematical algorithms for generating the shadow for a stream of spurting blood, but the course will have to appeal to the gaming geeks in order for it to attract enough enrollment.

My parting shot was a request that I be given a budget to fund my own exploratory research on the pedagogical uses of virtual environments. Sure, she said, put it in the proposal. (Which is easy enough to say, but still... she didn't burst out laughing, which is a good sign.)

Where to start... EverQuest is probably out (though maybe I should investigate a little further before deciding...). Star Wars Galaxies? Deus X 2? Grand Theft Auto?

(Somebody, pinch me!)

Okay, okay, back to my long-enough list of short-term goals.

Reading a decision novel is much like walking along a path: when you come to a fork in the path, you must decide on the left path or the right path. You cannot leave the path. Decision books look a lot more like novels than interactive fiction. They are cleverly woven stories that overlap at certain points and they are a far cry from being interactive. They do allow you a choice, a "decision," but what happens if you want to do something that is not one of the preconceived choices? --Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank --Interactive Fiction and the Future of the Novel (Atari Archives)

A classic article from the 1984 book Digital Deli, which is available online at the wonderful Atari Archives website.

I'd have to disagree with their claim here. It's true that interactive fiction (text-adventure games) offer far morie decisions than "decision novels" (the best-known of these were the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels -- made up of one-page stories with a multiple-choice question at the bottom: "If you pick up the telephone, turn to page 10. If you let it ring, turn to page 14").

But an IF game still offers only a finite set of solutions. A good programmer will account for all sorts of attempted actions, typically by writing funny refusal statements (such as, when a frustrated gamer types "bite tree," the game might respond, "That would be worse than its bark."). But even if a game recognizes a lot of attempted actions, only a very small number of actions will actually affect the outcome of the game. Yes, you can type whatever you want in response to the ">" prompt, just as I could take a Jane Austen novel off of my shelf and start turning pages at random. The Austen novel is optimized for the reader who starts at page one and turns pages sequentially, just as the typical interactive fiction game is optimized for the gamer who knows the conventions of the genre (or who is willing to learn them as they are taught by the author during the early stages of the game).

This classic article, co-written by one of the founders of Infocom, naturally emphasizes that company's improvements over Will Crowther's original two-word parser. Despite the article's bias, or perhaps because of it, it offers an excellent introduction to the structure and possible future of interactive fiction.

Of course, improved graphics displays and the rise of CD-ROM games would kill the commercial value of the genre -- but the whole computer gaming market sort of imploded in the late 80s anyway, mostly due to the failure of dozens of independent computer platforms.

On an only barely related note, one of my students wrote that until she visited the office of the student newspaper (which uses Macs) she hadn't seen an Apple comptuer since elementary school -- that is, not outside of "old movies." (By the way, she's a CS major.)

Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer ReviewLiteracy Weblog)

Vannevar Bush, writing in 1945, lamented that the volume of scientific knowledge being published each year forced researchers to spend unprecedented time and energy searching for relevant information (and choosing what to ignore). His solution, the Memex, was a photocopier crossed with a microfilm storage and access device. A Memex user would theoretically create links between documents, annotating those links, add those annotations to the filing system, and share the resulting "trails" with other researchers. In some sense, what Vannevar Bush was trying to accomplish with his annotated "trails" has been implemented through the weblog genre (specifically, the research blog or "edublog").

Traditional textual scholarship aims to construct a specific, ideal, "correct" text. But computer science -- the discipline that generates the technology that drives (or hampers) information literacy -- aims instead for abstraction. In the open source software development model, particularly as described by Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," individual programmers contribute their labor freely to a common project made available to the general public for free.

Given the financial pressures publishers of journals exert upon libraries, and the brewing rebellion against what some activists characterize as a cabal of print publishers, some emerging electronic forms have radically altered the dynamics of the scholar-publisher relationship, without necessarily reducing the filtering value provided by peer-review. Electronic journals such as First Monday offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship on a timeline of weeks. Even more radical is the Wiki, a form of electronic authorship that decentralizes authority and encourages all readers to annotate, expand, edit, or completely revise a common text.

In such genres, peer-review (in the form of inbound links, e-mailed or posted corrections/refutations, revision, or even deletion) is expected to happen after a text is published, thus making the process of peer review visible, instead of simply the product. Popularly-edited texts online typically summarize general knowledge, rather than offer a forum for the presentation of new knowledge or controversial opinion; further, emerging electronic genres also typically over-represent particular opinions espoused by technorati who manipulate the system (an effect which inspired the term "Googlewashing," and illustrated by the recent online prank that now causes a Google search for "miserable failure" to point first to George Bush's official biography on the White House web site). Developing strategies to compensate for these anomalous effects is a vital skill for 21st Century information literacy.

If there's a problem with PowerPoint, it's not that it makes you dumb, it's that Microsoft has never taken the time to show us how it can make you smart. --Mike Gunderloy --PowerPoint Doesn't Make You Dumb (ADT Mag)

Enough people responded ethusiastically to the NY Times article dissing PowerPoint that I thought it worthwhile to link to an opposing viewpoint.

What's that on the home page of ADT Magazine -- is that an ad for Microsoft? And what's that on the main menu bar -- a link to a whole section devoted to Microsoft's .NET?

While Gunderloy is critical of Microsoft, his claim that people simply haven't been trained to unlock the power of a piece of software is consistent with a marketing policy to sell training sessions (or books, or magazines) so that people will be better able to use Microsoft products.

Of course, the subject of the NYT article, Edward Tufte, is also selling his anti-PowerPoint brochure, so what's my point?

I'm not sure... I must've missed that slide.

Back to my grading.

On another note... I realized that I just used the word "dissing" without quotation marks or self-conscious irony, which probably means that what coolness it once had is now officially over.

The machine's inventors are somewhat vague about what the food simulator will actually be used for, but they suggest that it will be helpful in designing new foods... --Lawrence Osborne --Food Simulator, The (NY Times (will expire))

Here's the PowerPoint business plan these guys must have followed.

Step 1. Invent a device that can simulate the sensation of chewing food.
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit.

BTW, I don't know why the NYT puts "The" at the end of the headline.

Among the attractions at the 1958 World'sFair in Brussels, Belgium, visitors would have beheld ?Professor RAMAC,? a four-ton IBM machine capable of offering up responses to users? queries on a two thousand year historical span... [T]he Professor offered the general public its first encounter with the magnetic disk storage technology today called the hard drive.... In 1950 Edmund C. Berkeley had published a book entitled Giant Brains: or Machines That Think, the first work to introduce computers to a general audience. The shift from Berkeley'santhropomorphism to the RAMAC'sfull-fledged personification as a ?Professor? or ?genius? hints at the kinds of synthetic identities that would culminate with Arthur C. Clarke'sHAL 9000 only a decade later. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms [2]: 'Professor RAMAC' (MGK)

I left a niggly comment on the author's blog. It somehow didn't feel right simply posting, "Thanks, I enjoyed that."

To quote a student of mine... heck, phooey and darn. I got distracted before I hit "submit" on that comment and now it's gone. Drat.

Weblog TweakingJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've made a few very minor tweaks to the blog, as I re-familiarize myself with JSP. Will is planning on making some changes to the site soon, and I want to be up to speed so I can more fully understand what he's accomplished for me.

The underlying code that he created for me is beyond my fathoming at this point, but Will has very wisely separated the guts of the program from the display, which is what I'm fiddling with.

Now the comments display the date. (That info had always been collected, I just didn't get around to figuring out how to display it until now.) I've also changed a few things about the editing screen that I use, mostly to reduce the amount of scrolling I have to do when creating a new blog entry.

My next project will be creating an RSS feed.

To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education. --Open Access Journals in the Field of Education (AERA-SIG)

Here's to open-access online journals. I hope Google notices this link and adds my PageRank value to the value of this page. (Via the original Pedablogue.)

Two North Carolina men were indicted for violating the state's junk e-mail law by sending thousands of e-mail pitches for investments, software and other products, in what prosecutors said was the nation's first felony charges for unsolicited e-mail. --Virginia Nabs Two Big Spammers (Wired/AP)

I'd like to think this will make a difference... maybe it will, maybe it won't.

Often, while sifting through the mountain of daily Gothamist correspondence, we come across emails asking for advice about starting a blog. Why anyone would consider Gothamist an authority on the sweet, intricate science of blogging is beyond us -- but we are loathe to sidestep our obligation to respond. Here then, based on our blog-exploration and the evolution that is Gothamist, the first in a series of Gothamist Notes On Blogging, entitled "What not to do when you blog." --What Not to Do When You Blog (Gothamist)

While this is a good overview of current blogging trends, I find it offputting to see any definition of blogging used in such prescriptive terms.

I'd particularly disagree with Gothamist's invective against writing about yourself. Good writing is good writing, regardless of the subject. Please don't stop blogging just because the subject of your blog doesn't interest The Gothamist. Maybe you won't get many outside links if you only blog about yourself and the people you already know, but if you start linking to pages you find elsewhere online, you may develop a network of personal blogs written by other people whose personal interests intersect with yours.

Some blogs wear pinstripes, others wear tie-dye and sandals, and others just wear comfy sweats. Whether a blog is professional, creative, or simply a place for your own thoughts, good writing is good reading for whoever finds it.

The increased adoption of blogging, citizen journalism, Flash presentations and the like portend a different season of political coverage than what we've seen in the past. These aren't new developments, but they've been used more frequently in the last year by the online-news industry, and will likely be incorporated into upcoming electoral coverage. --Steve Outing --Prepare Now for Better Online Election Coverage (Editor and Publisher)

I'll be teaching "Writing for the Internet" next fall, during the presidential election. Plenty of my students have professed their utter boredom with politics (outside of their particular hobbyhorse, if any). So I'm reluctant to tie a major online project to political current events; still, there will be a lot happening in cyberspace, particularly on the Thursday before election day, when scandals are strategically the most damaging to candidates. I'll have to think about this one.

Anyway, here's a great suggestion from the article: "Candidates were asked to give their stands on a variety of issues. In the print edition, candidate responses were sorted into grids, so readers could see who thinks what with a quick glance. But online, the approach was different: Web readers decided what their own stands are, then discovered who agreed with them the most at the end of the quiz."

Unless the population of a state is dispersed evenly in proportion to the size of each county, there is no direct relationship between the physical area of a county and the number of people, registered voters, or votes cast within it. | Which is why I was surprised to see an analyst from a leading all-news television network point to a map of California and single out San Bernadino county, California'slargest county by area, as a significant reason for Arnold Schwarzenegger'svictory. --Jonathan Corum --Mapping Votes by County: County maps and the 2003 California Statewide Special Election. (Style.org)

Note: The above images come from a screen capture of the original site; the cubist design on the left is, of course, a map of California with the counties adusted in size to represent population. I erased some text that would have been illegible at this size, in order to increase the comprssion rate.

Fascinating study of maps that distort the public perception of Arnold Schwartzenegger's political mandate in California. Very reminiscent of the maps showing George W. Bush winning huge tracts of land, with Al Gore winning in tiny, highly-populated spots.

Via Sylvie's HCI Weblog.

"The technology is simple," said Microsoft Office Research Division Head, Richard Greenwood, "students have been doing it for years. Thanks to the power of Microsoft Word 2004, anybody can turn a five-hundred-word report into a ten-thousand-word masterpiece." --Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature (BB Spot)

Not the best spoof news site, but this article isn't bad.

A solid agreement has been reached between BlogShares founder Seyed Razavi and technologist Jay Campbell -- the site is coming back! --Blogshares: Coming Back Soon

I figured that a good idea wouldn't lay dormant for very long.

OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and hit the "Find words" button. (Keep it short to get the best results.) In most cases you'll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first. --Reverse Dictionary

My inbox is rather full at the moment, but I did manage to fish out this gem that Jim sent last week. Looks like it uses the content of wikipedia to fuel its searches.

Scientists say measurements taken by the US space agency's Mars Odyssey craft prove that a human mission could survive on the Martian surface. | Instrument data show radiation around the Red Planet might cause some health problems but is unlikely to be fatal. --Richard Black --Humans 'could survive Mars visit' (BBC)

Also interesting in this article: Mars seems to have too much surface water to be sustained in equilibrium. It may be coming out of an ice age.

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible exception of handguns and tequila." --Christopher Harper Mitch Radcliffe? Ratliff?Computers, handguns and tequilaAnd That's The Way It Will Be... News and Information ina Digital World)

Found this quote in a paper written by a student. I'll have to get that book.

Update, 09 Dec: Whoops, it looks like Harper was quoting a statement attributed to someone named Mitch Radcliffe or Ratliffe. No time today to explore this little mystery.

There are instances when, in the interests of the majority, some censorship may be used for a period of time. Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples. | But we cannot strive for an information society without allowing the free flow of information which is a pre-requisite. We just have to become better managers, navigators and users of information – let’s just say we need information maturity. | The Information Age has opened many doors for our eager minds to explore. Now the question is not so much ‘What information do I want?’ as ‘What information do I not want?’. --Arthur C. Clarke --Humanity will survive information deluge  (OneWorld South Asia)

I'm not sure I'm artciulating anything new here, but for me, reading some of the "high-profile" blogs feels a little bit like listening to talk radio: a charismatic figure stirs up people's frustrations and fears by linking to a news article or bit of information. Then a feeding frenzy takes place, with dozens of other bloggers quickly linking to this story or adding their comments, creating the noise effect I was talking about yesterday. --Chuck Tyron --Ten Blogs that Shook the World (The Chutry Experiment)

I confess that I probably feel too much validation when I happen to blog something that I later see climbing the charts on Popdex or Blogdex. Often, of course, I have seen the link on Slashdot, Wired, Metafilter, A & L Daily, or some other well-read site, so there is little wonder that other bloggers will pick up an interesting link. It's really far more satisfying when I find a gracious link on thinking with my fingers or MGK; these are people I've met in person (Torill was recently in Greensburg, and although Matthew probaby doesn't remember me, long before I started blogging I met him briefly at a conference -- probably the MLA, though I can't honestly remember).

This blog entry is a bit more of a hodgepodge than usual, but just now as I was scanning the blog entry I wrote for Torill's visit, I was reminded of Torill's reasons for not permitting comments on her blog. My sister Rosemary (whose eagle eye often catches typos in my blog entries -- thanks sis) told me that a comment spammer had struck my pointless Rainbow Hector Weblog. My journalism students are turning in blog portfolios, and one of the components asks them to reflect upon an entry that they wrote that generated good comments. Some students who haven't been blogging regularly probably won't get many comments on the blog entries they are feverishly writing the day before their portfolios are due. The artificiality of expecting students to write entries that generate comments leads to the following well-written, poignant plea from my student Shannon Gerstel, who uses images of nudity and shame to describe the way she feels about her blog in the hours before it is due.

I'll be very interested to see how many of my student bloggers continue to blog over the break, and what they write about when they are no longer thinking about fulfilling the requirements of an assignment.

Key to the technique is comparing news sources that cover the same events but employ slightly different styles. Because they are writing about the same events they contain the same facts, or arguments, said Barzilay. "This gives us patterns which are kind of the same -- and this is the core of the paraphrasing technique.".... [T]he system learned incorrectly that "Palestinian suicide bomber" and "suicide bomber" were the same, and that "killing 20 people" is the same as "killing 20 Israelis", said Barzilay. These mistakes made by the system are "due to how reporters are reporting," she said. "In some sense... the teacher here is what the reporter writes," she said. Kimberly Patch --Software paraphrases sentences (TRN)

The Palestine/Israel detail is presented as an example of pro-Israel reporter bias, but I'm not so sure. If, according to the sample of news reportage being examined, more Israelis were killed than Palestinians, and if the ways in which Israelis were killed (civilians killed in marketplaces by suicide bombers, and also soldiers killed by armed combatants) was more newsworthy than the ways in which Palestinians were killed (armed combatants killed by soldiers and some innocent bystanders killed by soldiers) then the computer's "mistake" might be understandable. But I'm not informed enough about the research involved to be able to make any reliable statement; of course the computer isn't responding to what really happened in the world, it's responding to the way a certain group of reporters described what their research tells them happened in the world. Of course, the results are going to reflect human biases, but the sample fed into the computer is affected by such things as how likely a news source that reflects a particular worldview will publish an online English edition.

On a lighter note...

Speaking at a press conference, researchers shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and coughed into their hands before insisting, "Of course this software won't be marketed to students intending to fool turnitit.com. Whatever gave you that idea?"

"We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex," quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday night's Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed "walking toasters" from the original TV series are succeeded by -- well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom. --Xeni Jardin --Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!  (Wired)

The original Battlestar Galactica, corny and 8pm family-friendly as it was, managed to push a few barriers by making one of the leads, Cassiopia, a prostitute (er.... that is, a "sociolator"). All that added a layer of adult subject matter that (when the writers bothered to address it) complicated the relationship between the womanizing Starbuck and the professionally detached Cassie; but the complexity goes right over the head of my five-year-old when we watch the reruns together. I'm pretty sure I don't want to snuggle down on the futon with my son to watch "a jaw dropper of a scene that blends Cylon eroticism with equal parts pants-wetting apocalyptic terror and blast-tacular deep-space warfare."

OK, he'd love the "blast-tacular deep-space warfare." And it certainly sounds like this miniseries has something going for it.

I don't want to sound like the whiners who, when the Batman movies started coming out, lamented the absence of the "Biff" "Pow!" "Blam!" animation that censored out all the fistfights and thus made the TV series acceptable for the kiddies. And this is all pretty much immaterial -- I don't have cable TV and thus won't watch the new show anyway.

The story you are about to read is true. It involves a fugitive heiress, guns, money, and layers of Internet intimacy and deception. It is a mystery that takes place at the edge of technology. And it is unlike anything you've ever read before. --John H. Richardson --The Search for Isabella V (Esquire)

A fascinating additional layer in the "Flight Risk" story (see the abbreviated back story or the abbrv bk stry) . The site itself has lain dormant since October, and none of the entries since mid-September have attracted any comments.

Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence. --Eric Wagoner

Update: According to poster "cedar" on Metafilter: "I called the Sorocco PD at (505)835-1883 requesting any information they might have. Officer Richard Lopez returned my call immediately and let me know that Mr. Barger was not considered missing or in danger." Glad to hear it.

Update, 5 Dec: In "Jorn Barger has Left the Building," Wired offers a wrap-up that includes reaction from Barger's sister, but otherwise depends heavily on links to Metafilter. --Where is Jorn Barger?EricWagoner.com)

I've been on the receiving end of some of Jorn's scorn (though I'm sure I was only a momentary blip on his radar). I'm also aware that because of the pro-Palestine angle of his linkage he has been accused of anti-Semitism. Still, I only reluctantly removed Robot Wisdom from my blogroll when he stopped updating it regularly. His contributions to cyberspace are significant (he coined the term "weblog," for instance). Certainly any private citizen has the right to disappear from public view if he or she so chooses, but this sounds very strange.

About a week ago, I thought about writing a rather sad blog entry about the sad state of some excellent blogs, such as John S. Rhodes's Webword (hasn't been updated in since September), and Elwyn Jenkins's Microdoc News (activity across all of Microdoc's blogs has dropped drastically) and, of course, Barger's Robot Wisdom. For some reason I never got around to writing that entry, but let me try a bit now.

Rhodes and Jenkins had hopes of using their blogs to elevate their profile and thus attract business.

Rhodes worked hard to create Webword as a community focused around usability issues, and though I seem to remember his site being ranked #2 in Google searches on usability, it may have been chilly in the long shadow of Jakob Nielsen. During the dot-com boom, when so much money was being spent on poor web designs, I really enjoyed the usability evangelization (and commiseration) that went on in the comments fields. Rhodes deputized some loyal community members to help run Webword. With my recent job change from technical writing to new media journalism, I'm not spending as much time on usability issues, which makes sense because the journalism majors that I educate will probably not be expected to design the websites for which they write. (I do still teach usability in "Writing for the Internet," but since I no longer require students to design web pages for real-world clients, usability is less central to my pedagogy nowadays. Had I stayed in technical writing, or moved to a different school as a technical writer, I would have felt Webword's absence more acutely.)

Jenkins created maybe a dozen or more weblogs with slightly different themes; his aggressive appearance on the blogosphere generated some flak:

"In short, Mr. Jenkins' vaporous content is well on its way to earning him a place on most of the A-list blogrolls. From there he'll be able to make a lot of money from blogging. And Google, no doubt, will make a lot of money by inserting ads on the bloggers' pages. The only people who suffer will be those who try to use Google to find meaningful content." -- from How Bloggers Game Google, from Google-Watch (a site that is as critical of Google as Elwyn is laudatory; one of Jenkins's several content clusters includes the study of Google)

The basic principle of starting a whole bunch of blogs in order to learn what kind of an audience you attract and then figuring out how to make a living serving that audience sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy; yet I always found it hard to glimpse the "real" Elwyn in his blog (even Elwyn's personal blog is sparse). Now, the spam comments collect on the otherwise inactive ProBlog, a group blog that he and others started as a reaction to Andrew Orlowski's periodic and vitriolic attacks on the blogosphere.

I wouldn't put my own online efforts in the same entrepreneurial categories as Rhodes or Jenkins... personally, I'm delighted that my position as a new media journalism faculty member gives me the excuse to continue blogging, while also permitting me to teach the occasional literature course, in an environment that seems willing to encourage my own creative new media efforts (chiefly in interactive fiction, but blogging is becoming more and more of a creative outlet for me).

As I contemplate grading weblog portfolios, I am once again buoyed by my own enthusiasm about weblogs as vehicles for personal expression, to help students trace their intellectual development, and to get them to experience the pleasures and responsibilities of publishing their ideas in a public forum, where real people can contact them and disagree or agree (as the case may be). Of course, there is always a certain percentage of students who simply can't get intellectually involved in the subject matter, and for whom any assignment is tedious and unrewarding. I don't see weblogs magically helping the disinterested and uninvolved students, but I do see the brightest students and the students in the solid center responding positively to their blogging experience.