Technology: January 2004 Archive Page

I have been enrolled in courses in which my professors used a powerpoint presentation every single day. When required to do a presentation in front of my peers, I also made use of Microsoft Powerpoint in order to present my information. I felt that using such a visual aid was a valuable tool to add multimedia zing to the classroom. Last week, I gave a Chaucer presentation to my Media Aesthetics class. Originally, I wanted to do a powerpoint presentation. However, after I was advised against it by Dr. Jerz, I read "Powerpoint is Evil." When I first read this article, I completely disagreed. However, once I thought about it more, it began to make sense. I'm not saying that powerpoint can never be useful, but it is more appropriate for "corporate sales pitches" (in the words of Dr. Jerz) instead of Chaucer presentations. --Jamee Rice --Learn how to 'learn something new everyday' (Jamee Rice)

Jamee's presentation very cleverly used the Pittsburgh regionalism 'yinz' (for "you") as a way of introducing Chaucer's language. See: Chaucer could have actually related to "Yinzers!"

The men of the Shihuh tribe carried the jerz, a small axe-head on a long stick. They used the implement for many purposes — it chopped the firewood, provided the grip for climbing and came in handy as a walking stick to step over the stones. To complement the jerz they also carried the special khasabi knife called the peshak. There is nothing on record to support the origins of the jerz. | How did the people of this region come to own this finely decorated hatchet? Was it brought to the shores of Musandam by sailors from other lands or was it picked up by the people of Musandam in the course of voyages down the Arabian Gulf and out into the Indian Ocean? Or was it developed by an artistic smith keen to showcase his skills as a good metal worker and an artist? The antecedents of the jerz are covered in mist. --Legend of the Jerz (Sultinate of Oman)

Cool!

[L]et's face facts, she could do your $70,000-a-year job for the wages of a Taco Bell counter jockey - she won't lose any sleep over your plight. When I ask what her advice is for a beleaguered American programmer afraid of being pulled under by the global tide that she represents, Jairam takes the high road, neither dismissing the concern nor offering soothing happy talk. Instead, she recites a portion of the 2,000-year-old epic poem and Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita: "Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the fruits. They'll come on their own." | This is a story about the global economy. It's about two countries and one profession - and how weirdly upside down the future has begun to look from opposite sides of the globe. It's about code and the people who write it. But it's also about free markets, new politics, and ancient wisdom - which means it's ultimately about faith. --Daniel H. Pink --The New Face of the Silicon Age (Wired Magazine)

Wired is the idealistic champion of Silicon Valley culture. While the quality of the writing is always top-notch, one rarely finds in the pages of Wired any serious criticism of technology -- and certainly none of the Slashdot "the government is taking control of your lives, datum by datum" variety. Pink writes himself into the story a bit more than I would prefer, but I do appreciate the way he paints himself as the devil's advocate on both sides. I feel a lot of pain for the very good CS majors who are now graduating into a world that is very different than it was in 1999 (or so) when they entered college with a career path in mind.

Still, something lurking in the darker parts of my English major soul remembers the sneers of the "toolies" who, even before they got their diploma, bragged of their $50,000 job offers.

The Africans and Irish and Poles and Italians and Norwegians and everyone else -- including the Indians -- who came to America in search of a better place took the less desirable jobs. This led to inevitable conflict with the working class Americans, but after a generation or two, the newcomers turned into what Archie Bunker might call "regular Americans" who were themselves threatened by the next wave of immigrants. This has been an ongoing part of American history. Just look at the names on America's olympic rosters or the faces of people wearing American military uniforms.

But now, the jobs in question are highly desirable positions, and -- more shocking to America's future -- people don't even have to leave their home country to do it!

I was surprised and pleased to see Wired publishing a lenthy, literary, and insightful examination of the American reaction to this particular side-effect of the new global economy. The U.S. auto industry lost business to Japan in the 80s, which caused a wave of "buy American" protectionism; and in return, Japan became a tremendous consumer of American culture. If I were truly interested in economics, I would of course have listened to the e-school toolies and ditched my English major; but upon reflection, Wired Magazine publishing an article with a sympathetic angle on global outsourcing shouldn't be any real surprise. Because, from the look of things, Wired Magazine has read the writing on the wall, and expects to sell a lot of subscriptions in India.

Planning for the Deep Impact mission began in 1999. It culminates on July 4, 2005, when a "fly-by" spacecraft will release a smaller "impactor" spacecraft, which will smash into comet Tempel 1 at 37,000 kilometers (22,000 miles) per hour.... The impact is expected to create a crater 100 meters in diameter and up to 30 meters deep. But A'Hearn warns that scientists know so little about comets that the cratering experts can't even agree on what physics are relevant to the impact, and thus can't agree on what exactly will happen. --Stefan Lovgren --Scientists Plan 'Deep Impact' Crash With Comet (National Geographic News)

"I always say that while I can't vote, I can damn sure make a difference," he said. "It doesn't feel odd, it shouldn't feel odd, because all Americans should be doing this. We as a country need to be more involved, especially our youth." --Stephen Yellin --Teen Blogger Heads Online (Wired)

I'm being called away, but I wanted to blog this before I forget it. I immediately thought of Ender's Game, an Orson Scott Card novel that features two teenage supporting characters (siblings of the hero) who affect global politics by participating in online discussion groups.

In this assignment you will be required to read/play and answer questions about a book from the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) series of ?gamebooks.? The series was published 1979-1998. Many people assume that electronic literature (interactive fiction, hypertext, what-have-you) is simply a souped up version of CYOA. The purpose of this assignment is to take a closer look at that assumption based on what you know about the history and theory of cybertext. --Matt Kirschenbaum

--Choose Your Own Adventure Assignment (MGK)

Wow. Not only do I love the assignment, I'm in awe of the web environment in which it is presented.

I recently posted a rant against bloated commercial courseware that locks curricular content in a proprietary database; and about seven hours ago I recently posted a comment prompted by a thread I found via Liz Lawley's website, but I didn't know that Lawley is a MoveableType courseware genius.

Open Source in EducationVarious, via KairosNews)

KairosNews has a few good links to articles about the open source movement. "Open Source and Education: A Sea Change?" is a roundup of links to recent "rumblings" on open-source content. Most exciting is the Chronicle of Higher Ed's report on a multi-million-dollar effort to create an open-source course-management tool.

Charlie's post links to a page that is in the Chronicle's "temp" directory, so I won't repeat it here... you can find it on the KairosNews entry. Charlie notes with amusement the reaction of the chairman of Blackboard (a commercial provider of course-management tools), who uses the standard FUD defense in order to scare potential users away from open-source (and thus protect his revenue stream).

I don't like using commercial course-management tools because I don't like the idea of putting so much work into a database that is only accessible as long as we have subscribed to the service. I understand that Seton Hill has recently churned through two or three of these course management tools, requiring faculty to re-learn a new system each time. We're currently using J-web, but I only use it to post a link to my online syllabus, to post final grades, and to take attendance. But even then I find it limiting... there's no way to differentiate between an excused absence and an unexcused absence. If I cancel class for a day, or want to take attendance at an extra-curricular event, there's no way for me to add or remove columns. If a student comes in late or leaves early, there is no way for me to record a partial absence.

Now, if there were a way that I could use XML to label the various components of my online syllabus, and then run a utility that would slurp up all that data into the standard course management interface that the students are familiar with from their other classes, that would be useful.

Scientists at MIT's Advanced Machine Cognizance Project announced Tuesday that, after seeing the final installment of the Matrix trilogy, they will cease all further work in the field of artificial intelligence.... "I saw Revolutions with my 12-year-old son Eric," Markovitch said. "He saw the look of worry on my face and said, 'Dad, don't be scared. It's only make-believe.' I had to tell him, 'No, son, it's what your father does for a living.'" --Scientists Abandon AI Project After Seeing The Matrix (The Onion)

It's very amusing reading the scientists quoted in the story referring to pop culture such as The Matrix, the Terminator series and Rage Against the Machine. It reminds me of the class discussion that ensues when nobody has done the assigned readings, but plenty of people have recently seen a movie that has some vague connection to the theme the class is supposed to be exploring. (I haven't had one of those classes recently, but when it does happen, the memory sticks around...)

Do not use profanity. Be very careful when discussing financial or business affairs. Avoid any mention of your private parts. Do not offer any guarantees, or refer to checks that may or may not be in the mail. | Refrain from describing anything or anybody as "free." Abstain from the exuberant use of punctuation marks. Shun simple salutations like "Hello," and opt instead to craft a detailed, personalized subject line. --Michelle Delio --Spam Filters Grab Good With Bad  (Wired)

Spam is evil.

The above article lists some of the new rules of e-mail. I have my e-mail spam filter set to block any message with more than two exclamation marks or the word "sex" in the subject line. (The only person who might ever want to talk to me about sex is my wife, and she doesn't need to use e-mail to get my attention.)

I've stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, adding anti-spam protection to our SHU installation of MoveableType. There were scores of links to viagra, digital camera, and gambling websites tucked away in older blog entries. (The spammers want Google to find links to their sites, thus artificially raising their rankings.)

I've also read that we can expect to start seeing full-screen advertisements that load stealthily in the background while we are surfing a site, and that play after we click away from a website.

I have four different ad-blocking tools installed on the computer I'm using now: Webwasher (which not only blocks ads but closes up the space on the screen where the ad used to be; I sometimes have to shut off because it interferes with my webmail), Google's Toolbar (great for stopping popups; hold down ctrl when clicking if you know you want a popup this time; or, click a button to permanently allow popups on the domain -- very useful), NoFlash (which kills Macromedia Flash ads; I can easily turn it back on if I know I want the flash thingy), and a few minutes ago I just added the unimaginatively-named Mike Skallas's Ad Blocking Host File (a list of ad-serving hosts that your browser will ignore, registering only errors where the ads are supposed to be... not pretty, but effective).

A student at McGill University has won the right to have his assignments marked without first submitting them to an American, anti-plagiarism website.

--McGill student wins fight over anti-cheating website  (CBC)

As a former resident of Canada, I couldn't repress a smirk at the CBC's need to identify the website as "American" in the lead. (The site is TurnitIn.com.)

The very premise of an online game is that it is uncontrollable - indeed, even the banned players have found ways to sneak back in various disguises. | That, in turn, presents a thorny set of philosophical problems. How do you seek to curb the baser instincts of a community of autonomous players? Is repression the answer? Or do you have to give people incentives to behave better all by themselves? --Andrew Gumbel --Blood on the Virtual Carpet (Independent)

I filed this under "Journalism" because it features a virtual newspaper reporting on the unsavory activities of the virtual residents of a in The Sims.

On this day in 1984, after a year of deliberation, the US supreme court ruled in favour of Sony (makers of the Betamax video-recorder) and against Universal Studios and Disney, who had claimed that viewers recording television programmes were stealing copyrighted material. The counter-argument was that home-tapers were "time-shifting": rescheduling programmes through convenience rather than greed. The acceptance of that argument was decided on a 5-4 vote, meaning that if one justice had been a little crustier, television viewers might now be confined to their homes on the nights of their favourite shows. --Mark Lawson --Going for the Record (Guardian)

I'm sure that many of the record company executives who complain about people stealing music by downloading it have no ethical qualms about videotaping TV shows for their own personal libraries (and I'll be they fast-forward through the commercials, too). Of course, the media titans are also going after TiVo and other tools with commercial-zapping goodies inside them.

Back then, it was technology maker vs. Hollywood. Now, Sony is one of the big media companies (owning both the technological platforms and the creative content for movies, TV, music, and videogames). Sony tried to stem the tide of file-sharing by selling audio gadgets that had security features to prevent Sony from losing money on the files, but users didn't like paying for a clunky gadget that didn't let them do what they really wanted to do with files (namely, get them for free).

I neither buy nor "share" music files, but then I don't buy CDs either, other than occasionally grabbing one out of a $5 bargain bin (and I can't even remember the last time I did that).

In the early days of game publishing, many companies invested great effort not only in the design of their games, but also in the way those games appeared on store shelves and what was included in the box. This article's intention is to describe this lost art of innovative game packaging from the early to mid-1980's, when there seemed to be an abundance of real thought and care behind the customer's experience beyond the software itself. --Bill Loguidice --Game Packaging - A Look to the Past When Treasures Beyond the Game Were Within the Box (Armchair Arcade)

I'm procrastinating a bit after a morning of productive work, so I haven't had time to look through the whole issue. I personally find artificially-paginated articles very hard to read online. Yes, it makes sense to break up a longer article, but I'd prefer the option to see a whole article in a single file (for printing or in-browser full-text searches). I love the site's use of an old, beat-up videogame box as its design theme.

(Update, 17 Jan: Bill told me how to get a printable version. I've changed the URL.)

By the way, a group of interactive fiction enthusiasts has created Feelies.org, where current authors of games typically shared in electronic-only form can produce and sell feelies. From the home page: "We already have posters, pamphlets, coins, maps and CDs from some of the best games of the post-Infocom era."

[T]he typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers... --New study shatters Internet 'geek' image (CNN)

Too bad that the folks who conducted the research, UCLA's Center for Communication Policy, only published their findings in a MS-Word document and a PowerPoint file. The same page also includes PDF archives. These are all very unfriendly formats for online readers with slow connections. (Okay, I have a good connection at the office, but not at home, where I am now.)

One of the great gifts of the book is the entrée it affords into the contemporary IF scene. Graham Nelson, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, and Andrew Plotkin were all authors who were new to me, but no sooner had I worked through Plotkin’s remarkable “Shade” than I added it to my spring syllabus (which I’ll post soon, btw); and I suspect others will follow suit. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised to find this text canonized amongst a new academic audience because of Montfort’s account of it here. --Matt Kirschenbaum reviews Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages --Wor(l)d Games (MGK)

As George wrote in a comment to the above entry, "Stuff like this is why I like reading blogs."

I don't know what it is about interactive fiction, but it prompts a lot of autobiographical essays like this one. (See also SPAG newsletter editor Paul O'Brian's review.)

And homestarrunner.com features a text game this week.

I oughta add a new category: geekiness.

--History of Computer Game Design: Technology, Culture, Business (Stanford University)

This course website features an excellent bibliography of computer game history and scholarship.

While blogging's earliest advocates operate on the "information wants to be free" principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | "Information is power" is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you're hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there's also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one. --Neil McIntosh --Why blogs could be bad for business (Guardian)

A few months ago, I was at a fancy on-campus dinner event. The university president, JoAnne Boyle, was working her way through the crowd, laying on the charm. I was part of a little group of people who were treated to a funny story about a well-known donor who called with some crotchety advice about one of the big topics on campus. When we all finished laughing at the punch line, I asked for the donor's first name again, because I hadn't caught it, and someone kidded me, "So, is this for your blog?" We all chuckled, but JoAnne's face turned white, and she quickly went off to charm someone else.

A little while later, as she was giving an impromptu welcome speech, she noticed who I was sitting with, and said, "The reporter who's the bane of my existence is sitting next to the faculty member who's the bane of my existence!"

Everyone turned around to see me recovering from what was almost a spit-take.

I don't think of my own blog in terms of power... goodness gracious, I'm just trying to teach a few things and enjoy doing what I do. I noticed that Alexa, a website ranking service, has placed jerz.setonhill.edu above www.setonhill.edu, and has recently replaced the screen capture of Seton Hill's home page with a screen capture from my own curricular home page. (My curricular website gets 57% of the traffic to the *.setonhill.edu domain, and the main site gets 29%, at least according to however Alexa measures it. The blogs.setonhill.edu subdomain gets 12%, by the way, which is up from 8% the last time I checked.)

I don't really know what any of this means, but, like businesses, universities also operate with a rigid power structure; administrators know things that faculty members don't need to know; tenured faculty members know things that their nontenured colleagues don't need to know.

Since I know that some of my students read my blog, I've found myself screening my blogging, since I don't want my blog to give away the "big twist" I want to throw into my lecture. And one day last term when I was very sick, a student blogged about how mentally befuddled I was. That student wrote sympathetically, but what if she hadn't?

Many of the students who started blogging for me last semester will be blogging for me again in different classes this term. I've learned a few things about instructional blogging... for one thing, I need to get the students reading each other's blogs more. We spent perhaps too much time counting the number of comments each blog entry generated, and not enough time getting students to link to each other's conversations. I'll be introducing three classes to blogging this week, and I plan to move pretty quickly from the basic "show me that you can post a link" to writing thickly-linked texts, with well-chosen links that not only demonstrate the student is keeping up with other blogs, but that gives readers a map to good reading online. We'll see what happens.

The entrenched business culture may not adopt blogging beyond the basic public relations and customer service approach. But a university's function is to educate -- to pass on skills and knowledge, by giving students the intellectual tools, in a microcosm of the society that awaits them after they graduate. Progressive educational philosophy emphasizes empowering the student. A weblog forces students to come into contact with that outside world a little earlier, which can be a burden. But with that responsibility comes power.

I'd rather the university president not think of me as the bane of her existence because of my blog, but at the same time, it's nice to be noticed.

CSS Not Displaying on My Site?Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've been pulling my hair out for the last 2 hours because something seems to be wrong with the style sheets on my site. Do my pages look the way they usually do? Most of the time, I get no styles whatsoever, then about once out of every 10 times, the page loads properly, but when I reload it, the stylesheet disappears again.

In the past, when I've run into this problem, it doesn't seem to have affected other users.

It figures it would happen on the first day of classes... and my wife is pissed at me because I'm very late coming home. Grr!

Update, Jan 13: OK, thanks all. I guess it was just my machine, then.

Update: I'm blogging this mostly so I remember it... when I have a stylesheet problem, and then post a comment or edit an entry on this blog, for some reason the problem fixes itself. It's happened three times now.

"If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished." Beverly Sweeney, middle school teacher involved in the suspension of a student who used a DOS command to send the word "Hey!" to 80 computer stations. --Hey! Where's the problem? (Star-Telegram)

Because, as we all know, proper computer use, and education in general, does not require curiosity, trial-and-error, or innovation.

Having said that, I'd like to look more closely at something Dave Lieber wrote.

But more troubling is the notion that Sweeney does not believe that the rest of us have any right to question the decisions made by public educators.

Ok, fair enough. Lieber continues:

Remember, we pay the salaries of the teachers and staff. We buy the computers.

He's right on both counts, but think about it -- the school has 80 computers that still run DOS? if that's the case, then "we" aren't doing a very good job -- either in supplying funds to purchase good equipment or (apparently) in coming up with salaries that will attract skilled teachers.

The fact that Sweeney's web site includes an animated picture of a caveman smashing a computer with a club, as well as a Java applet that features globes and lights whirling around a distorted portrait, lead one of the MetaFilter posters to ask, in all honesty, whether her page had been hacked.

Would it make sense to create a group blog devoted to teaching English language and literature, one where ideas could be exchanged, resources shared, pointers to already existing sites posted, websites collaboratively created?

Consider these questions:

• What have you created that you'd like to share with others?
• What have you found on the web that has been most useful in your teaching?
• What have you not found that you wish were out there? What's on your wish list?

--George H. Williams --Sharing Teaching Resources (George H. Williams)

It was December 1968. An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a "mouse." --The Click Heard Round The World (Wired)

Interesting tidbits:

• Engelbart credits Vannevar Bush with inventing the concept of links: "I'd read that article 17 years before I wrote about links using computers and honestly do not remember if I took the idea from Bush deliberately or only went back to his article later."
• "We also did a lot of experiments to see how many buttons the mouse should have. We tried as many as five. We settled on three. That's all we could fit. Now the three-button mouse has become standard, except for the Mac. Steve Jobs insisted on only one button. We haven't spoken much since then."
• What we call the cursor, Engelbart originally called the "bug". If that term had stuck, the etymology of the word would be even more... uh... buggy.

Matt Hoy writes:

They sell rare earth magnets. Incredibly strong and small. I ordered a bunch of them. These would be useful for creating the "hard drive killer" door frame [Neal] Stephenson mentions in "Cryptonomicon". They sell one monster with over 350 lbs of force. I'm afraid I had to buy smaller ones, since I don't like the idea of breaking a finger when I get it caught between the magnet and a piece of steel.

--Neodymium Super Magnets (gaussboys.com)

Mmmm.... magnets!

Huge slabs uncovered in Marion Garry's garden in Buckhaven, Fife, had experts convinced they had found evidence of an early Viking village....Mr Speirs admitted that his team mistakenly ignored the finds of a World War II child's gas mask and old television remote in their hunt for Viking evidence. --'Historic find' is old garden patio (BBC)

The game's artificial intelligence borders on idiotic. At one point, I conversed with the civic manager of Upper Seattle in his office. After our chat, he conveniently walked into the hallway and blankly looked on as I hacked into his safe and stole secret information.

I was especially disappointed with Invisible War because its ambitious technological underpinnings held much promise.

Graphics were filled with realistic nuances such as hanging lights which swayed to and fro when I bumped them. Boxes and other objects had real weight and could be picked up and thrown.

But all this technical wizardry was for naught and had no real bearing on gameplay. --Matt Slagle --PC version of Deus Ex: Invisible War disappoints (AP/USA Today)

I had been looking forward to this game -- the original Deus X was fantastic: a first-person shooter/role-playing/adventure hybrid with fully voiced dialogue and multiple solutions to every problem. Looks like the designers put too much energy into the technology, and not enough into the storyline. I'll read a few more reviews before I make up my mind, but I can tell right now I'm not buying this title for full price.

LBV-1806-20 may have formed in what Eikenberry called "violent, triggered star formation." In the process, a huge, massive star reaches the end of its lifespan and explodes in an intense supernova. The shockwave from that supernova then hits a young star just as its forming, compressing gas around it quickly -- over a period of 100,000 years or so -- at forces greater than the star is able to blow off on its own. --Biggest, Brightest Star Puzzles Astronomers (Space.com)

Plenty of space news lately, what with new photos from Mars, a comet-chasing probe, and the leak on the International Space Station.

At first some girls were intimidated by the power drills, but soon they were vying for access to them.... After building their own siege engine -- a medieval invention to catapult objects -- they launched the head of a Barbie doll, to mimic the practice of launching diseased corpses over castle walls, to introduce disease among the besieged. Nestling Barbie'shead in a sling, they tugged a rope, released a lever, and launched the doll'shead in an arc across the college lawn.

[...]

African American students did not study together; they worked hard, but they strictly separated their social and intellectual lives. Chinese students formed study groups and had study mates. Their ability to form communities and to collaborate was a key to their success.

[...]

Many gifted girls do not achieve their own goals because their resourcefulness and eagerness to please causes them to compromise their goals many times in the course of their development. They sabotage themselves by taking less challenging coursework than they need, by stopping out of education or career plans, or by losing sight of their goals entirely?and often never aspire to goals commensurate with their abilities. Their strong priorities for maintaining relationships rather than achieving their own goals makes it inevitable that gifted women achieve less than gifted men....

[...]

On the reservation, an accountant is a friendly, caring person who often makes ?house calls? and who helps the family fill out difficult tax forms resulting in much-needed refunds. A social worker, on the other hand, is someone who takes your children away.

Selections from the book by Pat McNees

--New Formulas for America's Workforce: Girls in Science and Engineering (4MB PDF) (National Science Foundation)

A PDF file. It took me ten times as long as usual to blog this entry, mostly because I was trying to figure out how to tell Google to offer me an HTML version of the whole file, rather than just the intro. (It's always a bad sign when a webmaster splits up a PDF into multiple small files; someone is clueful enough to recognize when the file is too large, but they don't think enough of usability issues to make the text available in another format.) No luck.

When I tried to download the PDF version of the intro, that window froze up for about 5 miutes. I have about six other windows open right now, so I didn't notice when Adobe popped up a window asking me whether I wanted to check for an update to their PDF viewer. When I kept trying to click on the tab to go back to the window where I thought the file was going to appear, I got nothing. So it was back to Google, where I found the author's home page, where I found the above selections.

So, I won't be trying to blog another PDF document from home anytime soon. Fie on PDF!

Rosemary suggested the Washington Post article "Why Janie Can't Engineer: Raising Girls to Succeed," which is a more accessible version of the same content, but which will soon vanish behind WashPost's pay-only firewall. But the article: "A college course on how to take apart a computer and put it back together attracted 300 male students and no young women -- until the announcement describing the course changed, to say that the computers they worked on would later be given to needy schools. Then the women signed up." Very interesting.

The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion. --Michael Crichton --Aliens Cause Global Warming (Crichton Official Website)

SETI is the "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence" project. A screen-saver popular among uber-geeks actually gives your computer calculations to do in order to help out the whole SETI program. The "Drake equation" is a way of figuring out, out of all the stars where planets might exist, where those planets might support intelligent life, where those life forms might attempt to communicate with outsiders, and where those signals might actually have been broadcast at precisely the time necessary for us to be able to receive them now. I have a vivid memory of Carl Sagan introducing this equation in the classic PBS series "Cosmos." (See a few of my thoughts on religion and Sagan's novel "Contact".)

Since we have no meaningful way to supply numbers for most or all of these variables, Crichton calls this guesswork "prejudice."

From time to time I blog about how the news media accepts unquestioningly the "fact" that global warming is caused by human activity, and I confess to feeling a bit smug each time I see a "mistaken" story.

But I've got to be honest with myself. I hate the smell of cigarette smoke, and rejoice in every law that makes it easier for me to breathe fresh air. Crichton gives an interesting account of how the EPA used "junk science" to "prove" that second-hand smoke causes cancer. And it's really easy for me to want to pat the anti-smoking activists on the back for their cleverness.

If the pro-smokers are so tobacco-addled that they can't see how yucky their habit is, and if it will take a little bit of scientific hocus-pocus to reduce the effect their nasty habit has on my nose, then bravo! If it's true that the science that supports smoking bans is no better than the science that supports global warming doomsday scenarios, then I'm employing a double standard, calling junk science duckspeak (George Orwell's term for an utterance which, when spoken by a supporter, is true and just and good, but when spoken by an opponent, is false and wrong and bad.) (And, of course, all this presumes that what Crichton and others call junk science really is junk. Since I'm not a scientist, I have to accept -- on faith -- the word of experts. I've been following the global warming/population bomb meme complex for long enough that I can see where journalists are oversimplifying or selectively reporting in order to reinforce a particular bias; I am not as informed about smoking issues (nor, to be honest, do I plan to investigate, since I'm personally in favor of the current anti-smoking trend).

An older link, popular now thanks to the skeptics at Arts & Letters Daily.

Johnstown Flood
Johnstown Flood ReflectionsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

This afternoon, I took my son to our local Borders for a talk on the Johnstown Flood documentary. The flood was caused by the 1889 collapse of a dam originally built for Pennsylvania's canal system, then abandoned when rails came along. The presenter, Richard Burkert, a museum director whose commentary is included on the DVD (which is narrated by Richard Dreyfuss), gave a good background on the geography, economics, and social layout of the region.

The site became a hunting club for the likes of Andrew Carnegie and other Pittsburgh-area steel magnates; when the dam collapsed, a 90-foot wall of water, pushing a thundering wall of rubble, huge trees, and even locomotives, tore down a narrow valley. A young engineer who had been brought to the site for some unrelated work noticed the problem with the dam, and shortly before the collapse (hastened by record rains) telegraphed the city (the local telephone operator started calling the three dozen or so telephone subscribers), then mounted a horse to warn the people, Paul-Revere-style. Although the people had several hours warning, they were already flooded and thus many couldn't escape.

I'd say about 100 people turned out; based on the conversations I overheard before the talk began and the questions asked, I'd say the crowd was full of local history buffs and/or people with connections to Johnstown. Other than a poster version of the DVD cover, there were no visuals at the presentation -- not even clips of the DVD, which I found disappointing for Peter's sake. (He sat pretty still, though he lost interest after about 25 minutes and started playing with my PDA. His age was about a tenth of the average age of the audience members, so he did remarkably well.)

When I taught advanced technical writing, I frequently used risk management examples, so I was hoping for a bit more about the engineering involved. And while the presenter mentioned that the circumstances generated a lot of folklore surrounding the Johnstown flood incident, he didn't relate any of those folk stories in any depth. So I was left feeling unsatisfied in both the technical and humanities areas. At times, Burkert seemed to be enjoying the carnage too much. I can understand his excitement over the subject matter, but I couldn't help thinking of John Carpenter clutching his little statue and shouting "I am the kind of the world!" and reveling in the personal fame and fortune that the Titanic disaster eventually brought him.

Burkert described the event as America's largest one-day loss of civilian lives before 9/11, and said that the extensive media coverage and psychological impact was comparable. (Of course, I wanted to hear a little more about that, but Peter wanted to play with the Thomas the Tank Engine trains.)

An article in the local paper previews the Burkert talk. I'm assuming that the Johnstown Flood Museum website uses Flash or some other multimedia application; I've installed a utility to disable those bells & whistles because I find the long download times extremely disruptive. Those sites who know how to design good content invariably have a plain HTML introduction and a button that invites you to click on a multimedia presentation; if the plain HTML introduction looks worthwhile, I disable the Flash-killing feature and reload the page. But if not, I don't bother.

From pictograms to pixel fonts, written language has evolved over time, changing in response to communication methods and printing technology. This overview is presented as an introduction to the origins, evolution, and applications of modern letterforms. --The Evolution of Type (Medium Bold)

The ubiquity of the word processor has changed what it means to write. I still hear professors talk about "note cards," which were part of the writing process taught to me when I was in high school. The idea, of course, was that you could rearrange your note cards during the early drafting process, so that you would have some idea of the organization of your ideas before you actually started writing. For those of you born in the last 25 or so years, yes indeed, we actually wrote our papers out by hand, and then when we revised them we had to write them over again. We had a motivation to cut deadwood, since we could get the draft finished faster if we didn't copy that whole wordy opening paragraph and instead just copied the one sentence that actually introduced the subject we were really going to write about.

I'm not advocating that students should go back to the process of hand-writing their papers; instead, I'm simply noting that today's most experienced teachers learned to write in a very different way. I started word-processing some of my school assignments in middle school, around 1980 (although some of my teachers were refusing dot-matrix printouts). I have a great, satisfying sensory memory of picking up a stack of fan-folded paper, tearing off the rows of holes on the outer edges, and then separating the pages. I never bothered to tear apart all those perforations unless the printout was intended for someone else to read, and to this day I associate tearing perforated paper with that "job well done" feeling. When I was an undergrad at U.Va., for major assignments I would walk my disk to the laser printers in the computer lab (my favorite was a few steps from Cabell Hall at the other end of the Central Grounds from the Rotunda).

Since it is now push-button easy to get high-quality copies of drafts that are in progress, I wonder how much that affects the ability of today's students to recognize when they have put sufficient work into a paper. In medieval times, if you wanted about 20 pages to write on, you had to kill a sheep, skin it, and tan the hide (I recall the process has something to do with urine). So all writing that was produced was precious. That's taking it a bit too far, of course -- to make a mistake was costly, in terms of both time and resources, which undoubtedly affected the activities of a scribe (whose main job was to copy faithfully and accurately the words that somebody else had composed).

This paper addresses the evolution of metaphors for the Internet and shows how they have constrained and determined the development of cyberlaw. | Within the law, metaphors mold the framework of discourse, determining the scope of appropriate questions about and answers to various social and legal problems. Courts and commentators employ metaphors as heuristics to generate hypotheses about the application of law to novel, unexplored domains. Metaphors structure the way lawyers conceptualize legal events, as they infiltrate, consciously and unconsciously, legal discourse.... Three metaphors in particular will be examined: the information superhighway, cyberspace, and the Internet as "real" space. --Cohen and Blavin --Gore, Gibson, and Goldsmith: The Evolution of Internet Metaphors in Law and Commentary  (Harvard Journal of Law and Technology)

Looks like a good find, via Clancy on Kairosnews. The actual article is, unfortunately, a PDF document, so I'm blogging it until I can get to the office in a few days.

Instead of being dollars or euros or kroner, links seem a lot more like the major prison currency, cigarettes, in the hands of a heavy smoker who cares more about smoking than about any other prison commodity. First of all, you can do something with them; as an afterthought, you also use them to get more PageRank if you like. --Nick Montfort --Linky Lucre (Grand Text Auto)

Nick's reading of Jill Walker's paper Links and Power comes up with some interesting observations. I've often thought of blogroll-hunting as a kind of game (one which I keep telling myself I shouldn't play so often). My goal is not so much to encourage people to link to my blog, but rather to find -- as soon as possible -- the links that other people post. For instance, Eric Mayer was poking through lists of weblogs and recognized my name from the interactive fiction community; I found his blog entry a few hours after he posted it. This kind of link-hunting keeps my online research muscles limbered up, and it's something I can do in a twenty-minute time window (while waiting for the kids to go to sleep or when a student doesn't show up for an office visit).

While my link-collecting activity is, from one perspective, no more meaningful than manipuliting blobs of light in the shape of spaceships or warriors on a video screen, or passively watching blobs of light reproducing the motions of professional atheletes thousands of miles away, my particular collection of links represents my memory (how many times have you blogged something just so you'd remember it?), and the aggregation proceeds according to a set of criteria that I may not always articulate (Mike Arnzen has noted a recent explosion of blogs relating to games, but that seemed perfectly natural to me since I've just bumped a few game-related projects higher in my priority list). I'm not sure whether eating dots in a maze or watching professional athletes creates anything of even the slightest value to others; but, as Nick points out, "Google likes blogs - but people like blogs, too! Google likes blogs for all the right reasons."

I remember a short story about a future society in which people are screened for intelligence in a sort of maze where they live their whole lives and try to attach meaning to the events that occur within the maze. One such event involves the collection of metal discs that occasionally appear on the walls. People pry these disks off, making their fingernails bloody (though one wonders why they wouldn't just use one of their discs to pry off the other disks...). These discs serve no purpose other than being collected; I forget what the other meaningless activities are, but robot caretakers encourage the humans in all their activities but one. There is one room that humans are told to avoid; the protagonist, whose name I rember is Jon, ignores the warnings and enters the room, which I think contains nothing more than a big question mark. (I wish I could find that story again. I must have read it in the 80s.)

Anyway, the collection of links on a web page is not as meaningless as the collection of ornamental metal discs, since I use other people's links to find information, people who share my interests, and, yes I admit it, sources of good links.