Cyberculture: April 2005 Archive Page

None of these dedicated reporters and editors is paid for their efforts. In fact, most of them don’t know the first thing about professional journalism. All however are as passionate about their craft as the top earners at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News or the BBC. What’s more, they’re convinced they can offer better journalism than anything professional news organizations currently supply; one stripped of all bias, covering areas long ago neglected by a mainstream media and produced by thousands of committed citizen correspondents all over the world. This is the dream of Wikinews.

Objectivity, no political agenda and the puritanical pursuit of truth? Surely that’s a pipedream? It’s certainly not a historical trait of American media. Yet if the lessons of the last year have taught us anything, it is that we dismiss citizen journalism at our peril.

[...]

“We were both kinda addicted to Star Wars Galaxies,” explains Ilya a little defensively. “I would travel [in the game] and claim I was with the press so they shouldn’t shoot me. But they still did.”

It’s not being glib to say that Ilya’s Star Wars Galaxy experience translates well to Wikinews. All the interactive and community skills that today’s 20-somethings have learned online provide the underpinning of this new participatory media. And given all the time and effort Ilya spent “practicising” being a journalist – learning style guides and how to structure a news story, who’s to say he’s any less equipped to start plying the trade than many journalism graduates? --Matthew Yeomans
--The Birth of WikiNews (Citrizens Kane)

Robert Pittman, who created MTV, attributed the station's success to the ability of viewers in their late teens and early 20s to process multiple facets of information simultaneously. In television, success brings imitation....

"When Mary Lynn Ryan, who was CNN's producer at the time, did this the news ratings skyrocketed," Grimes said. "So it appeared as though Robert Pittman was correct: if you are from 12-22 years old, your brain has learned how to process all these competing messages simultaneously, but people in their 30s and older have not learned how to do that."

Bergen, however, hypothesized that Pittman's theory was not correct.... "The human brain is today as it was in the 1880s, the 1580s and in the time of the Greeks and Romans. It has not changed," Grimes said. "We are no better able to parallel process conflicting information now than we were 300 years ago. So this notion that Pittman had that people have learned how to do that is nonsense." --Distracting visuals clutter TV screen; viewers less likely to retain content (EurekAlert!)

We'll be starting our own TV turn-off week, one week late.

Tonight, my son asked to watch The Incredibles again, but I told him we'd play together instead. While my wife took a nap, the kids and I read books aloud, played hide-and-seek, "Simon Says," and a game of my own invention -- "The Obedience Game." Just about anything can be fun if you enjoy the people you're with.

Computer turn-off week? I'm not ready for that...

AP started as a cooperative. Today, it is a cooperative in name only. It’s time to take a lesson from music swappers and invent the new AP – a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service.

The 21st Century news business needs a peer-to-peer network that lets local operations drive cost out of their non-local news packages, divert resources to local web content creation and operate on a level playing field with bloggers, citizen journalists and internet pure plays. --Bob Benz and Mike Phillips --Time for a change: The Associated Press as Napsterized news (Online Journalism Review)

This is a reasonable attempt by the mainstream media to "get it" when it comes to the internet. Another detail that caught my eye:

Confronted with the rapidly growing need for web-specific content like Flash files, audio clips and other multimedia elements, AP has chosen to spend more of its members’ money to create that content rather than facilitate content-sharing among its members.

I'm planning to introduce a Flash unit in an upcoming (Fall 2006, if memory serves) New Media Projects course.

Pick Up Ax Link-O-Rama (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This year, I've taught Anthony Clarvoe's play Pick Up Ax in two of my courses -- Intro to Literary Study and Media Aesthetics. If you're just itching to find out what my students had to say about this play about geeks who listened to rock music that was recorded before they were born, here's a Google search for 'Pick Up Ax' on blogs.setonhill.edu.

A few years ago, I wrote a brief article on Pick Up Ax in the Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games newsletter.

The publisher's website features a brief Clarvoe bio.


Some reviews:

Pick Up Ax reveals how distant such ideals now seem. Its protagonist—far from feeling heat, let alone compunction, for swimming with (past) a school of very nasty sharks—is rewarded for his less-than-ethical actions; and not just in the outcome of the plot, mind you: we actually kind of like and admire this guy, in spite of the fact that—or, more disturbingly, maybe because—we recognize in him the soulless signposts of our recent Age of Greed (NYTheatre.com)

Here's a mostly positive review that praised the production more than the writing.

The company says that its plays are chosen ``for their fiery vitality and thought-provoking topics,'' and this play was very often fiery; but thought-provoking? Well, yes, if the message was that the meek shall inherit modern technology or that the nerds will get their revenge. It seemed unsure, too, as to whether it was a morality play or a realistic one. (Off-Off Broadway Review)

Just today I found a delightful Pick Up Ax photo gallery, featuring photos of the mood room in action.

The game scene is resorting to faddish ideas from years ago to try to appear original. I'm surprised they haven't come out with Pet Rock software yet.

None of this will save a doomed industry. The business is going to attempt to sustain growth and creativity by making game players buy newer and newer machines. Computer gaming has always been sustained by never-ending improvements in resolution and realism. But once we get to photorealism, what is going to sustain growth?

That time is drawing near. We are already getting pre-hype for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 2, as well as the new Nintendo. All this will do is make the visuals more lifelike and the blood and gore more realistic and nauseating. While the kids who are used to this "progress" may not be put off by it, newcomers may be repulsed and skip these new generations of machines altogether.

If that doesn't flatten the market, the never-ending need to satisfy the demanding full-time game-player should do it. --John C. Dvorak --Doom 4: End of the Game Industry?  (PC Mag.com)

Predictably, Dvorak's getting trashed by twitch-thumbed gamers on Slashdot, but Dvorak's curmudgeonly demeanor is only endearing to a point.

In the minority are those teachers who have setup their blog/cms as the main home page for their site, integrated into their blog or CMS or at least provide obvious links to their CV, teaching experience, etc, off of the main page of their blog. The blog/CMS is thus positioned as the main public face for establishing professional ethos, an inseparable part of the teacher/researcher's identity. I was actually surprised at how few I have been able to find; it seems a large number of those in the field don't provide direct links to their professional CV or teaching philosophy from the front page of their blog or only a brief mention of their professional affiliation thus making it obvious to me that they would not share their blog as the singular main portal into their professional identity in a cover letter or resume submitted to a hiring committee.

Here's the list I have so far where teachers are building their professional identity into their blog/cms site, or at least featuring the blog as their home page with direct links back to CV, bio, etc.

• Matt Barton
• Johndan Johnson-Eilola
• Dennis Jerz
• Charles Lowe
• Clancy Ratliff
• Rich Rice
• Clay Spinuzzi

Anyone have suggestions for other sites in rhetoric and composition with these characteristics? I'm sure there must be some more out there and I'd like a few more examples. --Teachers Who Position Their Blog or CMS as their Professional Home Page (KairosNews)

Nowadays, news consumers have an almost unlimited choice. They don't sit down with a newspaper for an hour to read it cover to cover. Instead, they bounce from site to site, story to story, link to link, customizing their newsgathering experience, clicking on whatever stories from whatever publications appeal to them. They don't stick around long, but they do visit. It may be difficult for newspapers to figure out how to make money on them, but that doesn't mean that consumers don't find the product appealing.

People haven't been abandoning newspapers (and magazines). They have been abandoning the print medium. --Adam L. Penenberg --The New Old Journalism  (Wired)

Nothing terribly new here, but it's still notable to see support for The Basics in a publication like Wired.

Incredibles DVD Freezes in My Player (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The other day, my wife picked up a copy of the widescreen, 2-disc DVD of The Incredibles. The movie disc loaded, played the FBI warning, then froze on the screen that threatens our little family with legal action if we ever offend The Mouse.

I'm used to the annoying tendency of DVDs to refuse to let you jump right to the menu, but this was ridiculous. The screen froze at the warning, and didn't do anything. The only way we could get the DVD out was by shutting off the player.

The bonus features disc plays just fine, and the disk that hung in on our DVD player worked just fine in my laptop. The DVD has imprinted on it "www.TheIncredibles.com/support," but that URL leads to an error. Hacking the URL leads to a Disney site containing no obvious technical assistance.

We brought the box back to Wal-Mart to exchange it, and the same thing happened.

My son suggests that we return the DVD and get a videotape instead, but I doubt Wal-Mart will allow that. Maybe somebody else Googling for this problem will find this page and we can commiserate...

I discovered an abandoned deposit in my company owned by one of our Outer Rim customers who died along with his entire family as a result of an landspeeder crash. He actually deposited this funds amounting to IC12,000,000,000.00 (Twelve billion Imperial Credits), for safe keeping in my company here in Mos Eisley. Company file records shows that the funds was actually for a project our late costumer wanted to start in the near future (a multi million Dollar Spice plant in Kessel), before his sudden and untimely death. As such since his death none of his relations or next-of-kin has come forward to lay claims for this property as the heir, this is the basically the reason why I have contacted you. My company cannot release the roperty unless someone applies for claim as the next-of-kin to the deceased as indicated in our operating guidelines. --PRIVATE AND URGENT (The Darth Side)

Amusing comment posted to Darth Vader's blog. ("Tomorrow I may strangle General Veers.")

First, pigeons cannot fly through Windows. Second, since they don't fly in darkness either, this method's bandwidth drops to zero 50% of the time. Finally, there's the problem of droppings download. We are pleased to report that all these shortcomings were resolved in our new data transfer protocol, as we now turn to describe.

System architecture: the system is constructed of a back end - a carriage, Ben-Hur movie style, which is made of a yoke made of light Balsa, and outfitted with two huge wheels - 2 DVD wheels, 4.7 Giga each. --Snails are faster than ADSL (Ami Ben-Bassat's Blog)

Our time here may be fleeting ("Out, out brief candle!") but footnotes are not supposed to be. When online citations extinguish, every discipline is befouled, because replication, at the heart of the research process, becomes difficult without stable archiving, which libraries used to provide.

It was called a book shelf, as in Shakespeare's day. --Michael Bugeja --Such Stuff as Footnotes Are Made On (Inside Higher Ed)

The distractions of constant emails, text and phone messages are a greater threat to IQ and concentration than taking cannabis, according to a survey of befuddled volunteers.

Doziness, lethargy and an increasing inability to focus reached "startling" levels in the trials by 1,100 people, who also demonstrated that emails in particular have an addictive, drug-like grip. --Martin Wainwright --Emails 'pose threat to IQ'  (Guardian)

Of course, computer games and the machines they run on have changed enormously since Zork first appeared in 1980. But I can't say that the games are any more entertaining.

Playing Zork and some of the other games of the day that were called "interactive fiction" was like reading a "Lord of the Rings" book for the first time. You could be transported to a strange and mystical world and caught up in a powerful and addictive story. --Ric Manning --The magic is back  (Courier Journal)

For the few seconds between the announcement that Ratzinger was named pope, and the announcement of his choice of name, the Wikipedia entry was titled Pope Joseph... I just happened to catch it on the fly (it was changed before I could update it)... --Stephen Downes, in a comment. --How the Community Can Work, Fast (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.)

That's some fast work on the part of the Wikipedians...

Google il Papa! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Google hasn't yet started returning meaningful results for "Benedict XVI" in its main search results, though its news service was doing fine right from the start.

At 1:45 EST, I googled the new pope's name, and found plenty of speculation that the next pope after John Paul II would choose that name. Creative works, including a comic book, have used characters with the name Pope Benedict XVI.

At 5:45, the search results were unchanged...




But the difference in GoogleAd options is marked.



Regarding Wikipedia: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was well-known before he was named pope, so much of the Wikipedians' task was repackaging the material already assembled for Ratzinger, but it's still amazing to see how detailed the Wikipedia article is, just a few hours after the news was announced. (See Wikipedia: Pope Benedict XVI.)

--i am 8-bit

A Los Angeles art show.

Website requires Flash.

Sorry, we were unable to locate document(s) pertaining to your request.

Did you mean: zirconium instead of kirschenbaum? --This Morning's Lesson in Machine Learning (Or, So Said the Search Engine Unto Me) (MGK)

This is tremendous news... search technology has advanced to the point where a search engine has become aware of Matt Kirschenbaum's strong, metallic character, his tendency to spark and ignite when exposed to the open air, his usefulness as an anti-corrosive in alloys, his whitish-grey lustre, the fact that his atomic number is 40, and the fact that he was discovered by Martin Heinrich Klaproth in 1789.

The real appeal of the game is seeing Star Wars characters rendered in itty-bitty plastic form. By the end of the game, there are more than 30 different little guys you can be in Free Play mode.

The good guys are cute, but the evil folks are just adorable. Mini-Maul! Sen. Palpateeny! Bite-sized battle droids! --Lore Sjöberg --Lego Star Wars: The Game  (WIred)

Good writing... the game would probably appeal to my son. Check out the captions in the photo gallery, too... "Your Jedi powers allow you to pull apart doors as if they were made out of some sort of plastic interlocking brick toy."

Goodbye, Blogdex (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I used to love Blogdex, but today's "most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community" are measured by a grand total of three links. So I've taken it off my blogroll. (I can't remember the last time I did that.)

The last announcement was posted in October of 2004, and that announcement hasn't been cleared of the spam that has collected there over the past few months.

I'm glad Technorati is still operating, but I do miss Blogdex.

--Gibby's Game Room (Nescapades)

That's my first computer on the bottom shelf, a Texas Instruments TI-99 4A (c. 1981). The key combination that produced "+" was "shift+equals." The key combination that produced "System Reset" was "namelessbutton-right-next-to-shift + equals." One day it started smoking, so we took it back to the store.

I didn't see an Atari 800 (c. 1979) on Gibby's page. An internal speaker was set to beep every time you pushed a key. The Atari 400 had a membrane keyboard, so I guess the beep was supposed to substitute for the click. But for the Atari 800, which had a real keyboard, the key beep was redundant. I opened up the case, snipped the speaker wire, and threaded both ends out through a gap between the keys. When I wanted sound, I twisted the wires together. What a geek.

Hm.... the TI really was our first computer, but "oldcomputers.net" says the Atari 800 came out earlier. Could we actually have gotten the TI 99 4 first? I remember we got a replacement at one point.... but I specifically remember the sound of the voice synthesizer saying "Texas Instruments TA 99 4A computer."

I'll appeal to my sister.... Rosemary, can you help me out on this?

There seemed to be better games for the Atari, and a summer computer course that I took as a middle schooler used HP terminals in one room and Atari 800s and 400s (check out that profile) in the other, so perhaps when we had enough of the Texas Instruments I convinced the rest of the family to go with the machine that I knew well.

On the top center, that's a Commodore 64 (c. 1982) -- the computer I took with me to college in 1986. (I used a tiny 4-inch TV screen as the monitor.)

If Gibby dies now, I think Gibby will win.

Are libraries and librarians willing to support initiative to provide weblog support for their community? The University of Minnesota Libraries think so: “It is our goal to develop a blog server through which everyone in the university community (faculty, staff, and student) can have access to their own individual blog” (University of Minnesota Libraries, accessed December 7, 2004). Other campuses are also providing students and staff with the means to creatE their own blogs. Though not library-initiated, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School hosts “Weblogs at Harvard Law,” which allows anyone with a harvard.edu e-mail address to create their own weblog. (John Harvard’s Journal 2004) Seton Hall University students can create their own weblogs with a service provided by the Humanities Division and the New Media Journalism program ([Jerz], accessed December 7, 2004). -- Reichardt, Randy and Geoffrey Harder, Science & Technology Libraries, 25(3), p105-116. --Weblogs: Their Use and Application in Science and Technology Libraries (PDF) (Science & Technology Libraries)

That's Seton Hill University.

It's a good article, nevertheless.

Although not traditionally the domain of special collections, I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. Interactive fiction is a genre of computer game that is more literary than most computer and video games popular today. Also known as text adventure games, these works present story text to players, who then type in commands to the computer, which then prints text in response, back and forth, in the process unfolding and determining a story. Although not commercially popular today, the genre may be of great scholarly and historical importance as interactive electronic games grow both in general popularity and as subjects worthy of academic study. --Adam Mathes --Collecting and Preserving Infocom Interactive Fiction (AdamManthes.com)

Via Nick on GrandTextAuto., where Mathes notes that this is a hypothetical project, written for a class.

I wonder... quite honestly, are the best-known commercial IF games really the ones that are most in need of collection and preservation? Still, Infocom's works were undeniably influential.

Here's what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it.

Here's what you can't do with a textbook:

You can't annotate it. How strange is it that students can't add their own reflections or thoughts or reactions, that they have to do that in a different space?

You can't search it.

You can't link it to other relevant ideas or concepts in any organized way.

You can't access it if it's not in your posession.

You can't copy out important information and paste it with other important information.

You can't share it in any meaningful way.

You can't have the most up to date information about the topic.

You can't edit it.

Think of how much more interactivity we have with digital content, how much more power we have to make meaning of that content through connecting ideas and people with it.

--The Case Against Textbooks (Weblogg-ed)

If students own copies of the book, then of course they can annotate it.

They can search a book if someone else has prepared a concordance, and they can link to the contents of the book by referring to a page number.

And there are all sorts of things that you can't do with a digital text -- such as read it without access to a computer, or add its weight to the milk crate in which you plan to present your tenure review package. Of course, the former concern comes with the territory, and the latter is no flaw in digital text itself.

But I'm picking nits, because I'm mostly in agreement. I use printed collections of essays in my teaching, and of course I use printed literary works, but rarely do I use traditional textbooks.

Since I think of myself mostly as a writing teacher, I tend to think of content as a means to an end. So I'm more interested in getting students to be critical thinkers and researchers, rather than have them absorb the contents of a book and remember it long enough to take a quiz.

I'll use a textbook in my "Newswriting" course this fall, but in my upper-level courses, I'm more likely to use web pages, supplemented with journal articles. Textbooks that cover digital culture go out of date so quickly that Wikipedia is often a better resource.

"Certainly, I didn't do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away." --Rupert Murdoch, "old media" mogul. --News must adapt to web, says Murdoch  (Guardian)

I don't believe that the internet is a leveller of genders. In fact, in many cases, it seems to be the opposite.

I spend a lot of time on IRC (internet relay chat), where my IRC nick is not gender-neutral. On many occasions I have joined IRC channels to ask technical questions, and have encountered people who say things like, ?Oh, I don't know the answer to your question, but you can talk to me anyway because you?re a girl.? or ?Are you really a girl?? and then after checking my ?real name? exclaiming ?Yesssss!? and suchlike.

If one outright pretends to be a man (for instance, by assuming a male IRC nick) then perhaps one could naively see internet-based communication as a leveller of genders, but only in as much as it'slevel because no one realises that you are a woman'that'sabout hiding gender, not levelling it! --questions (join-the-dots)

Hannah makes some excellent, thoughtful responses to a pre-interview survey. She seems a bit frustrated by commonly held notions about women in computing, noting, quite diplomatically, "a bit of an implied assumption" in a question that suggests that she, as a woman, might faces personal challenges that form personal challenges for her. "For example," she notes, "consider fathers who’d prefer to work part time or from home, but are discouraged from doing so due to societal pressures."

Heh. I'm usually discouraged from working at home by the sound of screaming kids, but I'm on my own for another week until the wife and kids get back from visiting my in-laws.

Wireless internet is an idea that first formulated back during the Cold War. It was a young Al Gore who first was struck in the head by an apple (much like Sir Newton, except this apple was thrown at Gore by Ollie North). Mr. Gore said to himself, in a very slow and monotonous tone, "I should create a world wide communication network... with my bare hands! All by myself!" And then, about an hour later, over a bowl of scrambled eggs with ketchup, he thought out loud, "You know what... once I have this internet thing completed, I should make it go through the air without wires... I will make this with my bare hands! The question is how..." --Mike Rubino --Wi-Fi Madness (Tranquility Lost)

Lately I've been love-bombing Mike Rubino, a graphic arts and creative writing double major, who's a major presence on blogs.setonhill.edu, but who for some silly reason won't declare a new media journalism major. He hasn't even taken a class with me yet. (Was it something I said?)

Anyway, he's a great satirist. I'm surprised I missed this back in August when he first posted it.

I spent quite a bit of time sorting through (and adding to) my collection of blogging-related bookmarks. Several of these have been linked here previously, but I thought it would be useful to compile them for easy reference. Here, for example is a (perhaps somewhat arbitrary) collection of blog criticisim links... --William Cole --Blogging Workshop (Donut Age)

A useful collection of links... I'm flattered to be on it.

In the spirit of endism, here's a list of all the forms of major media and how they're trending. Make of it what you will.

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)
• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising) --Mainstream Media Meltdown (The Long Tail)

To include books along with all the other media dinosaurs is misleading.

The growth rate of books seems flat, but compared to the other traditional media, books look healthy.

I'm also not sure that measuing the advertising dollars spent on the web is a good way to measure the importance of that media. So, while the author coyly withholds commentary in an attempt to appear unbiased, the selection and organization of this particular list carries an ideological slant. I'm not criticizing the author for having an ideology, I'm just noting the rhetorical impact of the author's compositional decisions.

Although a failed business enterprise, Laurel'sPurple Moon seemed to do exactly what it had planned -- hit it off with girls. Her idea that games should consist of relationships, values such as loyalty, love, and courage, and conflicts such as jealousy, cheating, exclusion, racism, materialism, and broken homes seems worthwhile, but as a young girl I also would have wanted some action as well. Perhaps there is a happy medium that would please both boys and girls -- a video game that incorporates action and physical complications into an in depth storyline filled with rich characters, relationships, emotional conflicts, and growth. --Johanna Dreyfuss --Utopian Entrepreneur (The Long and Winding Road)

My student Johanna Dreyfus reflects on Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur. I'm looking for this game, too, Johanna! Let me know if you find it!

The implications of scalable theory have been far-reaching and pervasive. In fact, few end-users would disagree with the deployment of expert systems, which embodies the private principles of artificial intelligence. We explore new introspective configurations, which we call KindlerDop.--Shatner, Elmo, Jerz and Nye --An Improvement of XML (SciGen)

Read the backstory behind this random CS paper generator. From Metafilter.

Note the citations to articles by "Elmo, T. M." in the bibliography. Brilliant!

If something needs to be prettier, they just add a few lines of description (or remove some - "beautiful" could challenge your mind to create an entirely different image than "beautiful blonde") instead of spending hours rendering.

In fact, there's so much content, Mihaly says it would just be too difficult to convert his game into a conventional MMOG. "Most good text MUDs would be way too expensive to translate to graphics because the range of features would require ungodly huge heaps of graphics... We'd have to strip out the soul of the game (as well as most of the features) to make it work," he said. While a picture can speak 1,000 words, it seems a few lines of text can conjure thousands of mental pictures. --Joseph Blancato --In Search of Deeper Content (War Cry Network)

Increasing graphics and cooler monsters doesn't always satisfy. Sometimes, less is more...

Another project, called Second Future, was undertaken by nine adults with cerebral palsy, and seeks to provide a forum in which they can share in the everyday personal interactions that most people take for granted. The group of nine, who share a single Second Life avatar known as Wilde Cunningham, get to experience being around other people without being judged.

"Many of the real-world challenges are bypassed in Second Life," said Jean-Marie Mahay, who works with the nine at an adult day-care center in Mattapan, Massachusetts. "Fewer folks have a problem hanging out with them, which is quite the opposite in real life. Also, due to their speech challenges, many would need help understanding them in real life, but in Second Life, I just type what they say and do what they want."

Added Mahay, "They felt stigmatized by their disabilities, (which) kept them from the normal social integration we take for granted. Second Life removes both of these things."

Mahay's charges spend their in-world time on the small island known as Brigadoon, a place created for sufferers of autism and Asperger's syndrome to try out the social interactions that are so hard for them in the real world. --Daniel Terdiman --Second Life Teaches Life Lessons  (Wired)

It is important that you understand that the concept of Toothing - beaming a sexual text message to a random phone on a commuter-packed tube train - is a bit like going into a crowded nightclub, throwing a brick at the dancefloor with a love letter attached, and hoping that the person it hits will agree to sleep with you. It'stechnically possible, and it'snot going to happen. That made it even better when the whole world fell for it.

The whole world. --Toothing (The Triforce)

Wired confesses it was hoaxed.

11. We are faced with three fundamental options: formation, participation and dialogue.

In the first place, a vast work of formation is needed to assure that the mass media be known and used intelligently and appropriately. The new vocabulary they introduce into society modifies both learning processes and the quality of human relations, so that, without proper formation, these media run the risk of manipulating and heavily conditioning, rather than serving people. This is especially true for young people, who show a natural propensity towards technological innovations, and as such are in even greater need of education in the responsible and critical use of the media.

In the second place, I would like to recall our attention to the subject of media access, and of co-responsible participation in their administration. If the communications media are a good destined for all humanity, then ever-new means must be found -- including recourse to opportune legislative measures -- to make possible a true participation in their management by all. The culture of co-responsibility must be nurtured.

Finally, there cannot be forgotten the great possibilities of mass media in promoting dialogue, becoming vehicles for reciprocal knowledge, of solidarity and of peace. They become a powerful resource for good if used to foster understanding between peoples; a destructive ?weapon? if used to foster injustice and conflicts. My venerable predecessor, Blessed John XXIII, already prophetically warned humanity of such potential risks in the Encyclical, Pacem in Terris. --The Rapid Development [of technology in the area of the media...] (Vatican)

This is one of the last documents produced by Pope John Paul II, honoring the January 24 feast of Saint Francis de Sales, the patron saint of journalists.

My dean sent me this link, via a news story on The Business of Television. I'm just about to introduce a new unit on "globalism" to my freshman comp class, so this seems like a great entry point.

Conservatives and too many liberals view video games through a jaundiced lens: they are sources of violence and mayhem that destroy the minds of impressionable teenagers. But, as Rejeski points out, "policymakers have spent far too much time focused on the effects of a small number of violent video releases and lost sight of the pedagogical function and advantages of games in general." True, violence makes video games a highly profitable enterprise.

But it's also the case that the new frontier of the serious game space contradicts those who like to fulminate against video games as a fount of evil. --Katrina vanden Heuvel --Playstations for Peace (The Nation)

Another traditional tipoff that a pope has died is the ritual closing of the shutters of the two windows at the side of the pope's apartment overlooking St. Peter's Square. Some say the closing of the shutters can be the first tangible sign of a death.

Despite those arcane traditions, first official word that John Paul had died came in e-mails sent by the Vatican press office to accredited journalists.

That marked a stark departure from the centuries-old traditions of one of the world's most enduring institutions, the Roman Catholic Church. --William J. Kole --E-Mails Usurp Arcane Signs of Pope's Death (Guardian | AP)

As the first lethal robots head for Iraq, the role of the robot soldier as a killing machine has barely been debated. The history of warfare suggests that every new technological leap - the longbow, the tank, the atomic bomb - outraces the strategy and doctrine to control it.

"The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it." --A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to Battle (NY TImes/RUR-RI-2004)

Posted to a newsgroup devoted to the discussion of RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots).

"[B]logging is not an educational use of school computers." -- Chris Sousa, principal of Proctor Jr.-Sr. High School. --High school bans blogging (Rutland Herald)

I wish this were an April Fool's Day hoax.