Technology: November 2005 Archive Page

Turning to a few student samples we can see this concept exemplified even more. Below is a quote from one of Dennis Jerz's students. This is one of the student's first postings, and you can see his/her enthusiasm about designing and creating a blog.

September 08, 2004: LOOK AT ME, I HAVE A BLOG!

I have a blog now. My very own. It's like a baby -- mine to mold, change, and create. Hundreds of people (or in my case, about 5) will be able to see my writings. People from other countries even. Hola! Bonjour! Guten Tag! foreign peoples! I think I may have become addicted though. I just found out how to personalize and change the colors. Now, every free moment I have will be spent changing colors and making the blog uniquely me. Homework? Who needs homework? I have to work on my blog. (Special K)

This student seems to be aware of, probably because Jerz emphasized to his students, the public nature of the weblog: "Hundreds of people... will be able to see my writings. People from other countries even." However, what is even more intriguing is that the student states in parentheses "(or in my case, about 5)," which would seem to indicate that he/she does not think many people will be reading her blog. --Ashley Joyce Holmes --Web Logs in the Post-Secondary Writing Classroom: A Study of Purposes (PDF) (North Carolina State University)

This was a pleasant find -- an NCSU master's thesis that analyzes the use of web logs in higher education. I think I'll throw a few quotes from this into my next annual review.

I'm much better at simply showing people what blogs are all about, so I appreciated Holmes' careful description of precisely how a blog works. I might use a section of this dissertation the next time I teach Writing for the Internet.

My student Vanessa Kolberg is the "Special K" blogger. The paper mentions her name correctly, but the URL given in the Works Cited list is wrong. It should be "http://blogs.setonhill.edu/VanessaKolberg".

Each of the following uses a weblog or content management system to manage the site and/or really breaks traditional conventions in other ways, changing the way that the teacher establishes their professional ethos in comparison to the more traditional forms seen above. --Example Instructor Professional Home Pages (Introductory Composition at Purdue: Technical Mentoring)

Just doing a little egosurfing to remind myself that I do have a professional identity that extends beyond circling punctuation errors. No classes today, but I went into the office anyway and marked papers for seven hours.

Not done yet, so it's back to work. But first, maybe I'll crush Rome in Civilization III.

Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question.

[...]

So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article on another interview with Stringer, which appeared a few weeks ago and also appeared to attribute pricing and availability information to the Sony CEO.

However, on closer inspection, the article was actually citing an anonymous source within Sony - a fine detail which the CNN article apparently missed, setting the whole rumour mill rolling once again. --CNN drops PS3 price story as Stringer comments are confuted  (Games Industry)

Via Bobby Kuchenmeister, a former student of mine, and a regular commenter, who finally got a blog. Hooray!

Researchers unveiled a prototype of a $100 hand-cranked laptop computer on Wednesday and said they hoped to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe.

About the size of a textbook, the lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable electricity supply, MIT researchers said at a United Nations technology summit.

--$100 laptops aim to bring children the world (Seattle Times)

This story broke during the week my blog was down, so I'm late to this party. One of minute of cranking is supposed to provide 40 minutes of computer power.

It's become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much ? the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall.

[...]

What's really driving the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core constituency ? young moviegoers ? has evaporated. Poof! They've scattered to the winds. Young males aren't just AWOL from movie theaters, they're also not seeing the studio's TV ads ? either because they've stopped watching TV altogether, or because they've got the TV, iPod and IM all going at the same time ? not exactly a situation in which an ad leaves much of an imprint.

[...]

Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with reality....The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble ? ahem, your customers ? who spend $75 to take the family to a movie. --Patrick Goldstein --In a losing race with the zeitgeist (LA Times (will expire))

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity. --Charles Johnson & Roger L. Simon --Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas (OSM.org)

I've been watching this one unfold from a distance.

A company called Pajamas Media (a reference to CNN president Jonathan Klein's dismissal of the typical blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas") to Open Source Media. Bloggers noted that this name conflicts with the name of Christopher Lyndon's "Open Source" radio show, and began tracking changes to Open Source Media's version of the name-change story.

Johnson and Simon have rightly pointed out the problems with Dan Rather's arrogant response to bloggers who pointed out flaws in the CBS coverage of Memogate, so it was rather surprising to see that it took some time for Open Source Media to admit that the company made a big mistake. (See Lyndon's description of the name problem.)

The Pajamas Media website, however, still contains material dismissing "Pajamas Media" as a temporary name that they will soon shed.

Why We'll Be Changing Our Name

When the bloggers who started this company first came together it was almost natural we would call ourselves Pajamas Media. It was a playful tip of the hat to that moment when bloggers exposed the misreporting of CBS anchor Dan Rather. At that time, an ex-executive for CBS tried to dismiss us as riffraff in "pajamas." But the bloggers were right, CBS was wrong, Rather retired (without apologizing) and the rest is history.

But as we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It's not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new. To do that, we needed a name that would allow us to grow. And that name we are in the process of deciding.

What a PR fiasco. It wasn't as if the people involved suddenly decided to change their name and picked one at random. They planned this, but didn't plan well enough.

While they responded slowly in terms of the blogging cycle, they still cleared it all up within a week, which is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. --Robert S. Boynton --Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs (Slate)

I'm back! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last Friday afternoon, my site went down. Trying to access the homepage yielded a message that the owner of the site should contact billing@[ISP]. I assumed that there was a mix-up in terms of paying our ISP for the next year of hosting, but our billing people say that we paid the bill on time.

During this time, I was able to access my files via ftp and SSH (geekier ways of accessing files, not involving web browsers), so I knew the site was still there and the data files were safe.

About a half hour ago, I noticed that my site was still accessible under a different URL -- the URL my ISP first gave me, before the domain name servers picked up "jerz.setonhill.edu" and started pointing web surfers to hosting company's computer.

SHU's webmaster Jess Turner did his webmasterful magic, found that our ISP has moved to a new IP address (the sequence of numbers that identifies each individual unique connectio to the internet).

So now I'm back in business. Hurrah for Jess!

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed or called me to let me know the site was down.

My student weblogs were unaffected by this problem, which was a good thing, since this is a stressful time of year and I would hate to give them one more thing to worry about.

As Riya learns who's in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. --Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix  (Wired)

--David Jump! (David Denninger)

A student of mine posted a clever little video that includes some simple but very cool effects.

Not much in the way of narrative or character development, but the whole thing made me smile.

See David Jump!.

For decades, the debate was very much focused on UFOs, sightings and abduction stories. Alien visitors turned into a modern myth. In an age when our other beliefs and ideologies were fading away, we could at least believe in UFOs.

Most scientists, annoyed as they were, simply chose to ignore it. Then some bright people, like my colleagues in The Planetary Society, realized that instead of just laughing at the matter, you could try to tap this truly huge interest for life in space, by shifting the focus to a related but more scientific theme: SETI. Since then, there are more articles about SETI than UFOs in our newspapers. They manage to shift the center of the debate, and to a small degree, they shifted our entire perception of the universe.

In a similar fashion, we now need to sow the seeds of a new ?myth? for the space program?in fact a whole new perception among people regarding our inherited place, role, and destiny in the cosmos. I am sure we won?t influence policymakers and budget planners right away. But we can make this seed grow in society at large: why not start already tonight with our kids? bedtime stories? --Hans L.D.G. Starlife
--Needed: a change of focus (The Space Review)

Needed: a better title. The image is beautiful, but the headline is drab.

P.S. Hans L.D.G. Starlife? Really?

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2A Debate Between Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Do we need instructional design in serious games, or is making a good game enough? This debate is part of an ongoing turf battle within the serious games movement.

As is generally the case with conference liveblogging, these are lightly-edited notes, and shouldn't be taken as a verbatim, authoritative transcript.

Perry McDowell gave the introduction. Developer of "Delta 3D," an open-source games engine.

If games can train and educate without putting pedagogy into it, why waste time/money in it?

If games can't train without instructional design, the results can be scary ("negative training effects").

In the 80s, regarding AI, "Mouths made promises that brains couldn't keep." The result was "the AI winter" -- money for AI research dried up as a result of dissatisfaction with early attempts.

In the 90s, the same thing happened with VR. Serious Games is providing a reprieve for VR researchers. But if we can't show hard evidence that SG doesn't train people better, faster, cheaper, then before long Serious Games will be five guys drinking beer remembering the old days, while, the rest of us will be at the "Hula-hoops for Education Conference."

"We don't want Serious Games to be on the scrapheap of history" along with the pet rock. (Hmmm?. if serious games isn't any good, then why shouldn't it be discarded when the next thing comes along? The argument is predicated on the assumption that serious games do work. He's suggesting the issue is to preserve funding for serious games, not to solve the problems that most of us in this room assume serious games will solve.)

Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky; two smart, very well-educated people who have almost diametrically opposing positions on the issue.

Contextualizing the start of the deabate, which started at another conference (sorry, I didn't catch that detail).

Marc -- teachers are basically babysitters, under certain circumstances we can get rid of teachers.

Jan -- "Marc, I could almost defend you until you went off the deep end."

The moderator helpfully contextualized the debate with Jerry Springer and Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots slides, and Dan Ackroyd's famous Saturday Night Live retort, "Jane, you ignorant slut."

So clearly, this debate was staged as entertainment, with the two participants ready to attack each other intellectally.

Jan Cannon-Bowers

Do we need pedagogy in educational games? Of course we do! What moron would think otherwise? Why is "pedagogy" a bad word? Gamers are afraid that pedagogy represents this noose we're going to put around their necks and tighten it to crush out all their creative juice. She suggests that it will be an interesting mix and culture clash. Learning doesn't have to be "fun" in order to be successful. Would you say everything you learned was fun? We can all recall cases in which we were so motivated to learn that we overcame bad instructional environments.

Should we try to make learning fun? Sure! If fun is one way to elevate motivation, then why not? Positive feelings about training -- "I liked it or didn't like it." There's a threshold below which no learning is happening, but does learning have to be "fun" in order to be effective? There's a point at which, once a certain threshold of comfort has been reached, there is little correlation between comfort and learning.

Besides fun, we should also consider that training is interesting, engaging, useful, challenging, fulfilling, and otherwise motivating. If we don't incorporate pedagogy, learning effectiveness is hit or miss (at best).

Jan would prefer that her doctor, mechanic, etc, be trained on a solid system that does its job, and she doesn't care whether they have fun in the process.


Marc Prensky

Had difficulty getting his laptop started. Heckled from the audience -- "Are you having fun?" Marc admitted that he should have tested it, and admitted "There's probably pedagogy involved in testing." The moderator jumped up and joked that the debate was over, Jan cried, "I won!"

To fill time, Jan fielded a question from the audience? what's the difference between enjoyable and fun? She replied that that's splitting hairs, but noted that people may go through an experience where they are sweating bullets, and then look back afterwards and say, "That was fun!"

When the laptop was ready, Marc sarted saying, "Sure sure sure sure." Began with a joke definition of pedagogy -- peda = "foot," gogy = "gouge" -- gagging on your foot in your mouth.

"Whenever you add an instructional designer, the first thing they do is suck the fun out."

Showed a list of 12 activities (trying, deciding, observing. etc.). You need motivation in order to get people to do those 12 things.

Will Wright --If a learner is motivated, there's no stopping him.

Effort for learning can feel like work, but can also feel like play. Learning feels like play when you have the engagement, motivation and passion -- and that should be our number one priority. The main reason you do all these things is to get people to finish the training you've invested your energy in.

A good chart

Curriculum Design v Game Design

Focus: Content vs. Engagement
Mode: Presentations vs. Gameplay
Decisions: Rare vs. Frequent and Important

Negative Training -- the instructional designer's way of instilling fear. "the herpes of training"

("Serious Games" is a subset of games for educational purposes. A term for a subset of education that focuses on enjoyment is "Fun Pedagogy.")

Jan of game designers -- "I don't trust you!" (guffaws). When asked to clarify, she said she didn't trust the instinct of game designers to be able to deliver the content that, for example, helps a pilot to fly a plane, without the help of instructional designers.

(Makes me think of Plato's Ion, the dialogue with a rhapsode who says that he is qualified to act the role of a general because he knows what a general would do or say.)

When asked how a pilot in a "fun" simulation would learn the details, Marc said "RTFM." Someone from the audience asked "Who wrote the FM?"

Marc -- we need good instructional strategies. "If they were good instructional strategies, they wouldn't suck the fun out." We've learned a lot about the world of Norrath, such that if there were a real world of Norrath, it could be validated.

Jan -- design is about making decisions. "I don't think the typical gamer who's not gotten some extensive exposure is going to make the appropriate design decisions."

Marc -- suggested that instead of starting from the beginning that instead you started in the middle, repairing an interesting thing that's broken, rather that creating something from scratch without a sense of how it all works.

Jan notes that moving from simulation to games, you need new, modern models of instruction that can accommodate immersive environments.

Ricardo Rademacher, who was sitting behind me in the audience, pointed to the slide on which Marc had displayed "Whenever you add an instructional designer, the first thing they do is suck the fun out," and noted that you could turn that around. "Whenever you add a game designer, they suck the learning out," and argued that's precisely what happened in the 90s with "edutainment software."

In the last few minutes of the panel, amidst much laughter and zipping-up of laptop cases, when Marc tried to get the crowd to join his rallying cry of "Let's not suck the fun out," Ricardo and I cried, "Let's not suck!"

In a parting shot, the moderator asked the crowd how many of them had changed their minds based on what they had seen. Predictably, nobody raised their hands.

Overall, I thought the whole premise -- do we need pedagogy at all -- gave Jan an uphill battle. Imagine, if you will, in the alternate universe, instead of "Serious Games Summit," a "Fun Pedagogy Summit."

What chance would a game designer have there?

Well, that's it -- time to publish this and head over to the reception. I'm driving back to Pennsylvania tonight.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Paul Marino: Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Executive Director, Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences
Author of The Art of Machinima

The presentation was a brief introduction to a demonsration of clips, many of which I've seen, so it wasn't as immediately informative as I had initially expected. Still, a useful focal point for many different issues. Marino began by defining machinima as “the intersection of filmmaking, animation and interactive/game technologies,” ended by calling it “the democratization of animated filmmaking/storytelling.”

What follows are my hastily typed notes. I kind of shut my brain off and just watched the clips, so this entry will be a little thin.

Capturing live action, even if it takes place in a virtual world, is a kind of filmmaking.

Cinema + Moore’s Law = Machinima

Quake Movies – The Rangers – created “Diary of a Camper,” a silent film with text-chatting dialogue, created by capturing the actions of players in the multi-player environment. The term “Quake movie” persisted for a while, but since it was being created within different games, a new term was needed.

Term coined in 1998 by Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey. (Machine + cinema, with the misspelled ending being part of an e-mail communication.)

Clive Thompson, NYT, noted that machinima is not just about creating an animated movie, but also permits game players “to comment directly on the pop culture they so devotedly consume.”

Machinima Clip Screening

“Apartment Huntin’”
“Warthog Jump”
”My Trip to Liberty City” -- “Almost a travelogue, in a Woody Allen kind of way.”
(Played the clip from the beginning to the joke about not really playing baseball.) (The same author also created a great short film on a text adventure theme.)

Visionary Machinima

“Anna” – lifecycle of a wildflower.
“The Journey” -- abstract, arthouse film, medium of expression.

Dance Videos: Keep of Movin’

“Let’s Get Started”
”Shut up and Dance”

Episodic Machinima
“Popular, and to a certain extent profitable.”
Red vs. Blue – five-person team that supports themselves, a million downloads per episode, over three years.
“Strangerhood Studios,” based on Sims 2.
“Cyborg Altar Boy”

New Building Blocks: Machinima Gets Crafty

In machinima it’s hard to do drama, easy to do comedy (the reverse of Hollywood)
Half-life 2’s Faceposer.

Marino’s clip… Presented the G-man singing in a music video.
“Robes”
“A Few Good G-Men”

(As soon as I get the chance, I’ll add links to sources for all these clips.)

Marino noted that Pixar films take two or three minutes per frame to reander, but today’s machinima creators are taking advantage of the real-time rendering tools that their computers and consoles possess. We’re reaching the point where creating these films don’t take nearly as much time as it used to take. Are we in the “Age of Ubiquitous Creativity”?

The talk really didn't have much to say at all about instructional filmmaking, even though that was part of the title. Overall, I'd say the audience was impressed; a crowd of about 20 people were around the speaker at the end of the presentation -- that's generally a good sign.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Derek Wischusen: Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Began with a useful grid that recognizes that realism is not the only way to evaluate a game, and that realistic games are not the only kind of training games out there.

Wischusen presented two binary pairs:

Fun/Training
and
Realistic/Unrealistic

Goal: Fun -> Training

(I like the recognition that realism is one option, but there are many ways to be “unrealistic,” just as there are many ways to be nonwhite or un-American. Expressionism, impressionism, romanticism, abastraction etc. are all artistic alternatives to realism.)

Key messages:

Training isn’t “just in time” or “just in case”
Simulation isn’t training
Networks, virtual environments, games, process measures are not training


Training is “relevant practice with feedback”

Assessment and Feedback

Simulation/game provides the practice environment. Practice alone does not make perfect. Intelligent assessment and feedback is essential for effective training to occur.

Perfect practice makes perfect. To learn how to do it correctly, you need assessment and feedback to tell you when you’re not doing it correctly.

While the good instructor is always the best source of training, there are rarely enough instructors to meet training needs; and never enough to provide one-on-one training.

(Hmm… A embedded assumption is that one-on-one training is best.. but “best” is a value statement. If you factor in ROI, then one-on-one instruction may be inefficient. Are all instructors “good” at one-on-one training? The reference to a “good” instructor is sort of begging the question. )

The system can do pre-testing to identify the knowledge you bring into the system, personalizing the delivery according to the needs of the learner.

“Cognitive fidelity is as important as graphical fidelity for both training quality and end-user acceptance.” (Hmm… that phrasing privileges graphical fidelity, but the speaker noted that not all training simulations requires that kind of fidelity.)

Presentation of Virtual Interactive Pattern Environment and Radiocomms Simulator (VIPERS) – an Air Force Research Laboratory project designed to give student pilots practice performing a labor-intensive landing procedure. Typically simulated with a duct tape pattern on the floor, with the students calling out their status and responding to commands as the routine requires. A technique better practiced on the ground, but students have limited access to fancy simulators.

(Hooray – in an aside the presenter noted that 2D environments can provide just as good results as rich 3D simulations, and cautioned the assumption that realistic graphics are always the best option.)

Synthetic Teammates for Realtime Anywhere Training and Assessment (STRATA)

DARWARS – offers a massively multiplayer online war, that permits different training systems to plug into it. Emphasizes “headwork” (teamwork, not flying skills).

Giving the trainee a situation that contains an error; will the trainee note that the setup information contains an error that makes accomplishing the goal impossible.

AI agents should occasionally make errors, since people do make errors in the field. That’s part of the “realism” in the training environment.

Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness (VECTOR)

Building a 3D environment that teaches soldiers to interact with people in a foreign environment, so that the locals are more interested in helping the soldiers than hurting them. The AI agents respond to trainee actions based on the emotional state of the agent, according to rules determined by cultural subject-matter experts. Within the exercise is a synthetic instructor, who gives objectives, provides feedback on both military and cultural protocols. The training involves interacting with the locals, getting important information while following cultural rules.

VIGILANCE – HazMat training, skilled support personnel (SSP) who assist the first responders. They may operate heavy machinery. The concern is that our SSP haven’t been trained to assist an EMT during a HazMat response.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Keynote: David Warner, Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Warner identified himself as “dangerously overeducated.” Characterized his presentation as “confessions of a serial stunt scientist,” and warned that he would jump topics around. The cup of tea I brought to the table went cold untouched -- there simply wasn't time to sit back and take a sip while reflecting; I was leaning forward the whole time, doing my best to keep up.

His main theme was what he called shareable system awareness, which he approached through a concep the called grok-it science (that is, emphasizing the user's ability to grasp and understand information quickly, and to transfer that understanding to their separate areas of operation, and to offer feedback that updates the whole system). He operates in the real world, calling on a network of nerd friends who can draw on the expertise and good will of people in a diverse range of locations, from Afghanistan to Burning Man.

His ability to make connections and move from one subject to another was tremendous. Of course I wanted him to slow down and go into depth now and then, but that wasn’t the point of his presentation.

What follows are my loosely-edited notes, taken during a breathtaking, rollicking presentation. My notes don’t even come close to doing justice to the content he presented.


The body is part of the interface with the mind, and the “rodent interface” (of the mouse) is a bottleneck.

Neuro-Cosmology. “All realities are virtual.”

“Grok-it Science 101”

“Computers are rocks that do math. They don’t complain and they don’t need pizza and beer like my graduate students.”

Showed fractal graphics, increasing perceptual density, accelerating the perceptive cycle.

In medical school, felt like he had “taken the wayback machine.” Gave a list of technological innovations that didn’t quite take on in the medical community, leading to his reputation as “a medical power nerd that can move faster than memos can stop me.”

For example, he used computer imagery to do special 3-D maps of data that was typically presented as a squiggly line on a horizontal scale.

Suggested using a data glove to sense tremors, showed that “the glove was more accurate than the doctors.” Surgery, therapy. Great set of photos of a quadriplegic girl who controlled a 3D game with facial expressions. There was little market for the product, but (here he does a Darth Vader breath) the military entered into the picture.

Warner described a robot-control system of pagers in a belt strapped onto a soldier… the pagers vibrate according to the proximity of a barrier in a particular direction.

Discussed ways to help military operations designed to give relief to refugees. (His reputation of being able to move faster than memos can stop him.)

Described a system where a worker in a refugee camp can send a worker out with a head-mounted camera. A medical worker sitting in a base camp can superimpose his or her own hand over the field of view of the worker on site, so that the worker on site can touch a patient in a certain area or perform some other assessment action.

Ways to get people who don’t like each other to get along: Put them in a harsh environment and yell at them.

A refugee has legal status, but a poor person who is not a refugee is less visible.

If you’re going to do serious games, make sure you understand the “ground truth” of the problem.

“We’re all going to die. The goal is not to be killed by stupid people.”

“If was the enemy, I would design a system just like the one we have and give it to us.”

A huge increase of internationally-exchanged information in medical newsgroups. No human can read all that information and understand it, but in order to get advance warning of pandemics, you need to get a sense of the data. Showed an example of a map with spheres representing individual mosques, and rings representing the number of violence-inciting verses from the Koran recited during daily prayers.

“Do you know how we’re going to stop the terrorists?” “I dunno.. hit ‘em with memos?”

Used Burning Man and the Superbowl to document diversity and link organizations.

Described a system that linked four computer stations to a network, had four users play multiplayer games together, and used biofeedback to determine whether it was possible to identify emergent leadership potential. (“It turns out you can!”)

Praised the initial response of the U.S. military to the recent Asian titan wave, but “then bureaucracy hit.”

“Ignorance is curable. Stupidity is terminal.”