Cyberculture: April 2006 Archive Page

In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary.

Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son's arrest last August in a drunken driving accident that left his best friend dead.

The information was accurate and had been in the news. --Shannon McCaffrey --Wikipedia Ripe for Political Dirty Tricks (Breitbart | AP)

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Student Mike Rubino and I have been talking via e-mail with the director of our writing center, about how to get students thinking about the relative value of Wikipedia as a source.

I tell students that it's fine to refer to Wikipedia when preparing for an informal oral presentation, or as part of a blogged response to a reading assignment. In a research paper, however, it's not a credible source -- except if the research paper is on a very geeky, very rapidly changing topic related to the internet, or a meme that's currently spreading through youth culture, in which case the Wikipedia article is likely to have more up-to-date content than what you find in the mainstream media.

I have written about how traditional chess engines are constructed and about how they go about figuring out what moves to make. I have speculated on how Rybka, a new and powerful chess engine is constructed. I have written a software specification for a new way to estimate the value of a chess position, or a new "evaluation function".

My task now is to convince everyone that my speculation is sound. Although I lack time, I am slowly starting to create software to test these ideas. I suspect that someone else will have some code togther to experiment before I will, but nevertheless it is worth a try to see if these ideas have any merit.

It would sound like a good project for a grad student or someone who has time to give it a try. --John Jerz --RandomVisitor (chessgames.com)

My big brother has been blogging on chessgames.com under the name "RandomVisitor." He just recently revealed his identity there.

My son, who's eight, can already whip my butt in chess if I don't pay close, close attention. Until recently he has been too willing to sacrifice his queen for little gain, and after he does that I can often win. But not always. At any rate, he's far better than I am at openings and the endgame, because those are easy to practice on a computer.

Every so often, after he beats me, he asks, "Am I ready to beat Uncle John yet?"

I tell him, "Keep practicing."

In my review of Once and Future, I made the erroneous statement -"Just like video killed the radio star, graphics killed the parser," and embarrassingly called interactive fiction a "dead genre." I was wrong. Five years after I typed those lines, interactive fiction games continue to be produced, even commercially. --Terrence Bosky --Something about Interactive Fiction (Moby Games)

A member of a WOW guild suffered a stroke in real life and died. Her guildmates, knowing her only through the game, but nevertheless wanting to offer some remembrance for one of their own, decided to hold a memorial service in the game. A rival guild decided that would be a great time to show up and kill everyone. Hilarity ensued.

Now, is it sort of creepy and vaguely sad that a group of people elected to hold a virtual funeral? I'd say so. It lends a depressing weight to the stereotype of basement-dwelling gamers who can't function in the real world. In my opinion, it trivializes the real loss that this person's real-life loved ones feel. But saying gamers aren't the most socially adept subculture isn't going to surprise anyone, and the fact is, these people did have a relationship with the deceased, however unorthodox. You can't criticize someone for feeling grief simply because they haven't met the deceased in the physical world.

[..]

Is killing a person's avatar the same as killing a person? Of course not. It's not close. But it does have a real effect on that person. You are inflicting suffering upon someone else, even if only putting them through the tedium of building up another character. We have ways to describe people who get off on inflicting suffering on others. One of them is "sadistic." Another is "evil."--Joe Rybicki --The Real and the Semi-Real (1up.com)

--Dad shoots at computer, saying son spends too much time playing games (Tampa Bays 10 News)

Guns don't kill video games. Angry parents with guns kill video games.

As founder of the tech meet-and-greet dorkbot events, and the annual robot talent show ArtBots, Repetto has organized exhibits and meetings that have made it easier for geeks everywhere to learn about new, cool tech projects in their communities. --The Geek Mind Behind Dorkbot (Wired)

In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work."

He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes." --Judge: Web-Surfing Worker Can't Be Fired (Yahoo!|AP (will expire))

This sounds reasonable. An employer certainly has the right to discipline workers who are not doing their jobs, but simply the act of using the internet shouldn't be a terminal offense.

The gathering was the monthly meeting of "Dorkbot," a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world.

[...]

Repetto has finished a project called "foal table." The idea originated in a request from a friend working on a theater production to design a table that transformed into a horse. Repetto watched videos of foals being born and carefully calibrated a mechanical table to make it walk in the awkward, stumbling manner of newborn horses.

"What it's supposed to do is ridiculous because it's a table and there is no reason for it to be walking," Repetto said.

The idea is therefore perfectly Dorkbot -- a name that Repetto says is meant to appeal to people who like to stand back and experience awe in technology and creativity. --'Dorkbot' Meetings Develop Cult Following

Reading this article made me go "Ahhh!" Now that's taking control of technology.

One item to discuss today is the final project for the class, your blogging portfolio. And among the items we need to consider are these:

* What should it include? (Will it highlight your best blogging, be an overview of what you tend to blog about and/or how you tend to blog, or a combination, or...?)

* What should it look like? (Will it be a blog entry? Will it be a separate web page?)

* How will it be assessed? --Donna Strickland -- Blogging Portfolio (English 4040)

I really like this teacher's effort to involve students in the discussion of how the blogging portfolio should be evaluated. Blogging is a means to a very specific end in the lit classes I'm teaching right now, but in the fall I'll be teaching Writing for the Internet again, and I'll want to be sure to include criteria that reward expressive and outrageous blogging, in addition to the intellectual and introspective blogging that I typically expect from students in lit classes.

Anyway, this is a great way of implementing in the class structure the kinds of collaborative, interactive communication structures that make blogging different from traditional essay writing.

McClure said that some students seem to feel "that e-mail is a casual form of communication, where professional relationships somehow do not exist as they do in the classroom -- students feel comfortable saying things in an email that they would never say to you in person." --David Epstein --Be Polite, E-Polite (Inside Higher Ed)

Nothing terribly ground-breaking in this article, but I'm blogging it because the examples are all university-related, and it might make a good discussion starter in this fall's "Writing for the Internet class."

Video game studies? Yes, please. And I don't just mean in gaming schools. Critical perspectives have been developing as well. Metafilter is already wise to ludology,but what about its mother discipline, ergotics? Don't forget narrative and storytelling. Of course, if cultural studies, or education is your thing, that's covered too.

Other programs focus on application and aesthetics.

Perhaps MeFites are catching on? --The seedy academic underbelly of video games (Metafilter)

The system's software goes beyond tracking simple emotions like sadness and anger to estimate complex mental states like agreeing, disagreeing, thinking, confused, concentrating and interested. The goal is to put this mental state inference engine on a wearable platform and use it to augment or enhance social interactions, said Rana el Kaliouby, a postdoctoral researcher at the Media Lab.

"This is only possible now because of the progress made in affective computing, real-time machine perception and wearable technologies," she said.

The researchers are developing an outward-facing version of the ESP system with a cap-mounted camera connected to a wearable computer. People with autism spectrum disorders have a hard time determining others' emotions or even whether someone is paying attention to them. The system is designed to provide that missing information. --Eric Smalley --Face Reader Bridges Autism Gap (Wired)

My students and I recently read Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, which has a protagonist who is unable to read facial expressions. Now that we're reading The Diamond Age (a cyberpunk bildungsroman about a marvellously advanced educational book), I thought it would be worthwhile to blog this technological innvation as well.

The key word for me here is not 'Fun'. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and whole schema devoted to separating out different kinds of fun.

No, the key word for me here is 'meant'. Meaning is an interesting concept, in both positive and negative, because it suggests purpose or exclusion. Saying that a product is meant to be a certain way can implicitly imply that it is not meant to be another way. Big Macs are meant to be tasty pleasures, they are not meant to be nutrition supplements, for example. They are designed with that intent.

What I'm driving at here is a kind of pre-judgment, and video games are unique as a medium (that I'm aware of) in that the greater majority of its creators, designers and producers otherwise actively pre-judge themselves and their work according to a 'fun' standard not as a key trait of enablement, but as the end goal in and of itself. --Tadhg Kelly --''Video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun.'' (Particle Blog)

Via Grand Text Auto.

I liked this author's argument that in video games, "fun" is a means, not an end. Still, this passive-verb-heavy passage prompted me to post a bit about the intentional fallacy:

Novels need to be readable. Their basic craft requires that readers are invited to keep turning the pages until they get to the end. But what are novels 'meant' to be? Nothing. They're meant to be whatever the author intends for them to be. Ditto music, ditto poetry, ditto television, sculpture, comics and so on. In all these forms, the basis of aesthetics or pace or whatever are regarded as the core necessity.

Fanny Pack

This is great if you're trying to create a singularity of pure geekness that will open up a portal to an alternate universe where they're still making episodes of Reboot. But if there are even two working neurons in the style portion of your brain, the same neurons that explained that Mr. T's haircut won't look as good on you, then you're going to want to pass on this one. On the other hand, if you've burned those neurons out through years of cosplay, more power to you. Just don't stand near me. --Lore Sjöberg -- Gotta Ditch the Fanny Pack, Dude (Wired)

Ditch the fanny pack?

Over my cold, dead, fanny.

Update: My sister just threatened me with this.

"Wouldn't shooting cell-phone users in research libraries be counterproductive?" you might well ask. "Wouldn't that actually make the library more noisy?"

A fair point. Yes, it would. But not for long.... --Scott McLemee --The Silencer (Inside Higher Ed)

Like most of the faculty on my campus, I typically just use the ELMO as an overhead projector to show handouts, but without having to go through the trouble of making a transparency, since it will project anything you put on it. In my mind, it's even easier to operate than a PowerPoint presentation, and I'll sometimes print out a quick outline for any lecture or class plan (in large font) and just project it, moving as we go through the class outline, keeping the hour organized. But I also like to experiment with the ELMO and see what other things it is capable of doing. After all, people's eyes are naturally drawn to a big screen spectacle and there is a way to tap into this for educational purposes and to reach out to visual learners. These devices are fantastic for visual aids, but I haven't seen professors using them very creatively, let alone with much expertise. It's something worth taking advantage of to not only project information, but to put into action to keep a class' attention (without, of course, using it as a DISTRACTION). --Mike Arnzen
--Tickling the ELMO (Pedablogue)

A great fresh look at a piece of technology I use almost every day.

Publisher sales reps inform Wal-Mart buyers of games in development; the games' subjects, titles, artwork and packaging are vetted and sometimes vetoed by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart tells a top-end publisher it won't carry a certain game, the publisher kills that game. In short, every triple-A game sold at retail in North America is managed start to finish, top to bottom, with the publisher's gaze fixed squarely on Wal-Mart, and no other. --Allen Varney --Wal-Mart Rules: One Giant Company Controls Your Games -- But How Much Longer? (The Escapist)

This is what happens when games go mainstream -- and when they mean big bucks. There will always be indie games, of course.

On one level, blogs are little more than personal journals posted on the Internet for all to see. They provide a forum for teachers to share ideas with colleagues around the world or simply talk about themselves and others. But under a wider lens, the sometimes funny, sometimes searing blogs paint what may be the rawest portrait seen of the teaching profession in transition -- and by some measures, in trouble.

Read some and find out why more teachers than ever -- some estimates say up to half in this decade -- are leaving the profession feeling exhausted, disillusioned and underpaid. --Valerie Strauss --Blackboard Blogging: Web Journals Become the New Fly on the Wall of Teachers' Lounges (Washington Post (will expire))

This article begins with the approach that blogs are gossipy and snarky vehicles of personal opinion: "Some teachers use blogs in the classroom to communicate with students and allow them to critique each other's work. But it is in the personal blogs that teachers have some of the most open, and occasionally brutal, discussions about themselves and their profession."

He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. --Robert Frost --Birches (Bartleby)

When I was five my family moved from the world of sidewalks and fenced-in backyards to an underdeveloped area where, at night in the winter when all the leaves were down, you couldn't see the lights from any neighboring houses. We had a gravel driveway that led up from an unpaved, very bumpy road that had no official speed limit. The shoulders of the road were very high, so that the road really ran in a kind of a trough, and I could play in the woods and climb up the trees and watch the cars go zooming by, far beneath me.

I have no idea if it was a birch, but one tree in particular had long, smooth limbs that stretched out over the road.

I'm stunned as I think back on it, but I did sometimes climb out across the road and ride a tree limb down to the ground. There really weren't all that many cars on the road, but the shoulders were little cliffs, that loom in my memory two or three times my height. I picture them as 20 feet high, but I was shorter then, so maybe they were only about 12 feet.

I loved the freedom that this image suggests.

It was great to be a kid when I had that much space to move around in. My son doesn't have that kind of freedom. We do have a nice backyard and friends in the neighborhood. In a pro-videogames article, ""Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" Henry Jenkins writes,

My son, Henry, now 16, has never had a backyard. He has grown up in various apartment complexes, surrounded by asphalt parking lots with, perhaps, a small grass buffer from the street. Children were prohibited by apartment policy from playing on the grass or from racing their tricycles in the basements or from doing much of anything else that might make noise, annoy the non-childbearing population, cause damage to the facilities, or put themselves at risk. There was, usually, a city park some blocks away which we could go on outings a few times a week and where we could watch him play. Henry could claim no physical space as his own, except his toy-strewn room, and he rarely got outside earshot. Once or twice, when I became exasperated by my son's constant presence around the house, I would forget all this and tell him he should go outside and play. He would look at me with confusion and ask "Where?"

But, he did have video games...

Not quite the same thing as dangling by a tree branch over the road, but serving much the same desire to explore and to take risks.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 7 -- Gleaming Translucent Chandeliers, Detail of Railing, Heavy Object Designing (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This week I finally managed to make my chandeliers look decent. Previously I had placed an invisible light-emitting entity inside a solid translucent block, but that unfortunately left the outside edges of the block looking very dark. So this time I created four thin transparent walls, and put the light inside all four walls. In addition, I placed extra light sources outside the chandelier, to create the glowing effect that I wanted.

The picture shows that I also added some chandeliers to the top level of the balcony. You can also see the woodgrain railings, though at this resolution the 45 degree angle join is only barely noticeable.

I actually spent much more time on the room I haven't shown yet. To give meaning to my new media meanderings, I'm trying to create a Half-Life 2 mod that implements Cloak of Darkness, a very simple scenario that's been implemented in dozens of different programming environments. That scenario is set in the lobby of an opera house, and features a bar (which I'm working on) and a cloakroom (that I haven't started yet).

While designing the bar, for the first time I've worked extensively with angled wall shapes -- complicated modular units that I duplicate and rotate in order to form a circle. The circle is divided up into 10 sections, so I created a large 36 degree wedge, then used it to cut out a kind of trough, and then placed my wall unit in the trough, and used the trough to cut the wall unit into a piece that has 36 degree edges. Since the world-building feature isn't designed to work with resolutions of smaller than one inch, the modules I'm creating are going to be a little off, but I'm not too worried.

These wall units are so complex that I should really be creating them in a 3D modeling tool, and importing them as models into the HL2 world. I'm actually being very wasteful of computing resources by constructing these modules out of blocky square brushes, and manipulating the corners of the blocks in order to approximate the shapes I want. But I'm not yet ready to tackle learning a 3D modeling program.

No pictures of that room yet. I need to spend some time creating the images that will make my wall units look better. Half-Life 2 comes with plenty of materials that represent cracking plaster, rubble, bricks, etc. It's also easy to find assorted high-tech panels and display readouts online, but nothing that depicts the precise decor I'm shooting for. So the models look pretty slapdash at the moment.

I'll show photos of the bar area when I've got something worth sharing.

According to the nonprofit Electronic Literature Organization, within the broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, including hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web; kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms; computer art installations, which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects; conversational characters, also known as chatterbots; interactive fiction; novels that take the form of e-mails, SMS messages or blogs; poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning; collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work; and literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. --Digital writing gives new meaning to a good read (My San Antonio)

--how to make 3D lemurs out of clay (Google)

According to my server log, someone came to my site after searching for "how to make 3D lemurs out of clay."

I was curious... and I used my finely honed Google searching skills to find "miniature lemur sculpture."

I'm not sure that I'm a better person for having done that research, but I doubt I'm any worse. Maybe it will help whoever was disappointed by my site.

Come back, lemur searcher! I can help you now!

Games today are many times more complex than games were even a few years ago. Recreating every three-dimensional point of a complex cave environment is going to take an artist several orders of magnitude more time than dropping a few rough dots on an Atari 2600's 196x160 screen and calling it a cave environment. Similarly, producing a full 5.1 surround sound track for a modern game requires sound engineers and advanced programming libraries. Triggering a few blips and bleeps is much easier.

But there are also some less obvious reasons for longer development cycles. In the old days, a programmer with a text editor and a few programs could create an entire game. However, to create all the complex content and code required for a modern game, programmers and artists need powerful tools such as 3-d modelers and advanced debuggers. Unfortunately, programmers and artists often have to use general purpose tools that are not at all well suited to game development. And when domain-specific tools do exist, such as in console game development, the tools are often unstable and immature due to the short life span of any particular console system. A multi-platform console world further complicates development by multiplying all of the issues of developing for a single platform by the number of platforms on which you intend to deliver your game. --Adam Geitgey --Where are the Good Open Source Games? (OS News)

Great suggestion, Evan.

Prices will be roughly comparable to DVDs -- $20 to $30 for new releases, $10 to $16 for catalog titles.

Now doesn't that bother some of you?

I'm sure it bothers exhibitors, those that own multiplex cinemas. --Scott Rosenberg --Movie downloads an evolutionary idea? (Monsters and Critics.com)

Email as a collaboration tool sucks. Everyone knows this. Everyone says it. Everyone writes about it.

And everyone agrees that its inefficient, it's chaotic, its silo'ed and its full of spam. Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, we can assume with confidence that email is still the preferred method of "collaborating" and sharing information with others. --The Good In Email (or Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool) (Central Desktop Blog)

I was recently invited to join an IM discussion for a collaborative project, but I declined. I can see how it would be useful for brainstorming, but at that point in the project we had already shared ideas and were approaching a "getting things done" mode, and I didn't feel like that was the right time to switch to chat.

I'm not a total dinosaur. I think Wikis are great collaborative tools, because they keep a track of changes, which means I feel more comfortable making wild changes, since someone else can always moderate it if I've made too drastic a change.

Andrew Swinand, executive vice president at Starcom Worldwide, a major advertising-buying agency, said during a panel discussion that newspapers could do more to harness their presence online, such as getting more participation from audiences.

Swinand also said his firm would like to buy advertising across newspaper websites but had difficulty doing so, and had to go through third-party vendors. He also said it was difficult to buy both print and online advertising through newspapers, and that the process for fulfilling newspaper ad sales was cumbersome and less automated than in other media.

Swinand did say afterward that he was still "bullish" on newspapers' online advertising potential, but added that newspapers should do more to personalize and localize their online content, in ways such as the social networking site MySpace does. -- --Stop the Presses ... Go Online (Wired | AP)

The job market for traditional journalism jobs is drying up. No question about it.

Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don't use things they don't understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. Jakob Nielsen --Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (Alertbox)

Rather than the familiar panels consisting of three 15-20 minute papers, a pitcher of water, and a brief Q&A (time permitting), these meetings were structured as “electronic poster sessions.” Multiple presenters stationed around the perimeter of the room in front of easel displays and laptop computers demonstrated their projects and spoke to anyone who stopped by with questions. --Steven E. Jones --The Significance of Electronic Poster Sessions (Inside Higher Ed)

This scholarly genre is nothing new. I've given several myself, one at a medieval drama convention, and one or two at the 4Cs.

What's significant is that the Modern Language Association is interested in it.

I had high hopes for the Higher Ed Blog Con, which starts today, but both of the first presentations are delivered as downloaded linear files. The first one is an argument for screencasting -- a lecture alternative. I can certainly understand why it would be useful to download a screencast about the value of screencasting, but the other is presented in 2 parts, which together will require almost an hour to watch. Were I actually at the conference, I could spend the time, but since I'm going to have to fit this conference in an already busy week, I don't think I'm going to watch many hour-long linear, old-fashioned presentations. New wine, old wineskins.

"It must be true. I read it on the internet." Au contraire, mon frere. Internet hoaxes have been around for as long as the internet itself, and we never run out of people willing to fall for them. --10 Best Internet Spoofs

6. Adventure

Microsoft (1972) --Top 10 adventure games of the 20th century (Adventure Classic Gaming)

What the hell? Microsoft didn't even exist in 1972.

All code operations, despite their metaphoric faculties such as "call" or "return", come down to absolutely local string manipulations and that is, I am afraid, to signifiers of voltage differences. Formalization in Hilbert's sense does away with theory itself, insofar as "the theory is no longer a system of meaningful propositions, but one of sentences as sequences of words, which are in turn sequences of letters. We can tell [say] by reference to the form alone which combinations of the words are sentences, which sentences are axioms, and which sentences follow as immediate consequences of others."

When meanings come down to sentences, sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all. Rather, there would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded any longer by an environment of everyday languages. --Friedrich Kittler --There is No Software (CTheory.net)

Taking a mini-break from working on a proposal that's due tomorrow. This article is new to me.