Media: November 2006 Archive Page

When someone forwards you an urgent e-mail message, it's often something you really do need to see; if a cellphone call breaks through while you're desperately trying to solve a problem, it might be the call that saves your hide. In the language of computer sociology, our jobs today are "interrupt driven." Distractions are not just a plague on our work - sometimes they are our work. To be cut off from other workers is to be cut off from everything.

For a small cadre of computer engineers and academics, this realization has begun to raise an enticing possibility: perhaps we can find an ideal middle ground. If high-tech work distractions are inevitable, then maybe we can re-engineer them so we receive all of their benefits but few of their downsides. Is there such a thing as a perfect interruption? --Clive Thompson --Meet the Life Hackers (NY Times (registration))

This short study examines Wikipedia's credibility by asking 258 research staff with a response rate of 21 percent, to read an article and assess its credibility, the credibility of its author and the credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Staff were either given an article in their own expert domain or a random article. No difference was found between the two group in terms of their perceived credibility of Wikipedia or of the articles' authors, but a difference was found in the credibility of the articles -- the experts found Wikipedia's articles to be more credible than the non-experts. --Thomas Chesney --An Empirical Examination of Wikipedia's Credibility (First Monday)

It would be risky to extrapolate too much based on one study, but it's still a useful data point. I tell my students not to cite Wikipedia in research papers, but they are free to use it during the information-gathering process, and for reference in an in-class oral presentation or something similar.

Persons making noninfringing uses of the following six classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) during the next three years.

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university's film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book'sread-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.


These exemptions will go into effect upon publication in the Federal Register on November 27, 2006 and will remain in effect through October 27, 2009. --Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works (U.S. Copyright Office)

I'm glad to see that some reasonable exemptions are being made so that media workers, educators, and archivists have a chance to do their work in a legal environment that otherwise overwhelmingly favors coporate interests.

Mr. Banks learns that the British Empire, its banks and many other manifestations of authority should be undermined, or at least taken less seriously. Life would be better if parents allowed themselves to dance like chimney sweeps and fly kites in the park. They shouldn't just pay more attention to their children; they should become more like them. The movie's liberatory spirit is, of course, out of the heart of the 1960s.

The new Broadway show is ostensibly darker, showing that children too have their flaws. But again it is the parents who need the healing. --Edward Rothstein reviews a new Broadway version of Mary Poppins --Stop That Foolish Singing This Minute! Mary Poppins Would Be Appalled (New York Times)

In this passage, Rothstein praises the subtlety of the books and laments the Broadway and Hollywood simplification:

Children are asked to submit to formal restrictions they don't fully grasp; they see exaggerated manifestations of responsibility and authority. Yet underneath the adult exterior they also sense strange, half-threatening and half-alluring forces that promise a realm of magical freedom. Travers captured that double vision -- that confusion and melding of realms -- that makes childhood so powerful.

That is where the film and Broadway show come to rest, fully endorsing a childish vision of freedom, rejecting much of everything else. But in the books that isn't possible.

I've blogged about Mary Poppins before.

About 300 eighth-graders at South Valley Junior High in Liberty, Mo., are blogging this fall about Guerrilla Season, a book about a 15-year-old living in Civil War-era Missouri.

The book's author, Pat Hughes, is joining in the online discussion from her home in Philadelphia.

"I love being able to communicate with the author because it makes me feel like I can ask anything," says Amy Lostroh, 13. "Most books you read you have to guess how the author named the characters, why they chose to write about the topic or what inspired them." --Ashley Bleimes --Blogging Now Begins Young (USA Today (will expire))

Thanks for the link, Neha.

I'd love to see more secondary teachers who do this. If students have to wait until they get to college before they start working on developing an intellectual awareness of their online voice, it's too late.

Here's an unapproved comment an an angry MySpace user left on a blog entry in which one of my students wrote of the risks of posting on MySpace:

You are a f*cking faggot. MySpace is totally cool and it doesnt deserve to be trashed by adults 24/7. Just because they are getting older doesnt mean us kids cant live our lives freely and learn our mistakes for ourselves. This is the USA! So quit bagging on it and mind your own business. -- Becky

(Asterisk added by me.) While Facebook had a good idea of limiting contact between older and younger users, young people who blog are not writing only for themselves. Attitudes like Becky's are clear signs that young people need guidance. Becky's teachers need to tell her that the First Amendment does guarantee the freedom of speech, but does not promise that the people who choose to exercise their right will be insulated from the consequences of breaking the law, breaking school rules, giving future potential employers reasons to throw their resume into the trash pile, etc.

--Leonard Nimoy (Spock) - Music Video (YouTube)

Watching this video caused me so much deep pain that the only way I could relieve it was to share it with you.

You will probably feel either filthy or angry after watching it.

We got to go there - but not back again ... Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (who directed/wrote the Lord of the Rings films) --Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh Talk THE HOBBIT (The One Ring.net)

Jackson and Walsh won't be involved in The Hobbit movie or a planned prequel to The Lord of the Rings.

[Image showing a few paragraphs from a story spoofing the "Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective" book series.]

>>>

--Adam Cadre --The Case of the Captured Koala (adamcadre)

Make sure you stick with it until you get to the solution, which is where you'll find the gimmick that makes this story worth blogging -- especially if you know the Encyclopedia Brown series.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act may give shopkeepers the power to force Linden Labs to delete copied items, but it will not provide financial compensation to the victims of infringement unless they file a federal lawsuit. Given the cost of these virtual goods, there aren't going to be many infringements worth the expense of suing.

The next phase of Linden's response is more interesting. The company plans to develop an infrastructure to enable Second Life residents and landowners to enforce IP-related covenants within certain areas, or as a prerequisite for joining certain groups. In effect, Second Life's inhabitants will self-police their world, according to rules and social norms they develop themselves.

This is exciting, because it turns Second Life into a laboratory for trying out alternatives to prevailing real world copyright rules. --Jennifer Granick --Second Life Will Save Copyright (Wired)

You have a billion potential teachers. You have an opportunity to learn in ways that you or I could not even have dreamed of when we were in school. And you have an opportunity to shepherd your students into a much more complex, much messier, and much more profound world of learning in ways that will help prepare them more powerfully for the world they face.

Many of our kids are already doing this without us. Many of them have much more of a clue of what it means to learn using these tools than we do. --Will Richardson --Owning the Teaching--and the Learning  (weglogg-ed)

A chilling lament by an insightful educator.

Miss Weaser, from Tufnell Park, began testing gadgets for the blogging website Shiny Media, which posted the one-minute video clips on YouTube. The films included her demonstrating mobile phones, laptops, a GPS and even a Cyberman head.

In September, they were spotted by producers from TV company Princess Productions, which had been commissioned to make the new programme for BBC2.

After a phone call and a quick screen test, Ms Weaser had the job. Mike Worsley of Princess Productions said: "She's a natural and is very interactive with an audience." --YouTube video got me a presenting job on BBC (Daily Mail)

We're still in a transitional period, when traditional media raid the new media for talent.

I'm happy for Susi Weaser, but I look forward to a future when the Susi Weasers of the world won't feel like they have to be noticed by a TV producer to feel they have succeeded.

EL405 Students Tackle Blender's ''Gus'' Tutorial (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My New Media Projects students got into small groups and walked through my Flash version of Blender's "Gus" animation tutorial.

It looks like Blender3D saves some temporary files in such a way that the lab computer's security restrictions cause some issues, because two of the student groups experienced crashes, and one of the groups lost all their work a few minutes before the end of class.

That was a bummer, but the energy in the class was so great that the mishap didn't dampen it too much.

I'm still crossing my fingers and wishing hard that the Half-Life 2 modding class will go smoothly. The lab computers are locked down pretty tight for security reasons, so that leads to problems that I'm not authorized to handle (even if I could).

LARRY KING: On your blog you write, "Bush is going to declare war on China next, I swear."

ROSEANNE BARR: I was so scared because I woke up and there was the Drudge, you know. I always read the Drudge Report and it said on there that the Chinese were like, you know, spying on our subs or doing something with our subs and I was like, "Oh no, he's going to think that's an act of war and then we're going to go over there next." I mean we're everywhere. We're everywhere.

KING: The Internet as a political medium viable?

BARR: Yes, it's like the only one left, absolutely, and that's not just me saying it. That's everybody saying it.

KING: But there's 80 billion things on it.

BARR: Yes, but if you know where to look, you know, it all can come together. When you're looking for the particular information that you're looking for after you do the big search, this is what I found out by going on there, it just takes your mind and then you live in there forever. You can never come out.

KING: I've never done it, never gone searching.

BARR: Oh, my God! It just opens up the whole universe. It's so awesome. You would love it.

KING: No, I wouldn't.

BARR: Anything you want to know.

KING: The wife loves it. I wouldn't love it. What do you punch little buttons and things?

BARR: You just click on this thing. The thing is you got to be able to read, so you have to have strong glasses when you've over 50 and then you just scroll down and click. It's not that hard. I can show you how to do it.

KING: No, thanks. --Larry King Admits He's Never Used The Internet: 'Do You Punch Little Buttons and Things?' (Think Progress)

The little blue and green dots in the background of the set still look great, but henceforth I will trust Rosanne Barr's opinion on politics more than I will trust Larry King's. (Though that ain't saying much.)

I don't know whether he deserves more pity for his ignorance or more disgust for his arrogance.

Video games are a viable storytelling medium, but the trouble is that video games always have the same protagonist, which is the player. And he always has the same set of motivations, which is to kill and don't die. That's not conducive to great novels. We have a character with this negative motivation and that character makes a lousy fictional protagonist. --Orson Scott Card discusses his new book/game/comic franchise, which pits the Red States vs the Blue States, in an interview by John Gaudiosi --Orson Scott Card Builds an Empire (Wired)

Interesting claim from an unrelated article: "In the last 20 years, Lucas' vision has arguably been far better expressed in video games than in movies." --Forget Film, Games Do Sci-Fi Best (That claim depends entirely on the criteria you choose to use when defining "best").

Video news releases are pre-packaged broadcast segments designed to look like television news stories, that are funded by and scripted for corporate or government clients. (See "Fake TV News: Introduction.") On April 6, 2006, the Center for Media and Democracy released a comprehensive report detailing TV newsrooms' use of VNRs. The report, "Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed," named 77 TV stations that aired at least one of 36 VNRs tracked over a ten-month period. Not once were the clients behind the segments--such as Pfizer, Intel and General Motors--disclosed to news audiences. --Farsetta and Price --Still Not the News: Stations Overwhelmingly Fail to Disclose VNRs (PR Watch)

Plunge should appear in the hed; the piece should be only a couple of sentences long; and it should "include the number feared dead, the identity of any group on board"?a soccer team, church choir, or students?"as well as the distance of the plunge from the capital city." The words ravine or gorge should appear.
[...]
No matter what their editorial policies, newspapers of the era had a physical need for short articles. Typesetting was still a time-consuming industrial art, with craftsmen pouring molten metal into molds--"hot type"--to form a newspaper's words, sentences, and paragraphs. Because the length of a news story couldn't be calculated precisely until type was set, makeup editors would have to physically cut overlong pieces from the bottom to make them fit. If a story ran short, they would plug the hole with brief filler stories typeset earlier in the day. --Jack Shafer --The Rise and Fall of the ''Bus Plunge'' Story (Slate)

Having started with a single video of a trip to the zoo in April of last year, YouTube now airs 100 million videos--and its users add 70,000 more--every day.

What happened? YouTube's creators had stumbled onto the intersection of three revolutions. First, the revolution in video production made possible by cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software. Second, the social revolution that pundits and analysts have dubbed Web 2.0. It's exemplified by sites like MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg--hybrids that are useful Web tools but also thriving communities where people create and share information together. The more people use them, the better they work, and more people use them all the time--a kind of self-stoking mass collaboration that wouldn't have been possible without the Internet. | The third revolution is a cultural one. Consumers are impatient with the mainstream media. --Best Invention: YouTube (Time)

I made this with cleverpig.com's Whack-A-Pig tutorial.

For example, let's imagine that the protagonist's problem is that he is being bullied at school and he doesn't know how to deal with this. In order to simulate his problem, he could use a Pac-Man template and modify the original game. He would replace the Pac-Man with a cartoon version of himself and replace the ghosts with images of his harassers. In addition to this, he could also take away the score feature and the pills, leaving nothing but a labyrinth where he is being constantly chased. Once that game is posted online, the other members of the group could respond by creating variants. One of them could be to modify the structure of the labyrinth to create a small space where the protagonist could live isolated, safe from the bullies. But other players could say that this means giving up his freedom and, therefore, that it is not a good solution. Then, another player could suggest using violence, by introducing weapons on the environment. Another may suggest introducing more players (several Pac-Mans) who would stick together and defend themselves as a group of virtual vigilantes. Of course, somebody may argue that it is technically impossible to be all the time surrounded by your friends: the bullies will find you alone sooner or later. --Gonzalo Frasca --Videogames of the Oppressed (Electronic Book Review)

Frasca rather brilliantly follows a line from Brecht's theater of alienation through Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augosto Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed," and hypothesizes an iterative, sequentially collaborative game development process that preserves the player's social distance from a character, yet enables the attempt to use the medium of the video game to find a solution to a social problem.

"All kinds of disciplines are going to have to converge. People with all kinds of skills are going to have to work together to build a new web which is going to be even better," he said.

He also said employers were now beginning to complain that there were not enough people who fully understood the web.

"There aren't any courses at the moment and it hasn't really been brought together.

"We're hearing complaints from companies when they need people that really understand the medium from both the technological and social side.

"When you look at university courses, web science isn't there - it seems to fall through the cracks.

"So we'd like to put it on the curriculum so that there are a lot more people who understand this." --Web inventor fears for the future (BBC)

This term, I'm teaching a 200-level "Writing for the Internet" course and a 400-level "New Media Projects" course, which are in some ways the freakiest English courses I've ever taught, since I find myself talking about ethics one minute and Euclidean geometry the next.

The sociological and the technological are inseparable in such an environment.

Seton Hill University encourages self-expression and open communication as part of the student experience, in balance with the mission of Seton Hill University and the ideals of sensitivity, dignity and respect for self and for others.
--Seton Hill University Information Technology's Special Comments about Internet Usage and Web Postings (Seton Hill University)

More and more students are coming to Seton Hill with a good understanding of these sorts of issues, but it always helps to have a document that spells out the administration's expectations.

--Percentage of Chart Which Resembles Pac-Man (themot.org)