Technology: May 2007 Archive Page

For the functions that people use most often, the 1986 vintage Mac Plus beats the 2007 AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+: 9 tests to 8! Out of the 17 tests, the antique Mac won 53% of the time! Including a jaw-dropping 52 second whipping of the AMD from the time the Power button is pushed to the time the Desktop is up and useable. --Hal Licino --86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins (Hub Pages)

Playing a game may teach the player that he can optimize the game only in certain ways (or that the game is impossible to win, like Global Thermonuclear War); but it's open to question whether the optimal game strategy corresponds to an optimal real-life strategy.

As we see more of this kind of thing (and I think we will), we as consumers of educational and editorial games, are going to need to stay alert and savvy, conscious of the way a game's rules can look like they emulate real life constraints without actually doing so. A case in point is the way Electrocity lets me participate in a fuel market without experiencing any repercussions at all from the fossil fuel burning by the people in the next town over. Would it be better all around if I just kept it in the ground? Maybe, maybe not -- but within the game there's no incentive to think about that. --Emily Short --Educational and Editorial Games (Emily Short's Interactive Fiction)

Don Woods is acknowledged to have the Right Stuff. With long, stringy black hair and a bearish grin, he looks somewhat older than his twenty-nine years. He works at Xerox and wears a dark GAMES T-shirt that contrasts with his almost chalk-colored skin. Pinned next to the Xerox employee badge on his shirt is a button that reads question authority. Wood is known as a classic, or canonical, hacker. "Here's a quick hack I've been working on," he says. He types a few characters on his keyboard, and from the computer come the calliopelike sounds of a rousing, Sousa-style marching song. "I put it together in a couple of days," he says.

One of the results of Woods' epic hacks is Adventure, a collaboration with Will Crowther. Ostensibly a game, Adventure is a metaphor for hacking. When you begin Adventure, the computer tells you your location: at a stream, near a forest, within sight of a small brick building. From there you embark on a Tolkeinesque journey through the caverns and glens of a medieval land, encountering murderous midgets, poisonous snakes, treacherous rapids, thieving pirates and magazines written in dwarf language. By telling the computer the direction you wish to move (typing n for north or u for up, for example), the computer calculates where, on the unseen map created in Woods' imagination, you will wind up next, and displays a written description of your next location. You go deeper and deeper into this netherworld, hoping to emerge by the same path with treasure in hand. There are almost 200 rooms you pass through on your way to the treasure, many dotted with hazards, and the path crosses and intertwines in ways impossible to divine without hours of exploration. Adventure is the most popular game at LOTS, and indeed it is a national craze among those with access to computers. "I would show it to people on a Friday afternoon," Woods says, "and they wouldn't leave their terminals until they finished it, maybe on Monday."

Adventure is a kind of litmus test for hackers: if you can lose yourself in the gullies and misty caverns, you might be susceptible to computer addiction. Just as the plot of Adventure is a world unto itself, the vast memory and operating system of a mainframe computer is a gigantic landscape, seeming impenetrable but eventually accessible to the most devoted seekers. Just as everything in the physical world is constructed of atoms, everything a computer processes or reads is ultimately reduced to bits of either one or zero. Like treasure seekers in the subterranean Adventure world, hackers are electronic spelunkers who have developed the skill to burrow down from the more superficial programming languages to the bedrock machine language of digits. Woods call this "going down and doing the grudgies." To get involved this deeply, you must be able to think in dizzyingly abstract terms. Your mental concentration is so intense that your consciousness is subsumed by the computer. --Steven Levy --Hackers in ParadiseRolling Stone 1982)

Levy expanded the theme of this article into the excellent book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

The film's extreme stylization -- dark backgrounds, glowing neon colors, polygonal landscapes, geometric vehicles, and an absence of external lighting -- was an aesthetic decision that embraced the limitations of computer-generated imagery. "The actual process of making something out of polygons, then shading it, became a design influence," explains Taylor. "Not only was the film made with computers, but it was about cyberspace."

[...]

Tron's story of humans interacting with sentient computer programs in an electronic world placed the narrative ahead of its time as well. In 1982, the term "cyberspace" had just been coined by science fiction author William Gibson. In another two years, Gibson's seminal work Neuromancer would launch the cyberpunk genre. --Mike Winder --You Down with MCP? Twenty-five years later, 'Tron' and other 'geek' classics are more compelling than ever (LA City Beat)

Thousands of PhDs are now working in various Google labs, and many of these people were hired from other successful businesses. Google has also acquired a number of smaller companies, many of them for either their technology or their technical talent, and these companies bring yet more entrepreneurial DNA into the mix. The company has created a potent combination of straight-from-university geniuses, straight-from-start-up geniuses, and straight-from-Microsoft/IBM/Yahoo/wherever geniuses. These bright folks work individually and in teams and 20 percent of their time is supposed to be devoted to pursuing new technical ideas of their own. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are sure (and for good reason) that their crew will generate in this 20 percent time thousands of ideas and technologies that the company can commercialize for decades to come. --Robert X. Cringely --The Final Days of Google: It is going to be an inside job. (PBS)

God forbid we manage to think about the phone as a learning device. I guarantee you that none of the sponsors of the bill have ever typed "define insipid" (or any other word, for that matter) into a text message on their phone and sent it to 46645? (Try it sometime.) I know I mention this a lot in my presentations, but I'm wondering why cell phones aren't a part of my kids' curriculum between now and the time they graduate from high school. I'm wondering why teachers aren't picking up their cell phones and finding answers to the questions they're asking, modeling the technology for their students. Why they aren't talking about ethical and effective use instead of making sure kids check them at the door. --Will Richardson --It Takes a Vision  (weblogg-ed)

A well-phrased response to Pennsylvania House Bill 1245 P.N. 1570 bill that would prohibit electronic devices from schools:

The possession by students of telephone paging devices, commonly referred to as beepers, cellular telephones and portable electronic devices that record or play audio or video material shall be prohibited on school grounds, at school sponsored activities and on buses or other vehicles provided by the school district.

Yes, it's annoying when students use their cell phones instead of pay attention during class. Now, this bill applies to children, not college students, so I have the luxury of saying that when one of my students wishes to pay attention to a gadget instead of class, I try to think of that as the student's way of sending me a message. That message may be "This part of class has become boring... move on to something else," or it may be "No matter what you do today, I am more interested in my gadget than in learning." Either way, it's information that I can use.

I don't really get that annoyed when a student's phone starts vibrating, though it is kind of ironic when a phone shifts from vibrate to some silly tune because the student has momentarily left the phone at his or her desk in order to give a formal report. I never have to say anything in such cases, because the student is usually embarrassed enough.

Even in the paper-and-pencil classroom, instructional technology has the potential to be abused. Once during a class discussion, a student kept tearing pages out of a notebook and crumpling them up quite dramatically. At first, it seemed as if the student was responding negatively to a new turn in the discussion -- as if to say, "The notes I took in the past few minutes aren't worth anything of that's where you're going with this discussion," and I could see the behavior was distracting the other students. But as this continued, I could tell the student wasn't even listening to the discussion -- I was witnessing a wild brainstorming session, in which the student was trying to nail down a thesis.

Possessing and using the paper wasn't the problem -- there are times when the ideas are flowing and you've just got to work them out. Yet the student was not aware of the effect the noisy crumpling was having on the class discussion. The solution is not to ban paper simply because it can be disruptive if a student noisily crumples it during a classroom. The solution is instead to create a supportive culture where students think of each other as resources, not cogs in the "listen/take notes/memorize/spit back" educational machine. And once again, because I teach students who choose to be in the classroom, I realize that school teachers have to spend a lot more energy on maintaining discipline, since they are expected to teach all students, not just the ones who want to be there.

A couple years ago, my dean asked me in passing if I thought the new media journalism students should be required to have laptops. I said no, and I still feel that way. I don't think all liberal arts students NEED laptops. A few students who rely exclusively on computer labs do complain about the amount of time they have to spend online for my classes, and I have adjusted the way I teach with blogs in order to make it possible for a student to log in once, rather than follow a thread as it develops. SHU is considering a program in which students sign up for PDAs; that would really open up the classroom to some new possibilities.

Yes, I would like to teach students the kind of sustained, penetrating critical thinking skills that are necessary to comprehend and produce traditional vehicles of knowledge and inquiry, such as the lecture and the essay. But gadget-loving teens come into the classroom with a huge set of experiences and strengths that the traditional classroom does not tap.

Tools for Teaching Basic Programming Concepts

Alice and Scratch. Filing for future reference.

Will you, won't you... Blackwell's Quadrille (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?" -- Lewis Carroll's "Lobster Quadrille"

I just tried to order an examination copy of a book from Blackwell Publishing, and when I got what looked like an error message on the final screen (or was it the final screen? I couldn't tell.) I sent feedback to the web designer. In so doing, I noticed that on the pages you fill out when you want to get a free book, you have to opt out of being contacted -- ticking a box if you do NOT want to be contacted in a certain medium.



I noticed that, and thought it was obnoxious, but I chalked it up to ignorance on the part of the marketers. Naturally they want to collect your contact information, and perhaps they thought they were being kind by letting people opt out.

On the webmaster's feedback form, you tick a box if you DO want to be contacted in a certain medium.


Now it looks like the marketing page is set up deliberately, in order to harvest information as quickly as possible. It makes me suspicious of the publisher, which -- along with the four-page ordering form that choked on the fourth page and wouldn't let me use the "go back" button to try again -- is not for customer relations.

Modern interactive fiction, much more than its technically limited earlier counterparts, displays an incredible range of literary influences, tributes and styles. For Sherwin's part, science fiction is an inspiration, but the greater part of his text adventures' efficacy comes from the unique and anarchic style of his characters' dialogue. "I have been greatly influenced by the late George Alec Effinger," he says. "He was the first guy I read that was able to write science fiction chock-full of characters that I not only deeply cared about, but characters that drove the plot due to their strong wills and personalities." In text adventures, literary influences are naturally more evident; text game writers are free to attempt to emulate the same literary devices as the authors who perhaps inspired them, whether in their dialogue styles, plot development or written motifs.

Gamers in search of an edifying read could hope for nothing more than the surreal eloquence of Adam Cadre's Photopia, or the superbly idiosyncratic dialogue of Sherwin's own Fallacy Of Dawn. Sherwin cites Stephen Bond's Rameses as "the best character study in the history of videogames" -- outside the world of the text game, one would be hard pressed to find characters and situations as lovingly and artfully developed and described as they often are in interactive fiction.

However, text games enjoy a luxury not afforded to videogames in any other form; they communicate exclusively through the written word. Without needing to integrate visuals, sound or 3D gameplay, they are free to concentrate wholly upon their writing, and thus are able to achieve a focus that is usually beyond the reach of a medium as multi-disciplinary as videogames. Pacotti relates this coherence to that of books. "The novel, typically created by one person working exclusively in language, strives for a coherence only occasionally seen in film and almost never in games," he explains. "This coherence -- the integration of the smallest details into a single vision -- is the basis of good art." --PLAY-PEN: Games Due for a Lit Course (Next Generation)

This article gives the literary qualities of text adventure games some welcome attention, integrating canonical recent IF works with a discussion of good writing in recent mainstream PRGs, but I fear that it tips too far over onto the narratological side, with a good bit of cinema 101 thrown in for good measure.

Just because text games use prose instead of polygons doesn't erase the fact that, as a game, a text adventure requires coding.

Last night I found myself digging out a text-adventure work-in-progress, and I managed to squash a few bugs after I put my daughter to bed, but before my son was finished with his bath. And then after putting my son to bed, I fell asleep on the floor of his room, so I didn't get much done last night.

--Deleted Scenes (StarTrekHistory.com)

An awesome collection of painstakingly-restored still shots and script excerpts, from scenes that were filmed but never aired.

Open source software makes podcasting easy -- too easy. Listening to a playlist of first-timer podcasts can leave your ears ringing from sudden changes in playback volume. The problem is audio mastering. Recording sound is simple, but mastering that sound -- compressing volume differences, maintaining a decibel ceiling, and similar operations -- is anything but. Fortunately, an open source tool offers everything you need for mastering podcasts and other spoken-word recordings. Audacity is well-known among podcasters on all platforms for its ability as an editor; here are some tips and tools for mastering and adjusting volume, aimed at podcasters, but they could apply to anyone who needs to produce a spoken-word recording under less-than-perfect conditions. --Johnathon Williams --Mastering podcasts with Audacity (News Forge)

I wish I knew about this argument a few months ago, when I was just starting to introduce podcasting to my "Media Lab" class.

The podcasting was one unit in a one-credit course that also includes working on the student paper and a term project, and of course we talked about the culture of podcasting and the nature of radio journalism, so I didn't spend a whole lot of time on technical excellence.

But maybe if I had known about this article, I would have been able to be a little pickier about the sound quality.

--Classic Sesame Street - Ernie (almost) repairs the TV (YouTube)

My sister sent me this clip, which was one of our favorites when we were kids. (Still is today, now that you mention it... though the production values were notably simpler back then.)

Thanks, Rosemary.

Using games to entice, entertain, and engage introductory programmers has been successful; many of the approaches, however, use graphical programming. This either requires a complex game engine or toolkit for students to program or a lot of additional effort for students to get the game looking the way they want. Taking a page from the game studies literature, the current paper reports on gaining the benefits of games without the graphics, of traveling back in time to the days of the great text adventure games. --Brian C. Ladd --XYZZY: Finding New Magic in Text Adventure Games (Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education)

I'm always glad to encounter new scholarship on text-based games, but the "back in time" rhetoric here is rather dismissive of the incredible artistic and programming advances that the post-commercial interactive fiction community has made.

This is a Microsoft-sponsored conference, held on the "Disney Wonder Cruise Ship."

And I, for one, welcome our new digital cultural overlords.

Seriously, though, engineering papers are a very, very different genre than the academic papers I've been writing lately. I actually presented at an engineering conference when I was a graduate student, presenting a method for sequencing writing assignments. This was nothing new so far as the rhet-comp field is concerned, but at the time the concept of writing across the curriculum was new to a lot of engineering teachers, and I did what I could to present it to them in a genre that they would find familiar.

In this strange, strange tale the Davids are the size of companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, rumoured to be discussing an alliance to take on the search leader. The list of detractors is longer than other search providers, though; privacy experts, advertisers, startups, and Hollywood executives are all frustrated with the company for one reason or another. --Who Isn't Afraid of Google? (Slashdot)

I recently submitted a proposal to give the "con" perspective on a panel about one of Google's recent innovations. If that panel is accepted, this article will be a good starting place for my research.

We are no longer talking about shovelfuls of dirt on the coffin of computer-enforced copying restrictions; that sound you hear is the beep-beep-beep of the dump truck backing up to the grave site. --Rob Pegoraro --The Sound of Copy Restrictions Crashing (Washintgon Post)

When I think about all the expensive engineering that Microsoft embedded into Vista, and how that cost is going to be passed on to consumers who didn't want it and don't need it... and when I think about what amazing things a fraction of that R & D money could have accomplished if it had been given to the open source community, it makes me want to... I dunno... go sharpen a pencil and draft my next syllabus on paper.

After I finish blogging for the evening.

It's now common for companies to Google potential employees to uncover peccadilloes from the past. It took me all of 30 seconds, via Google, to discover one applicant's very public infatuation with indecorous sexual escapades and another's unhealthy fondness for abusing industrial strength pharmaceuticals. Needless to say, neither was hired. --Jim Louderback --On Media in Our Lives: Embarrassment forever (SFGate.com)

Will, this one will probably annoy you, but the reason I'm posting it is because it's written by one of the people who actually makes the decision to hire an applicant or trash the resume.

Has Louderback read The Diamond Age? His penultimate paragraph seems to refer to Neal Stephenson's ideas about the Neo-Victorians.

We could evolve into a much more tolerant and forgiving society, where everyone's secrets are laid bare, and no one -- aside from your mother -- really cares. Don't hold your breath. The more likely outcome is that we'll devolve into a new age of crushing civility, one that makes the current "PC" climate look downright permissive. I see a new Victorian Age dawning, where everyone's proper and polite on the outside, yet out of control in private, when the curtains are drawn and the power is off.

--Atari Candleholder (Wonderland | Mixko)

Wonderland credits a designer called Mixko, but I couldn't find it on that site. (And even I did find it there, I couldn't link to it, because the site uses Flash in a horribly user-hostile way.)

The VSTF process converts display of text such as this first sentence from the U.S. Declaration of Independence

into this:

--Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting: A New Method to Enhance Online Reading (Reading Online)

Fascinating. The indented version really does seem a lot easier to read, perhaps chiefly because the first word in each line is often a preposition or other small word that one can usually guess from the context. Such words are so common that they are easily recognized, even when the eye is focusing on the next word in the line. So there is less back-tracking of the eyes.

The article is packed with statistics that show that students comprehend better when they learn texts formatted in this manner.

The researchers are selling an online service that reformats text on the fly, so naturally the research is going to emphasize the benefits of such a service, so keep that in mind.

The economics of book printing dictate that books are less expensive (and therefore accessible to more people) if the print fills up as much of the page as possible. But there is no such restriction on electronic text. As monitor screens get wider and wider every year, I have often wondered what to do with all that blank space on either side of the legible columns of text. This looks like a useful option.

Over the summer, I'm planning to create some new online handouts for my journalism class, so I'm blogging this for future reference.

According to Marmor, Monet's work began to show a yellowish cast as his cataracts developed. To reveal how Monet saw the world, Marmor darkened images using Photoshop and reduced the levels of blue to replicate a yellowing effect. He also used blurring filters.

The results suggest that Monet's vision corrupted his ability to see colors correctly. This -- and not a desire to reflect the growing expressionist style of painting -- may explain the abstract nature of Monet's later work. --Randy Dotinga --Photoshop Re-Creates Aging Impressionists' Eye on the World (Wired)

Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage!
Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that th' infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye. -- Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). "After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles," he said. --Americans and Japanese Read Faces Differently (Live Science)

Some linguists are worried that the proliferation of text messaging among students may hurt the development of formal English. Johnson does not agree.

"I don't buy it," Johnson said. "I think students can distinguish between different contexts. What they would say with their friends is different from what they would say to an instructor."

Text messaging may be an important tool to help students learn the difference between different English and behaviors that are appropriate for different situations.

"Sure, text messaging can help teach that difference," Johnson said. "I would put the emphasis on explaining the importance of context."

In fact, Johnson says that text messaging may have a positive effect on language, especially with English as a second language students. --Teaching through Text Message; Cell Phones Emerge as Learning Tool (Rebel Yell)

I tend to agree. If instructors teach that text-message lingo and academic English are two points on a sliding scale (not necessarily the most extreme points), that's a good way to help students learn about the importance of audience and rhetorical context. I try to make it very clear that my expectations for blog entries are slightly more formal than in-class timed writing exercises, but I really don't mind shorthand or typos in the comments that students leave on peer blog entries.

Of course, I do ask students to demonstrate that they are capable of leaving an in-depth comment from time to time, and naturally I hope that when students are doing any sort of course work that they will be practicing the appropriate writing skills.

But I should have expected that. The IF Comp, an annual contest to see who can write the best text-based game, offers a vast treasury of interactive fiction, and many of the entries over the past 13 years are truly fantastic. Some, like Vespers, are lit-geek works of art, putting the bulk of commercial games to shame. --Textual Pleasure: Parsing the Annual IF Competition (The Escapist)

--atari-and-controllers (jackrabbit.etsy.com)

Via join the dots.

"You present an engineering problem, like a fighter plane that's returned to base shredded by antiaircraft fire, and ask students where they would put extra armor," said Mr. Tront. Students circle various parts of the plane that took a lot of hits. "You can show their solutions one by one and discuss them," he said.

And if no one catches on to the trick -- this was a plane that made it back safely; the damage was irrelevant, and it's the undamaged areas that were probably hit on the planes that went down, so those areas need protection -- the professor can discuss the logic behind that, too. --Josh Fischman --Take Several Tablets for Teaching: Interactive Scribbling Draws Students Into Classroom Presentations (Chronicle of Higher Education)

I blogged this because I like the cool engineering example. That's like the curious incident of the dog in the night -- the dog that did not bark (thus indicating that it knew a particular night visitor).

I am a fan of technology, but in this example I can see it being just as effective if you pass out printouts, have students mark them up in pencil, then use a document camera to project their anonymous suggestions.

I only give a handful of slideshows a year. If students get bored after about 10 minutes of a slideshow, and I had 20 minutes of material, I would probably break up the presentation (giving them a small-group writing assignment).

Digg Takedown, Obama Takeover, Army Blog Squeeze (Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

This is the last week of classes, and I've got deadlines galore (3 conference proposals, an annual report, a departmental proposal, and an article submission that I've been sitting on for a week).

So I won't have much to say, but I still thought it was worth noting the story of Digg's attempt to silence user-submitted articles about cracking HD-DVD security. Since Digg is made up of user-supported content, Digg users have responsed by submitting a flood of articles that express their unhappiness with the fact that Digg tried to suppress the HD-DVD security information (and most of those articles probably duplicate the protection information that Digg was supposed to be protecting by taking down the article in the first place).

I also note the story of how the Obama campaign was initially happy that supporter Joe Anthony volunteered to keep the Obama MySpace page. But then the Obama campaign pushed Anthony off the site, taking it over from and refusing to pay him what Anthony thought it was worth. (I don't know whether they offered a lower figure and Anthony was holding out for more, or whether they just figured it was their right to take over the site.) At any rate, Anthony says the campaign has lost his vote.

Just think of all the money that has gone into the development of complex software with digital content protection schemes that bloat the size and blunt the usability (Vista) , and that will go into litigation that will attempt to extend the economic lifespan of the 19-th century models of cultural production. Imagine if that money had instead been spent on think-tanks that aim to work with the cultural tide, rather than against it.

And while I appreciate the desire of the US Army to crack down on the possibility of leaking military secrets, wouldn't the blogosphere be a useful place to engage with public opinion and recruit new members? The military crackdown on soldier blogs suggests the public at large will lose a valuable avenue to interact with the men and women who make life-or-death decisions that affect global stability. If you think of what the US Army Corps of Engineers can do in an emergency, think of an online strike team that might be ready to swoop in the event of a Katrina-like crisis, or a Darfur-like morass, engaging the good will of people around the globe, drawing on their first-hand observations.

Am I naive? Probably. Regardless, today was not a very good day for social networking.