Technology: June 2007 Archive Page

--Text to Speech (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s on my PDA, and have listened to student papers that were submitted to finish off incomplete grades, a dissertation chapter that touched on a subject I know a little bit about, an administrative planning document on assessment, a 93-page article of mine that I've been developing, on and off, for about five years; and today when I drive to work briefly I'll be listening to a Gamasutra article on Zork.

TextAloud offers a free version, which was good enough for short and routine stuff, but the AT&T professional voices sound excellent -- far better than anything I had ever experienced before, and I figure they're well worth the cost of about a DVD movie each (one male, one female).

I have been toying with the idea of having my journalism students practice taking notes from audio recordings, and I figure a tool like this will let me work a little more efficiently, since I won't have to get a voice actor to record the dialogue each week. Of course, once I get a sense of what kinds of mistakes the students make, I can firm up the scripts and get someone to record them more dramatically.

I can imagine, with this text-to-speech program, setting up an RSS feed of all my student's overnight blogging on a given topic, converting it to an audio file, and then listening it on the drive in to work.

It almost makes me wish I had a longer commute.

The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. | On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect--Jeremy Cooke --Vertical farming in the big Apple (BBC)

What will they think of next -- maybe, taking an urban residential skyscraper, tilting it on its side, and chopping the apartments into separate structures -- each with their own private entrance and yards?

I love the future!

Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit's Wikipedia entry to mention his wife's death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son. --Dead wrestler's Web page was altered (Yahoo! | AP (will expire))

I wasn't particularly following this story, but this is an interesting wrinkle. When I first started teaching journalism at Seton Hill in 2003, it was common for mainstream publications to publish information that a quick Google search would reaveal as a hoax (or at least very suspicious). Now we see journalists making routine references to the nuts and bolts of the new information economy.

Update, 29 June: "The anonymous individual responsible for suggesting, 14 hours before police discovered the body, that WWE wrestler Chris Benoit's wife was dead is confessing, saying his/her comment was a 'terrible coincidence.'" -WikiNews

Is that the end of the story?

Doctors backed away on Sunday from a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism, saying psychiatrists should study the issue more. --Experts oppose video game addiction designation (Reuters | C|Net)

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today?s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them. --Scott Jaschik --When ''Digital Natives'' Go to the Library (Inside Higher Ed)

I'd love to learn more about how libraries are modding themselves in order to take advantage of the considerable digital literacies that our students bring with them when the arrive on campus.

He is full of high sentence, like J. Alfred Prufrock. But beneath it all, one finds a sense of cultural history combining one part idyllic idealization with two parts status anxiety. Gorman only appears to be facing hard questions about the new digital order. Actually he is just echoing debates on "mass society" from five or six decades ago.

So let us go, then, you and I -- friends, as we are, of dusty pre-digital cultural literacy -- into the library stacks. Let us locate a bound volume of Sewanee Review from 1957 and open it to read "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture" by Edward Shils. The same text may be found in Shils's collection The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1972 -- a volume not yet absorbed by Google Books. --Scott McLemee --Mass Culture 2.0 (Inside Higher Ed)

A good response to librarian Michael Gorman's latest anti-technology rants.

WATCH out YouTube lovers - the online video service are trialling new technology to prevent people posting unauthorised material they don't have the copyright for.

YouTube will trial the new technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. --YouTube no longer yours (Sunday Telegraph)

Jorn Barger, a Joyce enthusiast whose many creative electronic endeavors include coining the term "weblog," offers this animated map of Dublin, showing the progress of Leopold Bloom and other characters from the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses. The chapter takes place on June 16, which has of late been celebrated as Bloomsday.


Last week was the Feast of Corpus Christi, which in the medieval town of York, England was celebrated with a huge outdoor festival that included wagons that were the sets for short religious plays that dramatized Christian history from the creation of the world to the final judgment (also know as Doomsday). This 2D animated map showing the progress of pageant wagons through the streets of York was part of my first scholarly publication, in 1997. I wish I'd thought of adapting the existing code to the Ulysses scenario.From Bloomsday to Doomsday

Sony Corp. apologized Friday to the Church of England for a violent computer game that features a bloody shootout inside an Anglican cathedral. --Jill Lawless --Sony: Sorry for Cathedral Shootout Game (Brietbart)

When the steam train roared into history, hissing smoke and howling into the night, it was an awesome beast, adorned in the finest woods, ivory, gold, and intricate inlays, like some Serpent King on a sacred tapestry. The automobiles of the 20's to 60's, each was a work of art. The television and radio affected the world in more ways that can be imagined, changing the entire dynamic of human social structure and communication. They were both appropriately gifted with the most lavish of hand tooled, wooden scrolled cabinetry, housings which borrowed architectural details from the grandest schools, churches and banks.

Sadly, the personal computer, which has impacted the world more profoundly than probably all of the previously mentioned inventions put together, never recieved the same kind treatment. It went from a buzzing beige cube, to a buzzing white one, to the garish space-eggs you see nowadays. --"Datamancer"

--The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine (Datamancer)

I absolutely love the round porthole window over the DVD drive. There should be a little brass plate on the frame under the monitor, and around the monitor there should be shelves with cubbyholes. Lots of cubbyholes.

The Los Angeles Police Department on Tuesday announced plans to pursue improvements to the city's 911 system, saying callers in the future will be able to use text messages, photos and even video from cellphones to seek emergency assistance. --Richard Winton --LAPD plans to accept 911 text messages (LA Times)

Will future dispatchers have to be screened for the ability to understand txt-spk?

A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. --Rick Bozich --Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game: Bennett removed for blogging super-regional (Courier-Journal)

I'm posting this version because I find it interesting that, when the Courier-Journal reported on the incident, it emphasized the involvement of the paper, while when this story attracts the blogosphere, it will be the identity of the reporter as a staff blogger that gives the story legs.

It's unusual for a newspaper to interview its own staff members, but the paper's executive editor, Bernie L. Ivory, gets a few good zingers about First Amendment rights, and a lawyer-friendly response to a claim that the NCAA threatened to punish the University of Louisville if officials did not revoke the reporter's press pass: "If that's true, that's nothing short of extortion and thuggery."

The Courier-Journal carefully included the "If that's true" part of Ivory's quote, which is a good hedge against future accusations of libel. (See this current story about how selective quoting made Edwards sound like he was talking about the Paris Hilton saga, when in fact he twice said he wasn't talking about her.)

The reporter was warned before the game that if he blogged during the game, it was in violation of NCAA policies. He consulted his editors, and went ahead and blogged anyway.

According to the Courier-Journal, staff blogger Brian Bennett was approached by NCAA officials in the fifth inning of a game between the University of Lousville and Oklahoma State, told that blogging "from an NCAA championship event 'is against NCAA policies (and) we're revoking the (press) credential and need to ask you to leave the stadium.'"

In its article, the Courier-Journal quoted its executive editor, Bennie Ivory, as saying, "It's clearly a First Amendment issue. This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers. It's what we did during the Orange Bowl. It's what we did during the NCAA basketball tournament. It's what we do." --Blogger removed from NCAA baseball game for blogging (C|Net)

--How NOT To Use Powerpoint By Comedian Don McMillan (YouTube)

Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.

I generally ask my students to post their presentation notes on their blog, and rather than read through their blog entry word-for-word just take the class through the links and talk us through their main points.

We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations. While a number of companies share some of these negative elements, none comes close to achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy. This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google's product range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between these tools, and in part it is due to Google's market dominance and the sheer size of its user base. Google's status in the ranking is also due to its aggressive use of invasive or potentially invasive technologies and techniques.

The view that Google "opens up" information through a range of attractive and advanced tools does not exempt the company from demonstrating responsible leadership in privacy. Google's increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook. Neither of these elements has been demonstrated. Rather, we have witnessed an attitude to privacy within Google that at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent. These dynamics do not pervade other major players such as Microsoft or eBay, both of which have made notable improvements to the corporate ethos on privacy issues. --A Race to the Bottom: Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies (Privacy International)

I am an animator and concept artist by trade. However, I don't think my art is really so great that it deserves a "how to". My devotion to my live steam hobby however, lends my steampunk designs a level of authenticity that often lacks in steampunk art. Therefore, this is just a quick explanation of parts, and how to draw and design a machine that "looks" convincing.

Please keep in mind that these are super simple explanations of different components of live steam, and steam buffs will probably will tear these descriptions to pieces :) I feel that it is important to get the basic idea without having to go into dry and boring detail. By no means am I an expert in steam engines. This info is taken from my personal experience working on small scale live-steam engines. Most of the examples below are found on model engines, which works off of the same basic principle as the big ones. This is also just a guide. There are no set rules for concept art. You just make whatever appeals to you. In other words.... this is steam for artists, not really to educate you in details of steam power! :) However, it is important to understand some fundamentals of steam power, in order to make your drawings look believable, as something that could have been built in Victorian times.

First you have to understand steam, and how it works by looking at each part of the machine. --How to Draw SteamPunk Machines (www.crabfu.com)

I love the site -- it's got some really cool artwork and photos of steam engines (toy-sized, but real).

Some day when I have time, I want to re-design my whole website with a steam punk theme.

"Looking at this brochure, it's obvious Paul just wanted to use the 'wave' frame effect from that new PhotoFrame 2.0 software package we got last week," fellow Blue Moon graphic designer Jared Mahaffey said. "There's whacked-out, psychedelic edges all over the place--on the photos, on the floor-plan charts, even on the text boxes, for God's sake." --Graphic Designer's Judgment Clouded By Desire To Use New Photoshop Plug-In (The Onion (Satire))

Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its "ranking algorithm" -- the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user's question. It is a crucial part of Google's inner sanctum, a department called "search quality" that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.

[...]

Until now, Google has preferred pages old enough to attract others to link to them.

But last year, Mr. Singhal started to worry that Google's balance was off. When the company introduced its new stock quotation service, a search for "Google Finance" couldn't find it. After monitoring similar problems, he assembled a team of three engineers to figure out what to do about them.

Earlier this spring, he brought his squad's findings to Mr. Manber's weekly gathering of top search-quality engineers who review major projects. At the meeting, a dozen people sat around a large table, another dozen sprawled on red couches, and two more beamed in from New York via video conference, their images projected on a large screen. Most were men, and many were tapping away on laptops. One of the New Yorkers munched on cake.

Mr. Singhal introduced the freshness problem, explaining that simply changing formulas to display more new pages results in lower-quality searches much of the time. He then unveiled his team's solution: a mathematical model that tries to determine when users want new information and when they don't. (And yes, like all Google initiatives, it had a name: QDF, for "query deserves freshness.") --Saul Hansell --Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine (New York Times)

Interesting details... so PageRank is not as important now as it once was.

At the end of their most recent paper reporting these findings, the researchers reflect that it is "ironic, sublime and truly humbling" that this 4,500-year-old limestone is so true to the original that it has misled generations of Egyptologists and geologists and, "because the ancient Egyptians were the original-albeit unknowing-nanotechnologists."

As if the scientific evidence isn't enough, Barsoum has pointed out a number of common sense reasons why the pyramids were not likely constructed entirely of chiseled limestone blocks. --Sheila Berninger and Dorilona Rose --The Surprising Truth Behind the Construction of the Great Pyramids (Live Science)