August 2007 Archive Page

Via MetaFilter:

You've got just over two weeks to make it to the John Henry celebration in Leeds, Alabama, where some folks believe the legendary steel driving contest actually took place. Maybe you already made it to John Henry Days in Talcott, West Virginia (or read a fictionalized account), where some more folks claim the same. John Garst, Scott Nelson, and other folklorists weigh in here, supplemented by a wealth of links and resources on the subject. While you think on it let Mississippi Fred McDowell, The Boss, Ralph Stanley, John Jackson, Merle Travis, and Jason Isbell tell their own versions. John Garst and his research mentioned previously.

David Lazarus describes the Time Lady's end in California.

"It was always there," said Orlo Brown, 70, who for many years kept Pacific Bell's (and subsequently SBC's) time machines running in a downtown Los Angeles office building. "Everybody knew the number." Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s. He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like audio tracks on the exterior. Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly. (LA Times)

Sean McBride:

The problem I discovered was that one of the thin walls between the holes had broken and bent down, forming a ramp. When I plugged the DVI adapter into my computer, two of the pins went into the same hole, and the projector could no longer understand the output from my computer.

However, it doesn't end there. When I plugged the DVI adapter into the broken socket, the ramp formed by the broken wall bent the corresponding pin upwards, forming a wedge with the adjacent pin. Then, when any other Mac user plugged the same adapter into their own computer, the pin wedge would press down on that same socket wall, breaking it and bending it down in the same fashion. (alwaysBETA)

This evening, I was out in the yard playing with the kids, when they noticed the full moon rising above a house a little ways down the street.

Rachel Buchanan:

It has all happened so fast. In the 20th century, media evolved through a series of technological landmarks that seem stately in comparison: first radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901; television invented, 1926; television transmission begins in Australia, 1956; CNN begins, 1980. From there, change is compressed. In 1992 the Mosaic browser made the internet easier to use. By 1998, Matt Drudge's online news and gossip website, the Drudge Report, had broken the story of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, an event that is widely cited by journalism academics as the birth of online news. Google, MySpace, YouTube, wikis and blogs all belong to this century.

Stuart Allan, author of Online News (2006), begins his history of the form with the Drudge Report. Other key events are the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, in which "amateur news reporters" used weblogs to create their own "decentralised media" and the war in Iraq, which resulted in the rise of first-person, raw accounts of life inside Iraq in the warblogs of Salam Pax and Riverbend. Participatory or citizen journalism began, in this account, with the launch of Indymedia (motto "be the media") in 2000 in Seattle during anti-globalisation protests. South Korea's OhmyNews, in which citizens write the stories (and readers tip writers they like best) and citizen "reporting" on the London bombings, Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami are other examples of what Allan says are "the ways in which the very users of online news are rewriting the rules which have traditionally governed journalism as a profession".

Ordinary people, Allan argues, are now pursuing their own news agendas, sidestepping "corresponding notions of 'authority', 'credibility' and 'prestige'." (The Age)

AP:

A court on Friday fined a 15-year-old schoolboy for posting a video on YouTube of his teacher singing karaoke without her permission and claiming she was a lunatic. In the first case of its kind in Finland, Nurmes District Court found Toni Vesikko guilty of intentional defamation and fined him $120. He also was ordered to pay $1,000 in damages for "causing harm and suffering," and $3,000 in court costs.

Just because she sings at a party does not give people permission to publish video footage without her permission. I don't think it's possible that anyone would think the "lunatic" claim was factual, but it still exposed her to ridicule. This is a very different thing from posting a video of a public figure, or yourself.

Elia Powers:

Housing officers divided students into living groups, based upon major, age and other factors. So students who saw their list of 25, 50 or 75 (depending on the group) potential roommates already knew that those included would likely live on the same floor or at least in the same residence hall. It was their job — given names, e-mail addresses and personal Web pages — to pair off in a matter of three weeks. When two students agreed on a match, they notified the housing office, which Cumia said most likely accommodated the request. (Inside Higher Ed)

Couldn't sleep. Thought I'd do some more work on the Wikipedia entry for Colossal Cave Adventure.

The Wilhelm Scream is a sound effect that appears in many action films, as an in-joke among sound designers.

It's funny, because it's true.... David Galef satirizes the humiliation humanities professors have to go through when requesting research funds:

To Professor Michael Wall, Chair, English Department: This has to do with the travel budget for the coming academic year. As we discussed last spring, I need something on the order of $700 for the annual Joyce conference, held this year in Miami, December 3-5. I saved the department money last year by using Blackboard exclusively rather than hand out Xeroxes, and in any event, this shouldn’t break the bank, right? Let me know soon, please, because I have to book the flight. (Inside Higher Ed)

Seton Hill has actually been very good to me, though it was a struggle last year finding funds to bring students who were presenting at the 4Cs. (We managed.)

Roy F. Baumeister

One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women. In principle, I agree. But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you don't see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds.

That's an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don't give them the big rewards. I'm not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren't moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups.

[...]

There are more males than females with really low IQs. Indeed, the pattern with mental retardation is the same as with genius, namely that as you go from mild to medium to extreme, the preponderance of males gets bigger.

All those retarded boys are not the handiwork of patriarchy. Men are not conspiring together to make each other's sons mentally retarded.

Almost certainly, it is something biological and genetic. And my guess is that the greater proportion of men at both extremes of the IQ distribution is part of the same pattern. Nature rolls the dice with men more than women. Men go to extremes more than women. It's true not just with IQ but also with other things, even height: The male distribution of height is flatter, with more really tall and really short men.

[...]

Want to think men are better than women? Then look at the top, the heroes, the inventors, the philanthropists, and so on. Want to think women are better than men? Then look at the bottom, the criminals, the junkies, the losers.

In an important sense, men really are better AND worse than women.

This is daring stuff. Consider this:

In the 19^th century in America, middle-class girls and women played piano far more than men. Yet all that piano playing failed to result in any creative output. There were no great women composers, no new directions in style of music or how to play, or anything like that. All those female pianists entertained their families and their dinner guests but did not seem motivated to create anything new. Meanwhile, at about the same time, black men in America created blues and then jazz, both of which changed the way the world experiences music. By any measure, those black men, mostly just emerging from slavery, were far more disadvantaged than the middle-class white women. Even getting their hands on a musical instrument must have been considerably harder. And remember, I'm saying that the creative abilities are probably about equal. But somehow the men were driven to create something new, more than the women.

One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven. --AP

Some acted selflessly, rushing to the aid of other characters even though that meant they risked infection themselves. Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves. And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others. --BBC

Wikipedia has a good collection of background resources on "corrupted blood," the virtual disease which afflicted avatars in World of Warcraft in 2005.

1. What Berlin wall?
35. Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
43. Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.
53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.
55. MTV has never featured music videos.
66. The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born. --Beloit College

Which ones struck you the most? #66 really blew me away -- though CERN didn't actually open up the WWW to the general public as a free service until 1993. (I was taking a non-credit humanities computing class that summer, and one week the guest lecturer gave a demo of this new piece of software -- a "web browser" called Mosaic.)

Here's a collection of teaching tips for the first day of classes brought to us by Honolulu Community College (check their reference lists for more good sources, too). The Pig Personality Profile [try here -- DGJ] is frivolous fun, but probably a good icebreaker and something I might even use when I teach Memoir Writing again in 2005-6. I especially liked reviewing Joyce T. Povlacs' 101 Things You Can Do the First Three Weeks of Class. If your term is just getting started too, you might want to review this list.

Here's a carefully worded google search that results in a great sampler of more on this topic.  --Mike Arnzen

Our first day of classes isn't for another week. Today was a full day of meetings, with lots of slideshows bearing statistics about how many students are enrolled, how we are doing on various ongoing university goals, and so forth. I'll be chairing the undergraduate English program review committee, and I also volunteered to be part of an ad hoc committee implementing an undergraduate humanities conference next spring. We hope to encourage juniors to deliver research papers on campus, so that during their senior year they can apply to off-campus conferences. (I presented on academic panels with four undergraduates at two conferences, last year, and I'm excited by the prospect of establishing a more formal way to keep that momentum going.)

Getting ready for the students is foremost in my mind, even though I've got another full day of meetings tomorrow. So now that the kids are in bed I'm taking a moment to think about the first day of classes. I'm still casting about for a comfortable way to start the first day of classes. 

A large majority of video games sold in the UK receive a rating under the voluntary Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) system, but some games, about 6-7% of the total, are referred to the BBFC. In determining what classification to give, the BBFC employs much the same approach as it does to films and DVDs. However, as a medium, video games of course differ from films in a number of ways, and especially in being interactive.

There has been little recent or credible research into the ways video games are distinctive as a medium or into how games may generate different reactions in players than films and DVDs do in viewers.

Many video games involve violent action and some people fear they may desensitise players to violence. Media interest in this subject has been growing. Some research in the US appears to support the hypothesis that playing video games can make people more aggressive. There is some pressure on both sides of the Atlantic for games to be more tightly regulated.

Meanwhile, the technology continues to advance, enhancing interactivity and delivering ever more realistic graphics. The newest developments may complicate the task of classifying games and increase anxiety amongst those who worry about the medium. --BBFC

In order to study people's concerns about video games, the study breaks parents up into current gamers, former gamers, and never-been-gamers.  The study emphasizes marketing, rather than topics that interest me more (such as rhetoric, design, or psychology), but there is some good discussion about playing habits among the different age groups.

Today we drove to the Thunder Mountain Lenape powwow, which was full of color and music. There were two drums — that is, groups of singers who sat around the same drum, chanting in rhythm.
Dancers mostly moved around the circle. The younger the dancer, the fancier the footwork and the more the likelihood of spins and twirls.

The two elders in the lead pretty much just walked, stepping in time. But look at the stage presence of the woman -- she was impressively regal. (I heard someone say she was the clan mother.)

I wouldn't actually call it a site redesign, since I just selected a canned template supplied by MT.

There are many things I love about the interface, and there are many things that annoy me to no end.  I'd like to give people the option of filling out a CAPTCHA and publishing a comment right away, or leaving the captcha blank and letting the usual anti-spam rules kick in.  It's not clear that I can do that without running into some problems with a very poorly worded message that first asks a loyal reader to log in, and then says "You do not have permission to comment on this blog," when it really should say "The blog owner will hold your comment for approval."

I hope those bugs will eventually work out.

I've been experimenting with MT4, and have in fact imported 5 years of blog entries from the indie software created by my former student, Will Gayther. I got used to the particular rhythms of Will's software, which was very fast and configurable. But I got tired of having to fight the spammers on two different fronts... so I'm throwing my lot in with MT for the time being.  MT4 was just released, though I've been playing with the beta for a while.

I'm used to sub-second responses to almost every button in my old blog.  This one has a rich-text editor, which will probably encourage me to start using bold keywords again.  I think it's going to be a lot easier to include images, too.  We'll see how it goes.

SOMETIMES there is a huge disconnect between the people who make a product and the people who use it. The creator of a Web site may assume too much knowledge on the part of users, leading to confusion. Software designers may not anticipate user behavior that can unintentionally destroy an entire database. Manufacturers can make equipment that inadvertently increases the likelihood of repetitive stress injuries. | Enter the usability professional, whose work has recently developed into a solid career track, driven mostly by advancements in technology. --Barbara Whitaker --Technology's Untanglers: They Make It Really Work (New York Times)

The techno bloggers sort of scoffed at this article when it first came out, since usability is a basic concept to people who work on the internet. Still, it's a good thing that a reporter took the time to educate the general public.

Because so little primary historical work has been done on the classic text computer game "Colossal Cave Adventure", academic and popular references to it frequently perpetuate inaccuracies. "Adventure" was the first in a series of text-based games ("interactive fiction") that emphasize exploring, puzzles, and story, typically in a fantasy setting; these games had a significant cultural impact in the late 1970s and a significant commercial presence in the early 1980s. Will Crowther based his program on a real cave in Kentucky; Don Woods expanded this version significantly. The expanded work has been examined as an occasion for narrative encounters (Buckles 1985) and as an aesthetic masterpiece of logic and utility (Knuth 1998); however, previous attempts to assess the significance of "Adventure" remain incomplete without access to Crowther's original source code and Crowther's original source cave. Accordingly, this paper analyzes previously unpublished files recovered from a backup of Woods's student account at Stanford, and documents an excursion to the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky in 2005. In addition, new interviews with Crowther, Woods, and their associates (particularly members of Crowther's family) provide new insights on the precise nature of Woods's significant contributions. Real locations in the cave and several artifacts (such as an iron rod and an axe head) correspond to their representation in Crowther's version; however, by May of 1977, Woods had expanded the game to include numerous locations that he invented, along with significant technical innovations (such as scorekeeping and a player inventory). Sources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974, or that identify it as a cartographic data file with no game or fantasy elements, are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976. The original game employed magic, humor, simple combat, and basic puzzles, all of which Woods greatly expanded. While Crowther remained largely faithful to the geography of the real cave, his original did introduce subtle changes to the environment in order to improve the gameplay. --Dennis G. Jerz --Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original ''Adventure'' in Code and in Kentucky (Digital Humanities Quarterly)

One of the journal's editors, Matt Kirschenbaum, writes:

Just a post to draw attention to a major new piece in the current issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly (a venue which you all should be keeping tabs on anyway) on Will Crowther's original ADVENTURE (aka Colossal Cave).

In his "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky," Dennis Jerz offers an archeology of the work's source code alongside of an exploration (photo-documented!) of the actual Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.

Scholars routinely mis-cite information as fundamental as ADVENTURE's date of composition, the kind of carelessness that reinforces the view that electronic objects exist outside of material histories and are impossible to take seriously as cultural artifacts. Jerz sets the record straight with rigorous textual scholarship based (in part) on the work's original magnetic back-up tapes, which is personally responsible for recovering.

Absolutely essential reading.

Update, Aug 11: Some reactions have started to appear on rec.arts.int-fiction.
Update, Aug 12: Matthew Russoto has posted compilable versions of Crowther's original source code. That was fast!
Update, Aug 13: David Kinder has posted a Windows executable based on Crowther's original source code. (The URL points to a temporary holding spot... I'll update the final URL when I find out what it is.)

MetaFilter and BoingBoing have also posted about the article.
Update, August 14: Slashdot compares the discovery of the code to the finding of the Holy Grail. Also, del.icio.us, reddit, Digg.

The internet news audience -- roughly a quarter of all Americans -- tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. --Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations (Pew Research Center)

The statistic I found most interesting is that those who prefer to watch TV news were twice as likely as internet news consumers to say news organizations care about the people they report on. Of course, that statistic might also mean that people who prefer empathy end up watching TV news, or that the TV news includes more emotional content.

We're a long way from the time when popular culture was full of heroic reporters who righted wrongs and stood up for truth.

There is ultimately no way to "justify" SCMRPG in the minds of those who find it deplorable but I believe even the game's detractors will find that the film fleshes out the controversy to better understand the future of games as a medium. The film is essentially a challenge to game developers to rethink the limits of their medium and a challenge to the general public to expect (demand!) more from games than mere entertainment. --Danny Ledone (interviewed by Keith Stuart) --Danny Ledonne on Super Columbine Massacre RPG (Guardian GamesBlog)

Filing for future reference.

If we teach our children that school is a prison, then summer school is extra punishment for the worst offenders. The sting of humiliation and failure adds to the pain of having to go to school when your friends are free.

That's too bad, because summer school isn't a punishment, it's an opportunity. In terms of education, summer vacation isn't a well-deserved rest; it's the time students forget much of what they learned.

[...]

Summer vacation persists because of tradition, inertia and the desire of some businesses for seasonal labor. The school calendar may have agrarian roots, but there's nothing natural about it. The good lord may have decreed that plants sprout in the spring and are harvested in the fall, but he never said kids were supposed to stop learning in the summer. --Holmes: Send them all to summer school (Daily News Trivia)

Sheesh. When I used to teach a two-semester freshman writing course, I was shocked at how much backsliding there was over Christmas.

After I returned the first assignment in January and said something like, "This is not high school anymore, and I won't expect to have to repeat material that should still be in your notebooks," the next assignments were much better.

Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley hypothesis states that, as artificial beings get closer to resembling real humans, the slightest errors or inaccuracies can shift our responses from empathy to disbelief and even disgust. It's why, in Toy Story, we love Woody and Buzz Lightyear, but are totally unmoved by Andy, their human owner.

This is something both videogame and movie special effects artists are having to grapple with now that processing power is allowing ever more naturalistic representations of human characters. And grappling with it they are. --Artists climb the uncanny valley (Guardian)

A good introduction to the subject.

James Hays and Alexei Efros from Carnegie Mellon University have developed an algorithm to help people who want to remove bits of photographs.

The parts being removed could be unsightly lorries in the snaps of the rural idyll where they took a holiday or even an old boyfriend or girlfriend they want to rub out from a photograph.

To find suitable matching elements, the research duo's algorithm looks through a database of 2.3 million images culled from Flickr.

"We search for other scenes that share as closely as possible the same semantic scene data," said Mr Hays, who has been showing off the project at the computer graphics conference Siggraph, in San Diego. --Mark Ward --Photo tool could fix bad images (BBC)

I wonder whether such a database could also be used to detect doctored images? Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Vicary and Fraley modeled their study on a 1979 Random House interactive fiction series, "Choose Your Own Adventure," which allowed the reader to select from multiple options at critical points in the story. Each choice directed the reader to a new scenario.

This approach appealed to the researchers because earlier studies of individual behavior in relationships asked participants to make choices based solely on descriptions of isolated events. The sequential nature of the new study was more like an actual relationship, Vicary said, in that it involved ongoing interactions with the same partner. --Simulated Relationships Offer Insight Into Real Ones (Science Daily)

Measuring test subjects' responses to tree fiction, with a branching plotline that reflects how positively or negatively the subjects responded to a simulated partner. Sounds cool.

Lately I've had the urge to play text adventure games, but I'm not sure what to play. I've been googling, but I'm overwhelmed by the variety of games available and can't seem to find a useful review site.

So... what should I play? --Recommend a few good text adventure games! (MetaFilter)

I missed this thread when it appeared... Thanks, Matt, for pointing it out to me.

Many of the games I'd recommend were on this list. I'd add 9:05, Christminster, and Jigsaw, too.

The New York Times Co. (NYT.N) plans to stop charging Internet users for access to its columnists and Op-Ed pieces on a section of its Web site known as TimesSelect, The New York Post reported on Tuesday. --New York Times to end paid Web service: report (Yahoo! | Reuters)

Certain upscale and targeted audiences will pay for some premium content, but this decision suggests the amount of money the Times made off of its premium content is not worth the hassle (and is not worth the income the company stands to make if this previously walled-off content is opened up to search engines and bloggers).

To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers. --Jakob Nielsen --Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Alertbox)

It's been a while since I checked out Nielsen's site. His overall point against blogs -- which we can sum up in the old saying "nobody buys the cow if you give the milk away for free" -- assumes that you're in the business of selling cows.

Nielsen himself churns out an article about every two weeks, which he gives away for free. Usually the articles are self-contained, but sometimes they are a teaser for a full report, which he sells. Those reports are themselves teasers for his speeches and conference workshops, which are themselves advertisements for specialized consulting services.

I don't disagree with anything he says... but I'm not going to stop blogging, because I'm not in the business of selling cows. I already have a job -- teaching new media journalism and other courses at SHU. Were I in a publish-or-perish environment, I would have to make a lot of adjustments, not only to how, when, and why I blog, but how I spend my summers (in the library or at home with the kids?).

I have advised people who were thinking of jumping on the band wagon that if they or someone else in their organization doesn't already love writing, or if they can't hire someone with writing skills, it's probably not worth it to add a blog. Yes, we need the one-in-a-thousand experts to lead the way (putting professional talents and R & D funds to work solving highly technical problems), but everyone is an expert in something -- not always something that makes money. That's OK.

The internet became the cultural force that it is now because geeks decided to give digital stuff away for free. They made tools with the idea making content creation easy, and they revolutionized society in the process. Without free digital culture leading the way, digital commerce would be nowhere.

So keep coming back here for milk. I'll keep telling you where I've found good milk elsewhere. And if you're looking to buy a cow, I'll point you to ones that I think look good. I hope you'll return the favor for me.

The study had youngsters sample identical McDonald's foods in name-brand and unmarked wrappers. The unmarked foods always lost the taste test. Robinson said it was remarkable how children so young were already so influenced by advertising.

The study involved 63 low-income children ages 3 to 5 from Head Start centers in San Mateo County, Calif. -- For kids, it tastes better if it's in a McDonald's wrapper (NY Daily News)

That clown is scary.

Of course, if you want to get the kids to eat their liver and Brussels sprouts, save those HappyMeal boxes.

Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. Partners: University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab. --Digital Preservation Program Makes Awards to Preserve American Creative Works (Library of Congress)

I've been hoping for this announcement for some time.

A while ago Matt Kirschenbaum approached me to ask whether I'd be interested in applying my research in "Colossal Cave Adventure" towards a big digital preservation project. This is it.

The interactive fiction virtual machine is an excellent model for digital preservation. As each new computer system has come out, all one has to do is code up a new interpreter to run the virtual machine. So it's possible to play "Adventure" on numerous platforms, from PDAs to cell phones. However, the recent editions of "Adventure" weren't created with an eye towards historical accuracy, but rather to expose the games to a wider audience. There's nothing wrong with popularizing an important text, but scholars do need access to accurate versions, so that they can accurately trace developments in the genre.

I'm not exactly sure what I'll be asked to do for the project, but at the least I can write up a textual analysis of the various editions of "Adventure" (including an important version that has been considered lost for decades... but I need to wait a little longer before I say any more about that).

One of the components of the proposal was a virtual arcade within Second Life, where visitors could play emulations of classic games.

Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.

This serves companies' business interests, but not the wider interests of consumers.

[...]

At this point, "friend" relationships remain unique to the social networks. The web still lacks a generalized way to convey relationships between people's identities on the internet. The absence of this secret sauce -- an underlying framework that connects "friends" and establishes trust relationships between peers -- is what gave rise to social networks in the first place. --Scott Gilbertson --Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up (Wired)

I couldn't have said it better. This is why I have no particular desire to use a fenced-in system. Yes, I have my students blog with MovableType, but the software is free for private users.

Having said that, I realize that the appeal for some people is precisely that they can share their information with a small group of friends, but all it takes is for one friend to squeal.

I also confess to feeling a bit uncomfortable at the prospect of contacting a researcher whose work I find useful, and telling them I want to be his or her "friend". In the clinically hierarchical world of academia, even "colleague" might be presumptuous.

Rather, Salen and other planners are looking at how games naturally engage players and teach them new skills, and hope to apply those principles to create kids who not only ace their SATs, but are also well suited for the 21st century.

Games offer a context for problem-solving with immediate feedback, and often involve social interaction that can reinforce lessons learned, Salen wrote in a proposal. Combine that process with the skills that modern games encourage -- like computer literacy and navigating through complex information networks -- and you have the basis for a brand new pedagogy, Salen believes.

The planners will devote this year plotting a curriculum, and will test pieces of it in high school classrooms the following school year. Right now, the ideas are vague but intriguing: Alternate reality games could be used to study science, as those players typically seek out and analyze data, and then propose and test their hypotheses. Salen also envisions harnessing the creative urges that kids already express through fan fiction, blogging and the creation of avatars and online identities. --Eliza Strickland --A Win-Win Scenario: 'Game School' Aims to Engage and Educate (Wired)

The smell of a flower - The memory of a walk in the park - The pain of stepping on a nail. These experiences are made possible by the 3 pounds of tissue in our heads...the BRAIN!! --Eric H. Chudler --Neuroscience for Kids (University of Washinton)

My son was asking me a lot of questions about how alcohol affects the brain, and an internet search lead me to this great site. I hope they have another neuroscience poetry competition.

Truthfully, I expected my new department would be grateful that I wasn't having kids. But the unofficial motto here seems to be "We do babies!" And indeed we do..... I couldn't believe that I was struggling to meet anyone who could go out for a drink. --Carol Peace --An Unexpecting Minority (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Who would have thought that academics with young children wouldn't have as much time to socialize as their child-free colleagues do?

I admire Peace for writing such a candid essay, and I note that she explicitly states her awareness of its self-pitying tone. She also points out that, from one perspective, it's a good thing that so many women in her department feel comfortable balancing work and family in this manner. Nevertheless, I have conflicted responses to this essay.

One colleague in my department has written several essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education about balancing her professional life with motherhood. She used to live too far away for us to get together, but she has recently moved very close, and we have already had playdates at the amusement park, a local museum (where the kids spent most of their time cutting up paper in the art room), and rodent-themed kiddie restaurant.

My response to Peace is that her colleagues with young children are probably very tired; they have less time for socializing of any kind; and they are probably worried about about taxing her patience.

If you spend a lot of time around smokers, or pet owners, or yodelers, you develop a tolerance for smoke, slobber, and yodeling, and you feel more relaxed around people who have a similarly high tolerance; consequently, you feel a bit uneasy when you're socializing with someone who doesn't share your interest in smoke, slobber, and yodeling, and you're never quite sure whether the person who says "Oh, I don't mind the smoke|slobber|yodeling one bit" is really about to scream but is instead trying to be polite -- and all the while planning to complain behind your back about how you thoughtlessly exposed them to an unreasonable amount of smoke|slobber|yodeling.

That sounds paranoid, but I am a social introvert (despite having an extroverted teaching persona), and social interactions don't always come naturally to me. Maybe Peace's colleagues simply aren't confident about what her reaction will be.

The cardinal rule of making friends is that you show an interest in what the other person likes to do. So, if Peace wants a quiet evening with the parents of young children, she might arrange for a teenage friend of the family to play with the kids in the backyard while the adults can have a quiet dinner.

I know I can be so completely wrapped up in parenting -- interrupting an adult conversation to ask a child sotto voce where she left her sippy cup and then trying to slip immediately back into the conversation. Like most parents, I've developed the ability to tune out kid disruptions that don't cross a certain line, and I'd like to think that I'm capable of adjusting that line depending on the circumstances.

I remember several times at my previous job when my wife and I accepted an invitation to bring our child to the house of a childless colleague. We made it clear that baby Peter was in the "cruising" phase, where he couldn't quite stand by himself and so was likely to lean or pull on the furniture in order to get around.

All evening, one of us had to follow Peter around so that he wouldn't yank down a tablecloth or grab a statue off of a coffee table or crawl into the kitty litter box or tumble down the stairs. Our hosts kept inviting us both to sit down at the same time, but even if they were telling the truth and it wouldn't have bothered them if we hadn't stopped that lamp from toppling over, we didn't it want it falling on our son's head. If our son had spit up on the imported carpet or scratched the flatscreen TV, we would have felt obligated to pay for it. At the time, we were eating off of a folding card table and our living room couch was the same futon we had used as grad students, and all the items of value (my laptop, precious books, etc.) were sequestered behind a baby gate in the study. It was very stressful for us to watch our son as he tried to finger unprotected wall outlets (can a baby really get a shocking by poking a finger in one of those? I don't want to find out) and reached for knicknacks on the bottom shelves (where we always deliberately left toys for him to grab).

Two female colleagues a few doors away from my office had young children around the same age as my son. My wife's decision to be a full-time parent automatically put me in a different category; they were working moms who had to make hard decisions about how to balance their home and professional lives. No matter how equitably my wife and I divided up the chores -- when I came home, my wife would often hand me a poopy baby and then retreat to the bedroom for the rest of the evening, while I made dinner, gave the baths and read the bedtime stories -- when I was at work, I was always a man whose career was riding on my wife's back.

One day we encountered a faculty couple walking together alone in the mall; classes weren't in session, but they still dropped their child off at daycare. I don't mean to say their decision was wrong, but it wasn't a decision that either of us would have made. My wife and I even babysat this couple's child once so that they could do something together, though they never offered to return the favor.

My point is not to criticize or gripe, but rather to point out that even though a child does give colleagues one more thing in common, all child-having couples are not automatically members of the same social group.

My kids are thumping on the floor above my study crying out to be fed, so I've got to end this blog entry now. If there are any rough spots, so be it -- I've got macaroni noodles to cook.

A pity effort to hack into the hacker-only conference DEFCON was attempted by the NBC reporter Michelle Madigan. Apparently the Associate Producer for Dateline NBC entered the DEFCON with a hidden camera and tried to film attendees confessing to illegal activities. According to some sources, Madigan was working on an investigative piece called "Hackers for Hire" which would have shown the underground world of the hackers community.

The DEFCON folks quickly picked up the scent (some claim they were tipped off) and told the audience that there is a reporter among them with a hidden camera. Michelle Madigan quickly left the conference room, chased down by over 100 of the participants. The tables turned on Madigan on exit, when she was chased down by a dozen of reporters trying to interview her. --Michelle Madigan attempts to hack DEFCON (OG Paper)

Mob justice.

I don't think the "chased down by a dozen of reporters" is accurate -- it sounded to me like it was a small gang of hackers who half-heartedly pretended to be reporters. One said "Thanks for playing!" and others chorused "Bye!" when she left the parking lot.

While the video is credited to "Elizabeth Safran," there is something very discomfiting about a gang of men mocking and poking fun at a woman as she makes a beeline for her car. Having said that, Madigan had attended under false pretenses, and while the small crowd escorting her to her car was annoyed, they simply counted on their presence in numbers to give them authority, and -- like any hackers would hack any system -- used the tools of the existing system in order to upset the status quo. The TV news "perp walk" is a media event designed to shame a suspect and celebrate the power of the authorities, and here we see a reporter making that walk of shame.

--3D Hectopus Animation (Rainbow Hector Weblog)

Just a 3D, six-legged character animation. Not the best walk cycle I've ever seen, but it was fun making it.

An octopus with a porcelain plate stuck to its suckers has led to the discovery of a hoard of ancient pottery, South Korean scientists say. --Treasure trove 'found by octopus' (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

The administrators generally agreed that people skills were important, yet those skills remain underrepresented in required courses. One likely explanation: Students don't like the courses, and they are pressuring administrators to drop them.

When curricula emphasize soft skills, administrators "are significantly more likely to report increased pressure from students to change the curriculum," the researchers said.

"Given that students are indeed the direct consumer and key revenue stream of most M.B.A. programs," they write, "this finding supports recent assertions that students' general disdain for people-focused course work drives considerable policy decisions regarding curricula. ... This finding may suggest that with respect to designing a relevant M.B.A., the customer is not always right." -Katherine Mangan --Companies and Business Students Differ on What Skills M.B.A. Programs Should Teach (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

Besides not beaming down, another factor that showed to increase the survival rate of the red-shirts was the nature of the relationship between the alien life and captain Kirk. When Captain Kirk meets an alien woman and "makes contact" the survival rate of the red-shirted crewmen increases by 84%. In fact, out of Captain Kirks' 24 "relationships" there were only three instances of red-shirt vaporization.

The caveat to this is when Captain Kirk not only meets the local alien women, but also starts a fight among alien locals. The combination of these events has led to the elimination of 4 crewmembers (3 red-shirts).

Here are the statistics:
Red Shirt Death episodes = 18
Episodes with fights = 55
Probability of a fight breaking out = 70%
Kirk "conquest" episodes = 24
Kirk "conquest" + fights = 16
Kirk "conquest" + red shirt casualty= 4
Red shirt death + fight + Kirk "conquest" = 3

--Matt Bailey --Analytics According to Captain Kirk (The Inside Track)

There's an amusing chart that shows crewmember deaths (by shirt-color-coded tombstones) in relation to Kirk's romantic conquests and the number of fights.

How can we fathom the values and preoccupations of the American people (no matter what their race, gender, or class) without paying attention to the nation's literature, painting, architecture, music, theater, and movies? If culture plays as significant a role as social, political, or economic issues in helping us make sense of the American past, why then do American historians expend so much effort analyzing the plight of women and workers, or the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and almost no time at all interpreting the paintings of Edward Hopper, the cartoons of Walt Disney, the lyrics of Cole Porter, the choreography of Jerome Robbins, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, or the films of Elia Kazan? --Richard Pells --History Descending a Staircase: American Historians and American Culture (Chronicle of Higher Education)