September 2007 Archive Page

http://ifcomp.org/comp07/download.html

ArsTechnica:

Rumors of Google's plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google's current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.

I really like Google's 3D model builder, SketchUp, but was frustrated because you can't really interact with (walk around in) the models you create, and the free version does not let you export the models to other programs, so I did not explore it much.

Google never releases a product until it's thoroughly ready for the general public, so I have high hopes for the user interface attached to Google's 3D world (whatever it should be like).

How will Google make money off of this? In-world ads? Virtual shopping malls? I have no idea.

Daniel Radosh brings to the mainstream press (New York Times) an argument that games researchers have been making for years.

If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay -- giving players challenges to work through and choices to make -- in entirely new ways. The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.

Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player's desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player's emotional and intellectual life.

There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can't play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these "interactive fictions" gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story. The steps required to advance the plot, though often devilishly perplexing, felt like natural behavior rather than arbitrary puzzle-solving. Today's game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

I welcome his sentiments, though he is romanticizing the success of "interactive fictions," which never "gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story," because the art form developed to suit a medium that could not promise such an overwhelming experience. Having said that, the marketing of text games did play up that first-person perspective, and if you are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoying the game, it generally worked out.

Today's video games do aspire to cinematic levels of reality, but in the end you're still shooting at wooden ducks on the carnival midway.  Way back when, the bleating speakers and photon-squirting CRTs meant that the graphics games at the time were hideously crappy, and they still look crappy. But the commercial interactive fiction still holds up as good interactive fiction. (We're talking on the scale of boutique art, with authors who know the tastes of their small audience very well.)


Update: Radosh reflects on the online response to his editorial.

The marketers and programmers at Google's Blogger.com are not speaking with each other much, or so it would seem.

The folks in charge of the home page love verbs. 

Here's a thumbnail I cropped from the blogger.com home page.








Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs!  Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact!  Take a tour! Name your blog!  Okay, well "Get" as they use it in "Get Feedback" is a bit lame, but it's better than "Feed!"

Bear in mind I'm analyzing just one tiny sliver of the site, but the designers know that every square inch on a home page is precious, and look at how much effort they put into using verbs.  For crying out loud, if you type the URL www.blogger.com, you're forwarded to a page named "start," and the inline title of that page is "Blogger: Create your Blog Now -- FREE"   

But have you tried leaving a comment on a Blogger site lately? Here's the message you get:

Your comment has been saved and will be visible after blog owner approval.

Oh! The pain!

For me, that was the laugh-out-loud moment in this clip.
Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

This editorial from Pepperdine shows good, clear writing, unlike the four-word CSU editorial that has been in the news recently. It emphasizes the fact that the editorial does not simply contain a vulgar charge aimed at the president, but that...

When students at Colorado State University in Front Collins opened the Sept. 24 issue of the Rocky Mountain Collegian, their student newspaper, an oversized and attention-grabbing headline shouted at them:

"Taser this ... F*** BUSH."

In the space where a 600-word editorial should be, this ambiguous (and asterisk-less) phrase was printed instead. It was recklessly displayed with no accompanying story, no explanation of the editorial board's intentions and no rationale for the gratuitous display of profanity.

The editor's statements about wanting to support free speech would hold more weight if some of those arguments had been included in the 596-word lacuna.

I haven't looked into the charter for the CSU student paper, but if someone does have the authority to fire the editor, then he or she should seriously consider it. I would seriously question the journalistic integrity of an editor who not only passes off a four-word bumper sticker as an editorial, but who also manages to make it look like the editorial is somehow blaming Bush for the tasering incident. (If Bush were somehow exercising his diabolical influence on that security officer, wouldn't he have gotten the guy to taser Kerry?)  So this is either a Michael Moore-style implication that two different facts are related just because they are true (a kid got tasered and lots of people hate Bush), or the author does not have the basic compositional skills necessary to notice the seriousness of such a logical fallacy.

More likely, those responsible for the editorial were just, well, irresponsible.

Those were an expensive four words, in terms of advertising money lost, credibility damage to the paper, and to the editor's future career plans.

A scene from Ridley Scott's youth, via Wired:

The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it's steel, and it's probably particles, it's not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you'd be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire.

Wired teases a bit, so that the ending is actually kind of anti-climactic, but it's a wonderfully geeky puzzle.

From ISS, orbiting 220 miles above the surface of the Earth, the qibla (an Arabic word meaning the direction a Muslim should pray toward Mecca) changes from second to second. During some parts of the space station's orbit, the qibla can move nearly 180 degrees during the course of a single prayer. What's a devout Muslim to do?

AP | Guardian

The morgue scene couldn't have been more grim: As doctors worked to retrieve evidence from 33 bodies riddled with gunshots, they were unnerved by the ringing of victims' cell phones, signaling loved ones seeking reassurance they would never get.

This haunting detail offers, after several months, a fresh perspective on the VA Tech tragedy.

NYT: a student helps a security guard tackle a student carrying a rifle:

The scene at the university yesterday underlined how campus security has been rethought in this country since April, when a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. Instead of fleeing out of classrooms and onto the street, students at St. John's were instructed, via text message to their cellphones, to stay where they were.

The messages went out so rapidly that Mr. Benson, a 21-year-old criminal justice major and police cadet, who held Mr. Hiraman against the wall, said he felt his cellphone vibrate with the information while he was restraining the gunman.

Fantastic little detail really helps give this "happy-ending" story some punch.

Full transcript, the very end of which is Columbia's Bollinger having the last word:

I'm sorry that President Ahmadinejad's schedule makes it necessary for him to leave before he's been able to answer many of the questions that we have or even answer some of the ones that we posed to him. (Laughter, applause.) But I think we can all be pleased that his appearance here demonstrates Columbia's deep commitment to free expression and debate. I want to thank you all for coming to participate. (Applause.) Thank you.

I understand that by inviting the leader of Iraq to speak in a public forum, Columbia's Bollinger risked fallout that could have affected his career. I was not surprised that he began with a speech that put Ahmadinejad on the defensive. And I was not surprised that Ahmadinejad twisted and dodged so much.

I am hardly an expert on linguistics, but I used to teach a freshman engineering writing course when I was in Toronto as a grad student,and from time to time, I had to teach students who had gone to high school in another language how to write college English. I remember learning that one way to translate the concept "learn" into Chinese is the concept "copy," so when I saw Mandarin speakers (many of whom were second-generation immigrants to Canada) struggling until I gave them the model, and then respectfully reproducing my work and expecting to be praised, I had to ask someone if there was a different word for Chinese "watch all the little components of what I do, so that you can improvise and do different things  as circumstances require". Oddly enough, when the students wrote their first personal paragraphs, they often wouldn't actually state the main point -- they thought it would be an insult to the reader's intelligence for a memo to spell out exactly what the client should do. (I told those students, if you don't insult your North American clients that way, you'll lose their business."  ("North America" is friendly Canadian slang referring to "Canada and that country south of us".)

Ahmadinejad's speech reminds me of so many different freshman papers I got from students with a Middle Eastern background. I don't want to start making generalizations, because I never really made a serious academic study of this (there is a whole field of English as a Second Language acquisition, so I'm sure this is nothing new), but the facial expressions that Ahmadinejad gave, the way he cheerfully evaded answers, even the way he responded (after behind reminded) to a the question of gender discrimination by saying "But as for women, maybe you think that being a woman is a crime. It's not a crime to be a woman." On the surface, coming right after his insistence that at there are no homosexuals in Iran, he looked intolerant and ridiculous -- how could he possibly think that the question accused him of thinking that being a woman is a crime? (Of course, he backed up his statement by giving only examples of traditional female roles, though elsewhere he did emphasize the role of women in science and government.)

I missed this when it came out during a recent rush of newshole fodder about Anna Nicole Smith. It is predictable yet slightly amusing for the first minute and a half, but be sure to watch past that point -- I'm still recovering from my coughing fit.
 

For me, this was the money quote in this Chronicle article about a study on the college admissions process:

I have never wanted anything in my life as badly as I wanted to get into that college. ... That is not how it should be."

The New Atlantis

The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is "managing." The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that "teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships." There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: "Change My Top Friends," "View All of My Friends" and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, "Edit Friends." With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.

To be sure, we all rank our friends, albeit in unspoken and intuitive ways. One friend might be a good companion for outings to movies or concerts; another might be someone with whom you socialize in professional settings; another might be the kind of person for whom you would drop everything if he needed help. But social networking sites allow us to rank our friends publicly. And not only can we publicize our own preferences in people, but we can also peruse the favorites among our other acquaintances. We can learn all about the friends of our friends--often without having ever met them in person.

This is written for a popular audience, so there is a lot of summary with few citations, but it's still a good snapshot of social networking as a phenomenon. I strongly resist the idea that any one company (or a small number of companies) should have that much control over my ability to network. There was a time when I worked aggressively for status via my blog. While it is still a part of my professional identity, and still a part of the way I process events and trace emerging trends, I have become less directly interested in tracking the number of hits to my blog, and more interested in the collective effect of the academic blogs that I provide to my students.

Most of my first-semester freshman know all about Facebook and MySpace, but many had never heard the term "blog" before (or weren't really able to define it).  I've learned to refer in general terms to "online participation" and a "class journal" so that they have some context before I hit them with a full-on techno assault on the day we introduce blogs.

From the AP, via Editor and Publisher:

Colorado State University's student newspaper has lost $30,000 in advertising and had to cut pay and other budgets by 10 percent because of fallout from the use of a four-letter word in an editorial about President Bush, the Coloradoan reported Saturday.

In large type, the editorial included the words "Taser this (expletive) Bush." The editorial said it had the support of the Collegian's editorial board. "As local and national media will inevitably jump on this controversy, I strongly urge the university community to try and understand that the intentions of the students on staff, including me, were not to cause harm, but rather to reinforce the importance of free speech at our great institution," Editor-in-Chief J. David

McSwane said in a posting on the paper's Web site Friday. McSwane wrote. "My staff and I are extremely proud to be CSU students and members of this amazing community, and it is my sincere hope that our readers understand our intentions were not malicious."

Hold on a second -- the headline says the paper was "punished."  What really happened was that businesses withdrew their ads and readers complained, but the headline suggests the students are being censored. In fact, the editor might be fired, but according to the article, that will happen only if a student body does the firing.

A statement from the president's office sums things up nicely:

"While student journalists enjoy all the privileges and protections of the First Amendment, they must also accept full responsibility for the choices they make," said CSU President Larry Penley in a prepared statement.

"Members of a university community ought to be expected to communicate civilly and rationally and to make thoughtful arguments in support of even unpopular viewpoints. I am disappointed that the Collegian's recent editorial choices do not reflect the expectations we have of our student journalists nor the standards that are clearly articulated by student media policies. I also have every expectation that the readers of the Collegian will make their viewpoints known to the editor and the Board of Student Communications, which serves as the newspaper's publisher, and that ultimately, the newspaper will answer to its readers." he said.

Using shock journalism to attract attention to an unoriginal idea that can fit on a bumper sticker -- no matter how passionately the author feels about the issue -- is pandering to the lowest common denominators, like fear and sleaze. There will always be an audience for stuff like that, so perhaps the Collegian's editor can rest easy knowing his job prospects are secure.

Images of Journalists in Popular Culture (PDF)

A newsroom is always filled with fast-talking, bright people whose main work is to speak to strangers, investigate a situation, get answers, develop a story. Since reporters are always finding out something about someone, they create countless stories with good beginnings, middles, and endings. The newspaper gave the moviemaker an endless flow of story possibilities in an atmosphere that soon became so familiar to movie audiences that journalists could be thrown into a film without the scriptwriter having to worry about motivation or plot.

By the early 1920s, audiences already knew that reporters were always involved in some kind of story, no matter how bizarre or melodramatic. They accepted it as a matter of course. In the process, they got not only large doses of entertainment but also a series of lasting impressions about the media that has stayed in the public mind for more than ten decades.

A journalist without a voice is only a shadow of the real McCoy. The images at first didn't speak, but all of the Jekyll-and-Hyde stereotypes of the newspaperman and woman were there in the pages of melodramatic fiction and in the silent films often based on that fiction. People who read newspapers didn't have the slightest idea how the news came to them until they read about it in lurid books or saw it on the silent screen. Right from the beginning of film, the world of the newspaper was an easily accessible and recognizable background.

[...]

By the last decades of the twentieth century, the journalists most people remember are the anonymous journalists, played by nondescript actors, who chase after a story by rudely invading the privacy of the person involved. These reporters become bit players, an anonymous piece of an intrusive pack of harassing journalists, many armed with lights, cameras, and microphones. The public watches uncomfortably as these obnoxious reporters fill the movie and, especially, the television screens. They poke their cameras into people's faces, yell out questions, recklessly pursue popular actors - the kind who used to play journalists once cheered by audiences. The result of this particularly offensive image of the reporter from the 1970s to the new century is the public's rejection of the reporter as a hero, as someone helpful and necessary to society. In the beginning, these anonymous reporters were more likable because they were given witty lines, and they asked questions the audiences wanted answered. They were often used to advance the plot and summarize the action. They were created by former journalists who, no matter how critical of the profession, couldn't disguise their true love of the people in it.

I've been scanning the online coverage of the MIT student who caused a bomb scare when she walked into an airport wearing a blinking circuit board on her sweatshirt.

I'm dismayed by the number of headlines that unquestioningly repeat the authorities' line that she was wearing a "fake bomb."  Several headlines at least put the term in quotation marks, and a good number of them describe the device more neutrally (as a circuit board) or they avoid mentioning the object at all (with a headline that emphasizes that an MIT student caused a bomb scare, but leaving the cause of the scare for the body of the article).

I've been laid up in sick all weekend, mostly drifting in and out of sleep.

I started getting chills Friday afternoon at work. I zipped up my jacket and put the heater on in the car to keep the chills under control, went to the couch in the basement (where my wife banished me) and just tried to keep sane.

All Saturday was a blur. I tried to sleep as much as I could, and I watched some random YouTube nonsense and listened to some Dodge Intrepid podcasts (a mock 40s-style radio adventure serial; recent SHU graduate Mike Rubino is a cast member). I could barely prop my head up with one hand and tap keys one at a time with the other. I took me about 15 minutes to type a two-sentence comment on a student blog.

Then at about 3 this morning, I woke up with sweat dripping off my hair and soaking the pillow, and as I lay there I realized -- I can think! I can think!

Today my wife gave me exactly what I need. She's taking the kids out all day, so I can try to recover a bit.
I can sit up now and type two-handed for brief periods of time now. I also did some light reading.

aibohphobia

The irrational fear of palindromes (words that read the same forwards and backwards).

Dude 1: Hey, what's your name?
Dude 2: Bob.
Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs and hides behind sofa*
Bob: Wow.
Dude 1: AAAAAAAAAAH! *Runs away and falls down stairs*

This completely stupid fauxbia made me laugh for some reason. There appears to be a real art to writing a successful Urban Dictionary entry. Such entries are often gratuitously vulgar, even when the term being defined is not vulgar. If I weren't so sick, I'd try to think about it some more.

Great Zork map.

The Walls are Closing In

 
It's all my fault
that now I hear their death -
their screams of pain
within their final breath.    


No, we are alive.

And thanks to you,
we'll get out.

A whole song about such a literal event?  Songs in musicals, even if they are showpiece numbers attached closely to what is happening on stage, have to be about the hopes and fears of the characters. There are a few other songs that seem to be closer to the right idea, but I wasn't really impressed by what I saw.

Language Log offers a thorough discussion of the real story of the emoticon.

Before seeing the Google Books page image, I had thought that Bierce's suggested punctuation looked like this: \___/. That's how it appears in a footnote to Andrew Graham's online essay, "Forked Tongue: The Language of Serpent in the Enlarged Devil's Dictionary of Ambrose Bierce," as well as the Wikipedia entry on emoticons. It's interesting to discover that the parenthesis-as-smile representation actually goes back 120 years. (In Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and Soldiers in Context: A Critical Study, Donald T. Blume dates this essay to September 25, 1887, but the version published in the 1912 collection may have been subsequently revised.)

The pre-Fahlman trail included a 1979 reference an idea from a Reader's Digest article the author had read "long ago."  I actually once sent a grad student to the library to look for this article, but he came back empty-handed. (I think I asked him to look from 1970 on, which explains why he didn't find the right article, which was published in 1962,

I'm glad someone has tied all those loose ends together...

The LA Times pulls no punches in this column on the aftermath of Dan Rather's pathetic defense of a slipshod story alleging Bush weaseled his way out of his military duties.

Now, if you once had thought of yourself as situated at the heart of the journalistic universe for nearly half a century, and suddenly found yourself 75 and toiling for an obscure cable operation that seemed to generate more press releases than viewers, it probably would be much more satisfying to see yourself as the victim of an intricate, high-level conspiracy than as someone undone by the kind of personal screw-up that would make a first-year reporter blush.

The problem is that there's more than one guy's injured vanity at play here. In fact, the adjectives that come to mind as you assess the substance of what Rather now has done are wanton, reckless and irresponsible. Let's put aside the fact that Rather has no evidence that the network's owners were anything but understandably embarrassed and angry at having their single most recognizable journalist air something as incompetently put together as the "60 Minutes" segment in question. Let's ignore any questions over why Thornburg and Boccardi -- two men with unimpeachable reputations in their respective fields -- would join a conspiracy to "get Dan Rather."

Emily Short reviews a game that tries to make a point:

While I sympathize with the message of the game, it didn't really work for me, for two reasons.

First, the game is irritating to play. It's impossible to undo mistakes (if you accidentally confiscate someone's pants instead of his shoes, for instance, as I did repeatedly) and the list of banned items is posted at the opposite corner of the screen from the passenger luggage list, which means that you have to look back and forth quite a lot. Many of the frustrations that constitute the "message" of the game result from game design decisions, even screen layout decisions, and not from the system being emulated. This is the game-design equivalent of a rhetorical cheap trick.

Second, the game doesn't argue the issues. I agree that TSA guidelines tend to be arbitrary and that they don't make us safer, but this game doesn't really argue that; it takes these facts as read. It felt more like an exercise in whipping up the indignation of people who already agree with the central premise. There's much to be indignant about in the American political environment lately, but I don't think my inconvenience in going through transport security is the most important issue by a long shot.

Wired's Threat Level:

Just two days after it was yelled out in a University of Florida lecture hall, "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" has become the newest cultural touchstone of our pop-cultural lexicon.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via Miki Louch.

When he was a boy, Dr. Pausch said, he had a concrete set of dreams: He wanted to experience the weightlessness of zero gravity; he wanted to play football in the NFL; he wanted to write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia ("You can tell the nerds early on," he joked); he wanted to be Captain Kirk from "Star Trek"; and he wanted to work for the Disney Co.

I interviewed Paush once for a newsletter published by the engineering school at the University of Virginia. Hearing about the occasion of his speech was a bit of a surprise.

Words fail me. The LA Times is among many sources reporting that...

Longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather filed a $70-million lawsuit today against his former employer, alleging that executives at the broadcast network broke the terms of his contract by marginalizing him in his final days at CBS News and forcing him to retire early.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Fahlman posted the emoticon in a message to an online electronic bulletin board at 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19, 1982, during a discussion about the limits of online humor and how to denote comments meant to be taken lightly. "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)," wrote Fahlman. "Read it sideways."

Several years earlier, in 1979, the "tongue-in-cheek" icon -) failed to make a similar splash.

The New York Musical Theater Festival has some tidbits about an upcoming showing of a musical based on The Last Starfighter. Too bad I'm not really within day-trip distance of New York... this one would tempt me. My nine-year-old son would probably enjoy it, but the trip would be hard on my five-year-old daughter. Oh well... looks like the show has gotten good reviews. (Jason Scott raved geeky raves when he saw it a few years ago.)

From JONATHAN BETUEL's screenplay for the beloved 1980s sci-fi film comes the cosmically entertaining romantic musical fantasy THE LAST STARFIGHTER. It's Spring 1983 in a Sierra Nevada trailer park. High school senior Alex Rogan's hardworking, unrewarded life takes an unexpected turn when he breaks a video game record and is spirited away by the game's inventor, the alien huckster Centauri, to fight for the Star League in a faraway galaxy. Centauri leaves behind Beta, a body double droid of Alex, to cover Alex's absence with his mother, brother and beloved girlfriend Maggie while Alex is off fighting the evil Zur and the Ko-dan Armada. Beta's comic mishaps on Earth with Maggie and the neighbors in the trailer park, and shape-shifting alien assassins in pursuit of Alex on his home turf, alternate with Alex's heroic starfighter achievements. Alex must reach inside himself to discover his true potential - the universe and his life depend on it!

David Cornelson, interviewed in Gamasutra about his plans for marketing text-adventure games to young readers:

One of the reasons IF is so fascinating is that you have this junction of programming, game design, and writing. It's great to toy around with all three of those aspects and try to merge them into something beautiful.

The reality is that most of us have one, possibly two of those capabilities at a reasonably high level, but statistically very few people have all three of them at a high level (Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, Graham Nelson, Michael Gentry, Paul O'Brian, Eric Eve, Adam Cadre, and more). I would even argue that some of these people have been able to overcome a lesser ability with sheer determination and free time.

I don't think you can build a business from this dichotomy. I do believe that if you offer someone a task that they're good at and give them a template to work towards, they will succeed. From there it was a matter of developing that template, which we've already done. The process is being duplicated for a second design and writing team and there seems to be a consensus that we've developed the right processes.

Andy Guess (Inside Higher Ed):

So technology's utility in the classroom comes down to how it is used. The question, then, is: How can educators adapt their teaching methods to emerging technologies? And should they? Skeptics might point out that even students themselves are ambivalent when it comes to using the Internet and other digital tools for class, as the survey highlights. But the study's introduction, written by Chris Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggests what professors can expect from digital natives' evolving modes of learning, what he calls "neomillennial learning styles." As new methods of interacting with information become more ubiquitous, he suggests, citing Second Life-type virtual immersion environments as an example, students will grow up with different expectations and preferences for acquiring knowledge and skills. The implication is less of an emphasis on the "sage on the stage" and a linear acquisition process focusing on a "single best source," focusing instead on "active learning" that comes from synthesizing information from multiple types of media. Noting that traditional ways of thinking and learning are undergoing a "sea change," Dede encourages a fusion of new and old. But what form that will take, exactly, is not addressed directly in the report.

New York Times:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Melissa Terras writes in the introduction to Digital Humanities Quarterly v1 n2 (2007):

We at DHQ hope that we will eventually reach a wider audience (and trust our readers will help us do so), introducing the type and range of activities the digital humanities community is interested in, and featuring energetic, novel, and interesting articles on a variety of research, making use of all the Internet technologies at our disposal.

One of the papers in this, our second issue, has already done just that. Dennis G. Jerz's Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original Adventure in Code and in Kentucky, was posted on the test site for proofreading a few weeks before launch, when one of our editors featured an advance mention of it on his blog. A few days later, it was picked up by the gaming community on a popular discussion list (rec.arts.int-fiction), garnering comments such as "HOLY MOLY!" and "It is clear on a single reading that this is the most important single paper ever written on the history of interactive fiction" before it had even been formally published. It doesn't stop there: the paper went on to be featured on Boing Boing (a "directory of wonderful things" which is read by hundreds of thousands of readers), then being mentioned on Slashdot, the popular technology-related news site. (We are pleased to report our servers survived being "slashdotted" so far, which is perhaps the best load test we could wish for). Shortly after, it featured on Metafilter, a community weblog that anyone can edit with a vast readership, where comments included "What academic research should aspire to be" and "I can feel a new LOLCATS meme coming on. (I can haz mint-cake?)." On the eve of publication, we have had a request from a local Kentucky newspaper wishing to republish the paper (which our publication terms willingly permit). This paper has legs.

In addition, publication on DHQ has made the original game available again for a new audience. When the preprint version of this article became available on the internet in August 2007, Matthew Russoto modified Crowther's source code so that it will compile for today's computers. David Kinder made a Windows executable version. The colossal cave lives again.

Kaj Sand-Jensen:

Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific publications. I then discuss why we should and how we could make these contributions more accessible and exciting.

A 13-page PDF. I wish I could excerpt some of the tables, but I'd have to do a screengrab, and I can't be bothered this morning.

In my "News Writing" class the other day, I had the students take out a piece of paper and write down the names of the five family members from The Simpsons. Then I had them write down the five rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. They groaned, at least some of them in an "I can't believe we're so lame!" attitude, rather than an adolescent eye-rolling "Are you serious?" attitude.

"Have I made my point?" I asked. They nodded.

Then I taught them about the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Can you believe that after pollsters read this text to 1003 people, when the poll-takers were asked to respond to "The U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation," 17% "mildly agree" and 38% "strongly agree"?

Of course, the poll seems designed to solicit such a response. This question doesn't come right after the pollster read the text aloud, and it's possible that if you believe that America was de facto a Christian nation, and you believe the Constitution established America as a nation, that you would agree to this statement without actually troubling yourself to notice that the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of any religion. I also note that the poll does not explain the legal concept of "establishment." 

Other details... in 2007, 56% of respondents said they got most of their news from TV (hmm.... 17 + 38 = 55%... that would explain a lot... but I know it's not so simple), with 20% saying the newspaper, and %15 the internet. But if I watch video clips and read news stories on the internet, how should I answer?

In Texas, spiders have learned to cooperate. And I, for one, salute our new arachnid overlords.

But Tuesday afternoon, thousands of Texas spiders were back at it, working to rebuild an immense spider web at Lake Tawakoni State Park that at one time stretched about 200 yards, covering bushes and trees to create a creepy canopy. Researchers say they now believe thousands of spiders from different species worked together to make one huge web -- much different from the traditional individual webs that would normally be woven. Together, they've built and rebuilt a web that has caught countless bugs and the attention of people nationwide. "These spiders seem to be working together to build it back," said Zach Lewis, an office clerk at the park. "It's really something to see.

A reader of Google Blogoscoped reveals that Google briefly posted a "confidential" video detailing its plans to compete with Facebook.

Google's recent big social effort is called Mocha-Mocha (or Mocka-Mocka?), and will become the infrastructure for all social stuff across all of their applications. As a part of this, a new feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to Facebook's News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail's addressbook and contact list.

Pew Research Center

Public interest in news has changed slightly over the last two decades, but in a manner that suggests no meaningful trend. The average reading for the Pew News Interest Index did slip during the 1990s from 30% to 23%, a seemingly noteworthy decrease that represents nearly a fourth of the original level. Had the index continued to slide as much in the new millennium, that change would have suggested a trend of potentially great import. But in the current decade the index has bounced back to precisely its level during the 1980s: 30%.

[...]

Money News registers with audiences, ranking second among super categories with a three-decade score of 34%. And, decade-by-decade, interest in Money News has increased. In the '80s, its index score was 23%; in the '90s it moved forward to 29%. In this decade it leaped to 40%.

Clive Thompon is not writing from the same world where I live.

Thirty-six hours? How in god's name had I managed to spend almost four hours a day inside this game? I should point out that this was not the only game I'd been playing during that time. I'd also been hip-deep in BioShock and Space Giraffe, so I'd been planted like a weed in front of my consoles for hours more. This is a missing-time experience so vast one would normally require a UFO abduction to achieve it. So the question of the column, and possibly the question of my eternal soul, is: Is this good thing? How much does it change the architecture of your life to spend that much time playing games? The dirty secret of gamers is that we wrestle with this dilemma all the time. We're often gripped by what I call "gamer regret" -- a sudden, horrifying sense of emptiness when we muse on all the other things we could have done with our game time.

I vaguely remember what it was like to spend a whole weekend playing a video game. Last weekend I was up until 3 or 4 am Saturday and Sunday mornings, because I knew that would be the only blocks of unbroken time that I would have in order to solve some MT4 installation problems. Last week I scheduled consultations with students in my basic comp course, and while I thoroughly enjoy talking with each student, I hadn't realized just how quickly all my other work backed up. I sure wish I had the time to lament spending too much time on video games!

My five-year-old sat and listened for over an hour while I read the first chapter of Gregor the Overlander and the first chapter of The Hobbit.  Earlier that day she had found an old beat-up costume jewelry ring that another kid on the playground said he found in a stream.  When the park time was over, When I asked which she liked better, she handed me Gregor and asked for another chapter. (My nine-year-old son asked for more of The Hobbit, which I read to him when he was five or six... I was impressed that he remembered Smaug's vulnerability.)

When Peter was two or three, I read to him an hour or more each night. Carolyn has always wanted to play with Peter rather than sit still and listen, but now that she is old enough to focus on a story that also interests Peter, I hope we'll be able to have more reading time.

A luminous group of anti-Stratfordians write:

Not one play, not one poem, not one letter in Mr. Shakspere's own hand has ever been found. He divided his time between London and Stratford, a situation conducive to correspondence. Early scholars naturally expected that at least some of his correspondence would have survived. Yet the only writings said to be in his own hand are six shaky, inconsistent signatures on legal documents, including three found on his will. If, in fact, these signatures are his, they reveal that Mr. Shakspere experienced difficulty signing his name. Some document experts doubt that even these signatures are his and suggest they were done by law clerks. One letter addressed to Mr. Shakspere survives. It requested a loan, and it was unopened and undelivered. His detailed will, in which he famously left his wife "my second best bed with the furniture," contains no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase and mentions no books, plays, poems, or literary effects of any kind. Nor does it mention any musical instruments, despite extensive evidence of the author's musical expertise. He did leave token bequests to three fellow actors (an interlineation, indicating it was an afterthought), but nothing to any writers. The actors' names connect him to the theater, but nothing implies a writing career. Why no mention of Stratford's Richard Field, who printed the poems that first made Shakespeare famous? If Mr. Shakspere was widely known as William "Shakespeare," why spell his name otherwise in his will? Dying men are usually very aware of, and concerned about, what they are famous for. Why not this man?

Va Tech's guidelines for evaluating disturbing student writing, as a Word file and as filtered through an analysis by Inside Higher Ed:

The document also reflects the tightrope its drafters were walking, leaving ample room for intuition and judgment in identifying disturbing writing and offering a series of questions instructors might find helpful in distinguishing creative and literary explorations of themes like violence, drugs and suicide, from a threat or cry for help. Among the questions, geared for fiction, poetry or playwrighting courses:

• "Is the creative work excessively violent? Do characters respond to everyday events with a level or kind of violence one does not expect, or may even find frightening? If so, does the violence seem more expressive of rage and anger than it does of a literary aesthetic or a thematic purpose?"
• "Are the characters' thoughts as well as actions violent or threatening? Do characters think about or question their violent actions?..In other words, does the text reveal the presence of a literary sensibility mediating and making judgments about the characters' thoughts and actions, or does it suggest unmediated venting of rage and anger? If the literary sensibility is missing, is the student receptive to adding that layer and to learning how to do so?"
• "Is this the student's first piece of violent writing?..Is violence at the center of everything the student has written, or does other writing suggest that violence is something the student is experimenting with for literary effect?"
• "Are the violent actions in the work so disturbing or so extreme as to suggest they go beyond any possible sense of purpose in relation to the larger narrative?"
• "Is the writing full of expressions of hostility toward other racial or ethnic groups? Is the writing threateningly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or in any way expressive of a mindset that may pose a threat to other students?"

"The danger," Falco says of the Virginia Tech document (which has received approvals from the university's counseling center, legal counsel and provost's office) "is that written guidelines can be misused....that a situation would come about where you hamper creative freedom because students are afraid to write something because they're afraid it will get them thrown into a system."

Metro.co.uk

A trio of vandals are facing trouble after posting a video of themselves smashing up a Lotus Elise on the internet. The three filmed themselves leaping and jumping on the bonnet and roof of the £20,000 sports car, parked in Marylebone, Central London. After originally posting the video on their MySpace pages, the group quickly withdrew it after learning of a witchhunt by angry internet Lotus fans.

English Original

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Run through AltaVista's Babelfish, translating from English to Spanish to English to Spanish, until reaching stasis. HyperSpanish?

Universal recognized of the truth it is, like of single man in the possession of a good fortune, must be internal desires of a wife. In spite of little they know it that the sensations or the opinions that such man nay is in his first one which he incorporates a vicinity, this truth are so elbow fixed to the minds of the surrounding families, who consider it have taste of the legitimate characteristic of some or another one of the daughters of the heir

HyperGerman:

It is confirmed truth, the one individual man in the possession of a luck, disturbance within its desires of a woman. However small conserved goods, within it to the way an inside to a way to these a man, who to the surplus in the morning in such a way to the way an inside, so that from the feelings the containers dig also or, to the opinions it, which are surplus its first you, possible coming into neighbourhood, this truth in the understanding of the surrounding families as this well-being place that, it cube, which specifies certified characteristic you a way of approx.. in a formed way in a way or as others its daughter meetings also inward

HyperFrench:

It is a universally identified truth, that a simple man in possession of a good fortune, must be interior want of a wife. However little known the feelings or the sights of such a man can be on his first writing a proximity, they these truth so good is fixed in the spirits of the surrounding families, which one considers with him with him the legitimate property of hard or others their daughters.

HyperJapanese (each cycle was adding more and more structure, and getting more and more philosophical... I gave up before reaching stasis):

Those which agree to the fortunate person of the wife of the single human? Furthermore finishing, the thing of the uniform of phenomenon of thing phenomenon of the thing like _ thing, do those of our our possession ones do the fact that the thing namely average it is called? Perhaps, in regard to consideration thick Seki it is justice of this truth daughter in regard to Seki, it is? The headquarters of thing of decorative style series 1 of truth gazing/hoping of those our things of universalness the fact that it is there should be convinced, it is other than neighborhood? Knowledge, how small human? Opposite side and quality or, or how or is that enormous thing start? The place of opinion, being abnormal, courtesy we should feel Seki which is healthy fixing? Therefore as for thing are phenomenon of thing and thing of possession ones liked those of thing how? What of evidence of 1st thing?

HyperItalian (cycling some articles but otherwise static... probably the most comprehensible version)

Universal recognized of the truth it is, that one a single man in possession of good fortune, must be to the inner part of desires of a moglie. However little known the sensibility or the points of the point of view of such man it can in the first place be on the relative which it records in the vicinities, this truth therefore is enslaved slowly in the minds of the surrounding families, than the legitimate property approximately or other of their daughters is considered.

Most academic slide shows are dreary affairs. Our students might as well be writing "I will not think outside the box" on the blackboard 100 times.

Imagine a conference in which every presenter spoke for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Is it heaven, or is it a pecha-kucha night? That would leave a lot of room for conference attendees to, you know, confer. (Wired offers a good intro to pecha-kucha, and an example.)

The inventors of the concept have trademarked it, which I confess is a bit of a downer for me; nevertheless, the slideshow genre needs this kind of creativity. The inventors are architects, so it makes sense that their style emphasizes quality images that are worth looking at for 20 seconds. Larry Lessig, a lawyer, has a very different presentation style, which can involve a hundred slides or more, but each slide might only contain a few words; he cycles through them rapidly as he's talking.

Then, of course, there's comedian Don McMillan's spoof of over-designed slideshows.

Nick Yee (The Daedalus Project) writes an 8-part post (this quote is from part 2) responding to media reports about "internet addiction."

High school and college students on football teams regularly die during practice (1, 2, 3), but their deaths are dealt with by the media with a very holistic perspective. The media questions whether the coach set an unreasonably exhausting regimen. The media questions whether the parents saw warning signs. They ask whether the school reviewed the coach's history thoroughly when the hiring was made. They wonder why the school mandates year-round practice that necessitates training in the hot summers. They ask whether the team physicians condoned the exhausting practices despite the individual's particular health idiosyncrasies. And in no time during all this does anyone suggest that football is addictive and caused the deaths. This is because that statement would be naïve and simplistic. When people die during or after playing an MMO however, it is typically "caused by an online gaming addiction". The wikipedia entry on "game addiction" lists several of these "notable cases". Even in cases where the person suffered from depression and other mood disorders, an "addiction" to the game itself is primarily blamed for the deaths. As another example, Kimberley Young's discussion of Internet Addiction Disorder implies that marital affairs that occur online are primarily the fault of the Internet, rather than having to do with personal choices. Why is it that explanations are complicated and holistic when it comes to football, and so simplistic when we talk about online games? Part of the reason is that football is too mainstream and too low-tech to be a tool for the media to instill paranoia with. No one is afraid of a leather ball.

Jennifer Reeger of the Tribune-Review (Pittsgurgh) reports on my colleague's local (Westmoreland County) history book.

"Thank God we do have this beautiful building," said Mike Cary, professor of history and political science at Seton Hill University and an editor of a book on the courthouse's history. "People remember Greensburg -- they remember that dome when they see it from a distance, and it's somehow inspirational for people." The courthouse, completed in 1907 and dedicated in 1908, will be celebrated in upcoming events and a book, "This American Courthouse: One Hundred Years of Service to the People of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania," scheduled to be released Sept. 14.

The student paper at Southern Illinois University publishes an analysis, assisted by an anonymous source, of evidence of plagiarism in the dissertation written by the SIU president.

"I could have made a mistake," Poshard said. "I'm not saying I didn't."

The Daily Egyptian recently obtained copies of Poshard's dissertation and original works from a source close to Alumni and Faculty Against Corruption at SIU. The source, who insisted on anonymity, said Poshard used verbatim excerpts in his dissertation that were not cited or quoted.

Previously, SIU's strategic plan was under fire because long sections were copied verbatim from a similar document from Texas A & M.

Nick Montfort, Grand Text Auto:

Leonard Cohen

Manhattan: Taken.
Berlin: Taken.

Morris Dickstein:

Book review editors often have difficulty convincing their bosses that the news about books is in the books themselves, not in mega-buck contracts, bestseller chitchat, and profiles of famous authors. Truly conscientious reviewers are not exactly a beloved breed: authors sensitive to criticism detest them, publishers would love to coopt them, and academics rarely respect those who write for a wider public, not for other scholars. Yet book reviewing is where talented young critics often get their start. It encourages them to be generalists, keeping in touch with contemporary writing. It forces them to write quickly and clearly and to put flesh on their arguments, eschewing the abstract jargon of many professionals. And it contributes to a cultural conversation otherwise dominated by hot TV shows, blockbuster movies, and media-manufactured celebrities.

[...]

Though it is built on reading and writing, the Internet is seen as the enemy of literature, digging the grave of the printed book. But just as the computer lent new fluency to the act of writing, the Internet has revolutionized literary research, allowing instant access to vast bodies of information that would have required arduous labor only yesterday. It has amplified the reach of print publications by becoming a prime carrier of the printed word, creating a simultaneous worldwide audience for publications great and small, local and national. But the economic crisis afflicting newspapers and magazines, which has battered literary journalism, shows how the Internet is eating away at it own foundations, the printed sources of so much of its real content. The blog will not make up the difference, at least in its unedited form as a spontaneous effusion, a personal diary in shorthand. As Adam Kirsch has written: "Bitesized commentary, which is all the blog form allows, is next to useless when it comes to talking about books. Literary criticism is only worth having if it at least strives to be literary in its own right, with a scope, complexity, and authority that no blogger I know even wants to achieve." (Critical Mass)