Technology: December 2007 Archive Page

In Reason, David Harsanyi reviews The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen.

"Can a social worker in Des Moines really be considered credible in arguing with a trained physicist over string theory?" he asks, referring to Wikipedia, the online, user created encyclopedia. "Can a car mechanic have as knowledgeable a 'POV' as that of a trained geneticist on the nature of hereditary diseases? Can we trust a religious fundamentalist to know more about the origins of mankind than a PhD in evolutionary biology?"

Well, yes and no. I, of course, have the prerogative to trust whomever I want. In the same way I once gathered my news from The National Inquirer and listened to Art Bell's late-night radio broadcasts for clues to my place in the universe, today I can ferret out similarly useless information webwide.

The more significant point, one that Keen ignores, is that the Web 2.0 explosion has provided me with something I've never had before: access to ongoing discussions between and among trained physicists, trained geneticists, and religious fundamentalists. Laymen as well as experts are now invited to sit in on these conversations. On occasion, the amateurs get it right, triggering dramatic results. Matt Drudge can announce the Monica Lewinsky scandal while Newsweek dithers about publishing it. Or a blog like Little Green Footballs can help catch Dan Rather peddling forged documents about the president's service record. Rather than undermining information, this new access has expanded users' understanding of the world.

I'd like to add just a bit to Harsanyi's defense of the conversational nature of Wikipedia. The social worker who isn't qualified to argue with a trained physicist over string theory can, of course, contribute to an article on social work. But more important, if the social worker asks questions on the string theory discussion page, or even makes bad edits in the article itself, that's a sign that at least one member of the audience doesn't understand the Wikipedia article, and it's a beacon calling for others to fix the problem, making the article more accessible to the social workers of the world, and in the process, improving it.

This is, of course, the very reason why Wikipedia is not a reliable source for college research papers (or even middle-school ones), but quite frankly nobody should turn to any encyclopedia, not even the printed encyclopedias gathering dust on the library shelves, as the final destination of any serious research. (Encyclopedias provide a general overview, putting a topic into a general context, but you won't find original research in any encyclopedia, you'll just find someone's summary of sources that a serious research should really go read first-hand.)


Because the discussion over each article happens transparently, with each mis-step and correction chronicled in the article history page, the enemy of usefulness on the internet is not the nature of the information itself, but rather the naive attitude of a reader who does not approach that information with the proper critical standpoint.  Each year when I explain to freshmen my attitude towards Wikipedia, somebody in the class is shocked to learn that anybody -- anybody -- can edit an article. Recently, one young man said, "They wouldn't let them put it on the internet if it wasn't true!"

I have high praise for the high school teacher who, instead of banning Wikipedia, instead assigns students to read the discussion page of a controversial topic, so that the students who go on to college will arrive with the idea that college is not all about hunting through textbooks or listening to lectures to find the "right answers," but rather that college is an opportunity to learn the skills necessary to succeed in an information-centered world.

Video games didn't start with Pac-Man (1980), Space Invaders (1978), or Pong (1972).

Great 1972 Rolling Stone article about a foundational computer game.

Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time. Something basic is going on.

Rudimentary Spacewar consists of two humans, two sets of control buttons or joysticks, one TV-like display and one computer. Two spaceships are displayed in motion on the screen, controllable for thrust, yaw, pitch and the firing of torpedoes. Whenever a spaceship and torpedo meet, they disappear in an attractive explosion. That's the original version invented in 1962 at MIT by Steve Russell. (More on him in a moment.)

October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console room just off the main hall containing AI's PDP-10 computer.

AP:

A baby Jesus statue here is getting a Global Positioning System for Christmas. The statue, part of a nativity scene, will be equipped with the device after the previous statue went missing, even though it had been bolted down. "I don't anticipate this will ever happen again," said Dina Cellini, who oversees the display, "but we may need to rely on technology to save our savior."

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

In 2002, David Winer bet Martin Nisenholtz that

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

According to Workbench:

So Winer wins the bet 3-2, but his premise of blog triumphalism is challenged by the fact that on all five stories, a major U.S. media outlet ranks above the leading weblog in Google search. Also, the results for the top story of the year reflect poorly on both sides.

In the five years since the bet was made, a clear winner did emerge, but it was neither blogs nor the Times.

Wikipedia, which was only one year old in 2002, ranks higher today on four of the five news stories: 12th for Chinese exports, fifth for oil prices, first for the Iraq war, fourth for the mortgage crisis and first for the Virginia Tech killings.

I just got this e-mail. Scratch is an amazing tool designed to teach programming to kids. My nine-year-old loves it. I'm planning to use Scratch in my "New Media Projects" class next fall.

Because of your interest in Scratch, we thought you would like to 
know about the Scratch@MIT conference that we are hosting next summer.

The conference will provide an opportunity for educators, 
researchers, developers, and other members of the worldwide Scratch 
community to gather together to share experiences and discuss future 
possibilities for Scratch.

The conference will take place on the MIT campus on July 24-26, 2008. 
Everyone is invited to submit proposals for presentations, panel 
discussions, and workshops (deadline: February 15, 2008).

For more information, see http://scratch.mit.edu/conference

Best wishes for a Happy New Year -- and we hope to see you at MIT 
next July!

The special coding Wikipedia has developed for its user-edited pages is powerful. Some shortcuts are simple and elegeant -- you just put [[square brackets]] around words to make them into links, and clicking on the link will automatically either take you to an existing page, or let you create a new one.

But as Wikipedia has grown in size and complexity, the code of its pages has become harder for newbies to read. I've never encountered negative vibes from someone who's come along after me and cleaned up my sloppy coding, and learning this sort of thing is part of my job description as a new media teacher. Nevertheless, I can see how intimidating it could be for someone whose subject matter expertise is in the history of Latvia or the cultural significance of oregano.

I just came across this older post by Jason Calacanis, who expresses the issue in stronger terms than I would use, but he really gets to the point.

We've been talking a lot about the Wikipedia recently here at calacanis.com, and I wanted to make my podcast from last week a little more clear. I spoke of technological obsurification--the process of using obscure technology to keep people from participating.

Having spent seven days at the Wikimania and hacking days last year in Boston I've learned a lot about the insular culture of Wikipedia, how they make decisions, and how they block participation. Yes, you read that last part correctly. The Wikipedia is currently designed to lower participation so it is easier to manage.

Now, I'm not saying it's wrong to limit participation in Wikipedia--perhaps that's what necessary to keep the project on track. However, I think we should be really honest about the fact that Wikipedia is not an open system--at least not open in the sense that anyone can participate.

Advice from GameCareerGuide.com resembles what I tell my English literature majors about why they are expected to study and benefit from literary works that they might not choose to read for their own pleasure. (The same goes for students in my Video Game Culture and Theory course.)

Before you begin down this path there is something you should know: playing games in order to study them is not what most people would consider "fun." This doesn't mean it isn't fun at all; it just means you have to think a different way. You have to find joy in discovering mechanics and watching their emergent properties unfold.

You have to be willing to endure a certain amount of tedium in order to glean clues about the inner workings of a game. Most of all, you have to be able to enjoy playing bad games as well as good.

Like the rest of game design "playing to learn" falls somewhere between a science and an art and contains all the joys of those two fields (though not many we traditionally associate with playing video games). If you can enjoy the eureka moments that happen when you finally discover how something is done, and the cascading flights of fancy that cause you to see the ramifications of a design that far exceed what's actually in the game, then this field is for you.

Anna L. Mallory (Roanoke Times):

The game, a takeoff on programs popular before the Internet and Nintendo, blends social-networking and choose-your-own adventure tools. It allows players to not only play games but also create and share their own adventures in user-submitted fictional lands.

Mallory also includes some quotes from former Infocom Imp Steve Meretzky on the heyday of text-adventures and the surprising rise of MySpace.

In Wired, Jenna Wortham focuses on what blogs typically look like to journalists.

Blogs are re-shaping not just news and entertainment, but also publishing, politics and public relations.

Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most famous blogger, is widely credited with putting a human face on the giant company and facilitating an exchange between customer and corporation. Matt Drudge's news blog Drudge Report garnered national recognition for his coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky sex scandal; last year, Drudge -- a former convenience store clerk -- was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. "Rathergate," a blog-driven critique of Dan Rather's journalism, led to the CBS anchorman's early, ignominious retirement.

Furthermore, blogs have become important news sources in their own right. Behind-the-scenes footage and reports emerged during crises like the South Asian tsunami, the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and the recent Burmese uprising, when coverage from traditional outlets was scarce.

The article doesn't really talk about the impact of the long tail -- that is, the effect of the many, many bloggers who are not at the top of the pecking order, but who have nevertheless formed readership networks that enrich the blogosphere. It's because so many people are writing -- instead of just reading what a small number of media producers deem printworthy -- that the top bloggers can find such quirky but as-yet-unknown things to blog about.

My students are almost all on Facebook, but not all of them have heard of weblogs, even though a Facebook network incorporates pretty much everything that weblogs are good at. Facebook users are encouraged to link to each other, rather than outside resources. The gated community strengthens the group, which keeps the value of the user content within the Facebook network, which is in some ways the opposite of what a blogger is doing by giving that value away to the internet at large, but the principle is the same.

From the Google Blog, a preview of Google's mashup of Wikipedia and About.com:

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

movabletype.org

As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose.

This is a good thing. MT had previously had a policy that you could make changes to the code but you couldn't redistribute those changes. MT has an architecture that supports plugins (optional add-ons that change the way MT works, but without messing under the hood).  Several times MT tech support people have recommended particular plugins to me, and several times free third-party plugins that were very popular were integrated into subsequent versions of MT.

I paid a reasonable fee (a couple hundred bucks) to license MT3 for blogs.setonhill.edu, and the past few years I've paid another reasonable fee for technical support that has saved me hours and hours of frustration.

News.com.au

Det-Sgt Jeff Maher of the homicide squad confirmed that a Google Earth satellite mapping van had been filming the area for up to a week.

He said the images captured by satellite could hold some clues to the gruesome murder.

"They (Google Earth) have had a van in the area for the last week," Det-Sgt Maher said. "We don't know what they've got yet. It's an avenue of inquiry at the moment." Police learnt of the Google Earth link during a door-knock of the area.

But wait a minute... the Google van takes pictures at street level. If it's the street-level pictures they're interested in, then what do "the images captured by satellite " have to do with the case? The quote from the police officer refers specifically to the van, so I'm guessing the reporter made a hasty assumption here.

I remember reading an interview with some who said he never bothers to read a news article that has "may" in the headline. Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

Yahoo | Reuters

"w00t," an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

Karissa sent me this story from Macworld:

Eight consumer and public-interest groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, saying mobile phone providers should not be able to block text messages from political groups and advertisers.

[...]

If the FCC grants the petition, it would open up mobile phone networks to millions of pieces of text spam, Nelson added. Verizon Wireless currently blocks between 100 million and 200 million unwanted text messages advertising pornography and other products, he said. Text messaging in the U.S. would quickly become "unusable" because of all the unblocked spam, Nelson said. "I don't think [the consumer groups] understand what would happen if they're successful," he said. "If the folks who filed with the FCC get their way, it'd be a free-for-all."

Footage from a NASA camera, via CBS:

Doris Lessing doesn't like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica:

Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn't believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. "And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc." It is now common, she says, for "young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers."

Because, of course, to know about computers is to know nothing of value.

I just read a paper from a college senior who, when writing a paper on a canonically validated text, initially cited more sources from a DVD documentary than from scholarly books and articles, so I, too, lament the decline of literacy. Yet I'm not exactly comfortable with Lessing's take on the value of a liberal-arts education, or her assessment of the causes of the decay of literacy. Like the printing press, blogging puts the power of literacy in the hands of the populace. If the unwashed masses have the tools in their hands, they're going to use them to produce texts about what matters to them, not what matters to the ones who were already in power before the tools escaped into the wild.

It is rather amazing that educated people who don't have time to read a book have the time to make Lego stop-motion animated versions of viral dance videos, but I'd much rather that people create and share their own works -- which means the processing of a few diamonds along with a lot of roughage -- than limit themselves to silently swallowing what big-business wants them to consume.

After watching the children until about 2pm today, I rousted my wife from the bedroom so she could give them a late lunch. While I was fiddling with my blogging templates and sort of puttering around until it was time to go to campus (I'm volunteering to serve dinner to the students during the big "Christmas on the Hill" dinner party), I heard an unusual amount of screaming and thumping upstairs.  Then the screams turned to laughter -- well, my son was laughing, and my wife was trying not to. 

A few minutes later, my five-year-old daughter had stuffed a few toys in a plastic suitcase, and was standing at the front door in her pink coat and Hello Kitty boots, ready to run away.

I asked her where she wanted to go, suggesting that perhaps I could give her a ride.

Her eyes got wide. "You mean you want me to go?"

"Of course I don't want you to go, but you won't get very far on foot, so maybe I could drive you. Were you thinking the train station or the airport?"

While my daughter processed that, my wife explained what had happened.  Both children were misbehaving during lunch, so much so that Mommy had to call Santa. In order to make sure the elves knew who had been naughty, my wife said she would spell their names over the phone.  She spelled Carolyn's name to howls of protest; then, before she got to Peter's name, the phone started beeping to signal the line was dead.

Peter started dancing around the kitchen, saying that God saved him from punishment.

My daughter, whose sense of justice is well-developed enough to know that she and her brother were both being equally naughty, was offended.

I managed to coax her out of her coat and boots by telling her that Peter would write a letter to Santa explaining what happened and asking that he receive the same punishment as Carolyn.  Perhaps if Carolyn also wrote a letter that showed how much she appreciated Peter's selfless act, maybe Mommy and Daddy would be able to make it all work out.

ZDNet explores the public reaction to Amazon's new e-book reader.

I don't usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I'd come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit the peak of popularity and the only way for it to go was down.

But then I realized that the Kindle had a cult.

From a speculative essay by Richard M. Stallman:

In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next time his computer was networked, Central Licensing would find out. He, as computer owner, would receive the harshest punishment--for not taking pains to prevent the crime.

Heh. Lightweight. That's funny. Via Information Week.

Zuckerberg said that when Facebook considered Beacon it hoped to let people share information across sites with their friends. He said it had to be clear and easy to control, while also being "lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the Web."

Macworld has new info on the scope of the information Beacon gathers on Facebook users:

While users' activities on the Web are tracked in various ways for different purposes, most commonly with tracking cookies in banner ads, the Beacon implementation is one Berteau has never come across before in terms of the details of users' actions that it's able to capture and send back.

These latest findings build on Berteau's report on Friday that Beacon stealthily tracked the activities of users on affiliate Beacon sites even if they were logged off from Facebook and had previously declined having their activities reported back to their Facebook friends.

Over the weekend, Facebook confirmed that Berteau's report on Friday was accurate, but said that it deletes the data it gets under these circumstances.

Still, Friday's findings deepened the privacy concerns surrounding Beacon since its introduction several weeks ago. And the admission Monday added to the concerns, since it contradicted what had, until then, been the official company line about this issue.

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

The NY Times reports that Six Apart is selling LiveJournal.

The owner of LiveJournal, a blogging and social-networking site, agreed yesterday to sell the company to SUP, a Russian online media company, in the latest example of deal-making in the social-networking sector.

I must have missed this video when I was sick earlier this semester... Michael Wesch at Kansas State University:

... the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.

While my daughter was (supposed to be) napping this afternoon, I downloaded Crystal Space, an open-source tool for creating 3D games. I made lightening-fast progress in the first couple of hours, but after that I was quickly lost. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic.

Over the last year or so, I have experimented with Half-Life 2 modding (making custom levels for a commercial first-person shooter game) and modeling with Blender 3D (a heavy-duty, free design tool).  I like the simplicity of Hammer, which is the tool that makes Half-Life 2 levels.  But getting Half-Life 2 to work on the school's computers was hell; I couldn't expect my students (mostly English majors) to go through all that effort to get Hammer to work on their own computers, which means that the students can only work on Hammer when they are in the computer lab.  (The next time I teach that course, I'm going to add a mandatory extra lab hour, so that I won't have to cut so deeply into class time in order to give students access to the tools they need for their assignments.  Yes, the students can come to the lab outside of class time, but that lab isn't open 24 hours, and sometimes other classes have booked it.)