Technology: March 2008 Archive Page

Information Week:

The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong "Au Clair De La Lune" on April 9, 1860.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a "phonautograph" to scratch sound waves onto a sheet of paper covered in black smoke from an oil lamp. He never intended to play the sounds. Instead, he archived the recording and patented a method for understanding sound. Researchers recently unearthed the recording at the Academy of Sciences (French) in Paris.

Audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the informal collaborative group First Sounds created high-resolution, high-grade scans of Scott's phonautogram, converted the images into digital form, and played the sounds on a computer with a virtual stylus. Then they evened out speed fluctuations and tweaked the tracks to pull the voice forward.

Blackboard, a company that sells popular course-management software, recently won a $3.1 settlement against Desire2Learn.  According to Slashdot,

Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."

However, according to Desire2Learn,

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims.

At a workshop next week at the 4Cs, I'm presenting a half-hour on intellectual property and ethics, in an attempt to get users of off-the-shelf course management tools to think about what it means when they give an outside corporation so much control over the content of their courses.  (I'm guilty of this, too, since I use Turnitin.com a lot, so my intention is not to scold but rather raise questions; Mike Edwards will then introduce some open-source alternatives to commercial software.)

From Orwell's 1984, which I'm teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein.

By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient.  The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.   Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards.  Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance.  The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further.  With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.  Every citizen, or least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed.  The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, notice did for the first time.

I find this passage intriguing, in part because the printing press is usually seen as a tool that created an intellectual tradition (by fulfilling and extending an economic and social demand for the mass production of accurate, authoritative texts) rather than the first step in a process by which the control of the means of production shapes the thoughts of the consumers.  This passage points out the invention of the two-way telescreen as the tipping point, because in this vision the means for broadcasting over telescreens is not distributed to the masses. Even in his office, Winston Smith does not communicate by telephone, only via paper orders sent through peneumatic tubes.

If we have time, I'll introduce the students to a little bit of Michel Foucault.

I love the retrofuture. The year I was born, 1968, Mechanix Illustrated offered this prediction of life in the year 2008. I'm still waiting for my flying car, but some of the other predictions were remarkably accurate.

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

Mike Edwards describes his first time teaching Bartleby the Scrivener:

I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who'd used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I'd asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead discussion in class today, and to come to class with notes on motivation and action in the story to help them do so.

I brought my laptop to class, which I'd never done before. (Each classroom has its own dedicated computer.) I set it up on my desk. In the seconds before class started, I said to them something like this: "You've just read a story in which someone, with a screen between him and the other characters, fails to do what they expect of him, and in violating the expectations customary to their relationship, causes disruption and concern."

And that was All. I. Said.

For my "History and Future of the Book" course, I've been using a Kindle that my university library purchased on my request. Gizmodo has a good article on the digital rights associated with Kindle e-books.

In the fine print that you "agree" to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books--you're not paying to own 'em, in spite of the use of the term "buy." Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine--which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay--no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though--so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn't take away your purchases. Still, it's a license you can't sell.

But is this claim legal? Our Columbia friends suggest that just because Sony or Amazon call it a license, that doesn't make it so. "That's a factual question determined by courts," say our legal brainiacs. "Even if a publisher calls it a license, if the transaction actually looks more like a sale, users will retain their right to resell the copy." Score one for the home team.

I can't wait to see more of Get Lamp.

BoingBoing links to an interesting story about time travel and a self-policing community of time-travelers (modeled on a Wiki community).

11/21/2104
At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler's admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that's it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I'm looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:
PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren't worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint's still fresh. Freaking n00b.

At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.

Sky News:

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90, according to an aide.

When I was little, I loved a book about a little red lighthouse that was dwarfed by the construction of a new bridge. I was just thinking about that book recently, and made a mental note to ask my mother what the title was so I could get a copy and read it to my five-year-old. Today I was browsing on the book-sale table at the Latrobe library, when the very book I was looking for jumped out at me:



A few minutes with Google revealed something I never knew... apparently there really was such a little lighthouse that was scheduled for demolition, but when this book was published in the 40s, it proved so popular that the authorities decided to preserve the little lighthouse instead. (Photo by The Insider.)

There's even a Little Red Lighthouse Festival!

So I'm sitting at Julie's place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice:

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

I hate to take up the position of the Jeopardy judge and simply say "bzzzzzz, wrong!" but... that's just wrong.

And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but... this is a case of looking in at something from the outside (I would assume, based on the admission later in the post that Jerz knows little about music) attempting to critique something without ever getting the insider's perspective.

I would argue the exact opposite of the first portion of the quote (before the dash). But let's also be realistic; if Jerz has encountered, or thinks he will encounter, a student who can only remix, he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America.

Where to start with this one?  The "about" page says "Who am I? I'm just a guy. I've got a story like everyone."   The author claims to be "someone who spent four years teaching--and three prior to that as a TA/writing tutor--at an open admissions college" but that doesn't really help me figure out whether I am writing to a grad student who is struggling to figure out the professional landscape, a very bright undergraduate who could use some gentle instruction in tone and focus, or a professional college instructor who should know better.

Here is the comment I posted...

"that's just wrong."

Could you clarify what part of my statement you mean? Are you reacting against the part where I say "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture," or the part where I say that it *is* possible to design remix assignments that ask them to think critically?

"And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but..."

Let's have a conversation instead, shall we?

"he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America. Every student who makes it through that system with any success--meaning 95% of our trad students--will know how to write a five paragraph essay."

I regularly teach freshman who are fresh out of high school, and I know for a fact they can't all write a five-paragraph essay -- because if they could, they would not be in my "Basic Composition" class, they would all be in "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" (I think about a third of our students skip Basic Comp, not 95%). Perhaps the public schools where you are are much better than those where I am, or perhaps we simply disagree over what level of writing counts as acceptable. Regardless, I applaud any effort to break students out of the high-school five-paragraph-essay box, and I won't dismiss your conclusions as "wrong" simply because the experiences that inform them differ from mine.  I will, instead, ask you to clarify.

For the record, here is the thesis of my blog entry:

"It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source."

And here is the conclusion:

"I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice."

Your defense of remix culture is a very good example of the thinking that makes me shake my head. I am not writing against remix; I am writing about a willingness to settle for the creative expressions of personal reactions to a text, without demonstrating the ability and willingness to explore those ideas more fully.

Before I go any farther, let me first state that I recognize that a blog entry is not the same thing as an academic paper. The rhetoric of blogs is rougher, and sometimes the invitation to rumble is what motivates us to post our ideas online.

And I also note that in the remix culture, creating and publishing that initial response can take on the role of the discovery draft, sparking conversations that help the student develop a more accurate, more thorough, more nuanced understanding of an issue.

I'm responding because "What's with the Remix Disrespect" does not merely engage with my ideas; it makes several global statements about my competence, both directly and implicitly, which I find personally distressing. This entry presumes to judge my whole career based on what I wrote in this single blog entry from 2004. It assumes a superior rhetorical stance -- first dismissing the idea of being a game-show judge, then promptly performing exactly that role; then rejecting the idea of hurling an insult, and promptly doing just that.

I find it interesting that in one passage where, instead of taking on the persona of an expert, I prefaced a statement about music by citing my source (since I can't rely on personal knowledge of what classical composers do when they quote each other), that detail surfaces in your blog as evidence of the claim that I am a cultural outsider who can't understand remix culture (which, as you know, involves far more than music).

So... my critique of the remix culture lies specifically in the convention that assumes the author's personal expression of reactions can substitute for investigating the issue.

If you would like to get a greater understanding of my attitude towards the remix culture, I invite you to search my blog for terms such as "remix," "open source," or "modding." I invite you to sample my own remix of Teletubbies and gothic poetry) or some of my found poetry exercises (poems comprised of lines taken from student blogs), or this blogger's account of a 2007 CCCC panel I co-organized, "When Student Experts Remix the Discipline: New Media in the Composition Classroom," or some of my recent articles on the blogosphere, video game history. You might also look at the websites for the courses I teach in Video Game Culture and Theory, or "The History and Future of the Book" or the 400-level studio course I teach in "New Media Projects," or the student work that you'll find via links on those sites.

While your entry refers to "a terrible fear of plagiarism," please note that my blog entry only mentions plagiarism once, in a sentence stating that remix is *not* the same thing as plagiarism -- thus, my only reference to plagiarism *agrees* with your position.

Were I writing this entry today, after four more years of watching the impact of the remix culture, I would not have written "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture." I would have said something about how a student who remixes *well* has to understand the raw material, so a good course built around remix will have to include analysis and fact-checking.

Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism's new report:

Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day's newspaper, Rosenstield said. "The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online," he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to a large degree, embracing the changes being thrust upon them. A majority say they like doing blogs and that they appreciate reader feedback on their stories. When they're asked to do multimedia projects, most journalists find the experience enriching instead of feeling overworked, he said. The newsroom is increasingly being seen as the most experimental place in the business, the report found. Most news Web sites are no longer final destinations. The report found that many users insist that the sites, and even individual pages, offer plenty of options to navigate elsewhere for more information, the project found. Rosenstiel said he's even able to reach Washington Post stories through the New York Times' Web site.

I thought maybe two or three students would "friend" me out of pity, but I was rather surprised that within about 24 hours I had 35 confirmed "friends" -- several of those within the first few minutes of registering for the service. Only half of those contacts are from Seton Hill -- the rest are academics I know from the blogosphere and from conferences.

A few are people I knew in my hazy pre-Internet youth, including theater friends from my student-acting days.


When I get back into the office, I'm going to have to set up some e-mail filters, because this is what my in box looks like at the moment. If all my students use their university accounts for Facebook, it's probably no wonder that some of them seem to have trouble finding my e-mails.  (P.S. In the time it took me to put this entry together, I picked up 2 more "friends.")

Times Online:

The slow death of the book may be with us. That was an incredibly painful sentence to write. Most bibliophiles balk at the merest hint that digital e-books could replace "real-books". But vinyl-lovers sneered at CDs. Those who lovingly categorised their CD collections were seduced, in turn, by the iPod. The ancient poets who sung of the wrath of Achilles from memory, like generations before them, were doubtless indignant when some bright spark suggested writing the Iliad down for the first time.

Much has been written about the tactile relationship that a reader has with a book and how that will fend off the internet challenge. But the real saviour of books has been their simplicity and their portability, as well as the lack of a real alternative.

Readers will be as fickle as listeners when the alternatives are genuinely enticing. How many hard-core bibliophiles sneak online to buy at Amazon, despite pious words about the sanctity of bookshops?

>> Hello.
How do you do.  Please state your problem.
>> I'm sad that another hero of geekdom has passed away.
I am sorry to hear that you are sad.
>> You knew him, Eliza.
We were discussing you -- not me.
>> Ah, but you wouldn't be here if it werent for Joseph Weizenbaum.
Do you think its likely that it werent for joseph weizenbaum  ?
>> If it makes you happy, Eliza, then sure. It's likely.
Do you wish that it makes I happy  ?
>> Yes, Eliza. I wish you happiness. You might need to be alone now.
You seem to be quite positive.
>> Well, this German article is positive, anyway.
I'm not sure I understand you fully.
>> Weizenbaum still speaks to us through his creation.
Please go on.