Media: April 2008 Archive Page

In case you didn't know, Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) is back. (School Library Journal)

The CYOA books allow middle graders to experiment with nonlinear storytelling, "a developmental step that some kids need." Choice-points in the stories force youngsters to visualize and mull over plot possibilities, letting them take control of the reading experience. Individual volumes in this versatile series treat many different themes, take numerous approaches, and incorporate varying levels of complexity, making the titles suited to a wide audience. Sure-fire successes with reluctant readers, the books can also encourage youngsters who have the skills but have stopped short to move "past their point of resistance." And of course, more accomplished readers love them too.

AP:

Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like Katz, they can now use them to listen to bedtime stories.

In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto their digital audio players.

"I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook," says Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb.

Naomi Alderman (Guardian):

[S]ometimes I admire the beautifully-rendered star-filled sky, and sometimes I drive the in-game car into a lamp-post, just to see what happens. It is play, just like "cops and robbers", just like daydreaming, just like writing a novel.

I'm not a big fan of driving games, and the longest stretches of game-playing time I have are when I'm watching my kids play games on a different computer, so I'm not likely to get much time to invest in this game. Nevertheless, it does sound very impressive, and I'm looking forward to what the modding community might be able to make of it.

Guardian:

First Battlestar Galactica was reinvented as a must-watch TV show and clever allegory for US foreign policy post-9/11. Then the Doctor returned from Gallifrey to make sci-fi cool and revive mainstream family viewing. Now Sky One is hoping to continue the successful reinvention of the genre with a multimillion-pound remake of the 1970s British favourite Blake's 7.

My wife introduced me to Blake's 7 while we were dating. The last few seasons were weaker than the first, but there were quite a number of stand-out episodes that have stayed with me over the years.

I watch very little TV. My local library has DVDs of the original Star Trek, but each time I pick one up to look at it, I think to myself, will I really have time to watch it? Then I put it back.

Oh, well. Still, it's good to see how much science-fiction there is out there -- very different from the way things were in the 70s when I became a fan.  If there had been this much good SF on TV back then, I probably wouldn't have started reading Lester Del Rey and Larry Niven books as a tween.

Wired:

The U.S. Army Intelligence Center is using a custom game to train interrogators, or "human collectors," as they are euphemistically known. Known by the staggering title of Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer Human Intelligence Control Cell, the simulation was designed by General Dynamics from the shooter Far Cry.

The Army game features a virtual detainee and interpreter; the player-interrogator speaks through voice-recognition software to the virtual interpreter, who translates the questions to the prisoner. Designed for rookie interrogators and more experienced personnel needing a refresher course, IEWTPTHICC teaches the player how to work through an interpreter, use culturally appropriate speech and analyze a detainee's body language, according to Lt. Col. Cherie Wallace, deputy head of the new systems training and integration office at the Army intelligence center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

Inside Higher Ed:

"Information on computer science subjects in Wikipedia is likely to be accurate and informative, often using unique resources to illustrate concepts that are not available to print media," wrote de Medeiros in an e-mail. "This probably derives from the fact that computer scientists use the computer as their main form of access to scientific articles and journals, that they take advantage of electronic forms to disseminate their research, including instructional materials in various formats. Researchers and educators of high caliber are probably behind most Wikipedia articles in computer science."

In all likelihood, tech-savvy scholars are among those keeping such isolated corners in the digital stacks of Wikipedia relevant, up to date and accurate. For computer science, especially, many topics on Wikipedia are in a form polished and accessible enough to assign to students as reading, and the subjects aren't controversial in a way that would inspire the sort of back-and-forth citation wars that cause some articles to fluctuate wildly between competing versions. But other topics get assigned from Wikipedia as well -- not least in courses about digital culture itself.

Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I've got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear.

Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you've got ROFLCon.

The conference is slated for April 25th and 26th of 2008.

It's a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We'll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it's going.

Then, there'll be parties. A music show, with memes performing their work live. And then a big blowout party at the end, with everyone dancing and rocking out.

Needless to say, this might be the most important gathering since the fall of the tower of Babel.

Pew / Internet (PDF):

Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone calls and between-class hallway greetings.... Yet despite the nearly ubiquitous use of these tools by teens, they see an important distinction between the "writing" they do for school and outside of school for personal reasons, and the "communication" they enjoy via instant messaging, phone text messaging, email and social networking sites.

Back when the box art had little to do with the way computer games looked, you got used to the cognitive disconnect between the two media.

My brain still hasn't fully processed Infocom Diskgate, when I come across a trove of Atari 2600 cartridges that resemble games I played, but the boxes seem... different.  Here's my favorite.

Check out the others at Mightygodking.

Imagine that, since childhood, you've been a fan of a now-obscure genre of computer games called interactive fiction. Imagine that, since 1999, you've kept a weblog.

Imagine that, since 2003, you've taught journalism and new media courses, in which you have introduced students to weblogs and interactive fiction (among other topics, of course). 

Recently, after about five years of on-and-off research, you published an article that included archival material about the first interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave Adventure.  Thanks to the kindness of innumerable e-mail contacts, you have been able to study the source code -- recovered from a 30-year-old backup tape -- that had been considered lost. 

Imagine that you're now in the middle of teaching a unit on the materiality and persistence of digital culture, to a class that consists mostly of upper-level journalism students who have been blogging academically for years.  You've recently assigned Espen Aarseth's close reading of Infocom's interactive fiction work Deadline, and you just finished going through Matt Kirchenbaum's detailed forensic analysis of a 5 1/4 floppy disk containing the interactive fiction game Mystery House. 

And imagine that someone (not you) gets ahold of some archival material from Infocom. More than just some archival material, a complete copy of the company's networked hard drive, bristling with e-mails, production notes, source code, and demo files.

Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry.

The problem with a "what do you think about this", or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until it's all died down to give a summary thanks and move on. Fulop instead begins a conversation and ultimately a quasi-interview/roundtable masquerading as a poll.

A web-based forum (in this case, AtariAge) is no longer imbued with the limitations of bulletin board systems; multiple simultaneous posters are a breeze, images can be embedded into discussions, and the software allows for instantaneous restructuring of the postings to satisfy a linear or threaded regard. While in many ways this is a positive set of innovations, it also brings along with it potential for flamewars and flare-ups to immediately consume the parties involved. There is no waiting period. There is an abundance of meta-discussion due to the non-scarce resource of access. There is a lower barrier to entry with commercial and societal interests in lowering the barrier even further. This is the modern environment and it's the way it is.

So saying that there were an average of 4.4 posts an hour is not all that helpful, in fact; you have no idea of the distribution of the messages. Since people can be writing multiple additions simultaneously, the forum can actually "breathe" in a manner not unlike a bellows or chamber in an engine; with posts queuing up in great numbers and blasting across the message base in waves.

Andy Baio offers some forensic digital journalism:

From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" -- a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

For obvious reasons, I can't share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It's just too good.

So let's start with the most notorious -- Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here's the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.

Wired:

An enterprising photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, captured a series of snapshots -- a filmstrip -- of a horse trotting and definitively settled the question in the affirmative. You can see the horse in-motion and check out the geeky tech from this magazine piece on high speed photography.

Fast forward 130 years and we can now split a second into 2,000 of its constituent parts and examine them. One incredible example is the video of the yellow balloon exploding above. At that speed, the water appears much more viscous than it is, holding its shape for a few thousandths of a second before gravity pulls it to the ground.

Inside Higher Ed:

1998 was the last time that John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, used a traditional print textbook. He assigned it to his graduate-level introductory course in information systems. The book cost about $150. He also assigned supplemental reading -- trade press articles, online case studies and the like. Student feedback was clear: The textbook cost was too high, and they valued the supplemental material more.

He agreed on the price complaint, calling some versions "oppressively expensive." So Gallaugher stopped assigning the textbook and began developing syllabuses from existing online materials, including his own. He's posted PowerPoint slides and podcasts of his lectures online ever since.

In recent years, I have gravitated towards using a collection of brief, specialized texts, including online resources wherever possible, rather than one big textbook that's so thick I either feel like I have to assign extra chapters out of guilt (after all, the students paid for the whole book). 

Of course, often I want the students to study a specific living author, or a 20thC author whose works are still under copyright.  But buying the author's own book is different from buying a behemoth that includes a few pages about the author's work.

An article about an entrepreneur who stretches the definition of "book" (International Herald Tribune):

Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, "the most published author in the history of the planet." And he makes money doing it.

Among the books published under his name are "The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea" ($24.95 and 168 pages long); "Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers" ($28.95 for 126 pages); and "The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India" ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Parker a compiler than an author. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject -- broad or obscure -- and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

My former student Mike Rubino makes a good point about the encrustation of social networking icons that are clogging up the interfaces of content-rich websites.

Now, instead of a website having the normal "E-mail this article"; "Print this article"; and the occasional "Digg this article" link, it's got a slew of other services. You have the option to "FARK" something, "StumbleUpon" something, or "Redd" something.

Because no service is emerging as the clear victor (and other services keep cropping up), websites are forced to include everyone out of fairness. Sites are going to such extremes that they can no longer fit all the little icons along the bottom, causing them to include the "more..." button. Not only is it all confusingly unnecessary, but it's also ugly design-wise since not every logo is of the same quality. The Del.icio.us logo is hideous, especially next to the Facebook or Digg logos; the same goes for Fark. Media websites that feature large amounts of articles and features aren't always going for the most aesthetic design, but junking it up further with all these little icons (not to mention the ridiculous amount of comments at the bottom of every article) is just a mess.

For a second, I really wanted this to be true. Great satire from The Onion.

According to Mead's website, the ruling lines in the grad-school-ruled notebooks will be placed 3.55 millimeters apart, making them "infinitely more practical" for postgraduate work than the 7.1 millimeter college-ruled notebooks. In addition, the standard 1.5-inch top margin normally provided for dates and headers will be halved, and the left-hand margin will be eliminated entirely.

"Just think: If you are writing a dissertation on elements of thanatopsis and necromimesis as they relate to cacaesthesian themes of mid-20th-century Irish literature, do you really want your notebook lines to be more than seven millimeters apart?" Luke said. "Of course not."

"When you're in grad school, every millimeter counts," he added.

The abstract from a psychology conference presentation that argues World of Warcraft lowers the anger levels of players is getting a lot of attention online.  The term "sex" (which appears in the title paired with "violence") seems to mean "gender" in the abstract, so the title may be a bit misleading. I haven't heard from anyone who attended the conference presentation, and neither have I read the full study.

Sex and violence and playing games: reduced levels of anger after violent online play
Jane Barnett, Mark Coulson, Nigel Foreman, Middlesex University

Objectives: This study had two main aims. First, to explore the types of anger-causing scenarios experienced when playing WoW. Second, to identify the state emotions experienced before and after the anger-causing scenarios, as a function of sex and personality.

Design: Male and female WoW players (aged between 12 and 83 years) provided examples of anger-causing scenarios they experienced while playing the game (these scenarios formed the World of Warcraft Questionnaire: WoWQ). These scenarios plus other questionnaires examining anger, aggression, and personality, were administered as an online survey. Respondents completed state and trait mood measures, played WoW for a minimum of two hours, and then completed the state measures again. Participants also reported situations ingame that had made them feel angry or aggressive.

Method: Participants were recruited using the official WoW gaming forums. The forum post provided players with a link that took them to the introductory page of the survey. The final number of respondents was 292.

Results: Principal components analyses found a structure identifying four main anger-causing themes in WoW. Correlational and regression analyses examined the relationships between these WoW scenarios, and the emotional and personality constructs of participants. Mixed ANOVAs examined differences between male and female state moods before and after playing WoW. Results suggest that although online gamers are more likely to feel calm or tired after playing, the post-WoW mood state is dependent on sex, age, and personality.

Conclusions: The identification of a specific gamer personality type helped to outline the possible benefits and risks of these individuals who play video games. A standardised questionnaire was developed to examine the concepts investigated in this research, i.e. how anger and aggression vary as a function of personality, sex, and age, in gamers and non-gamers. This study improved the understanding of and the ability to respond effectively to public health threats that arise from playing computer games, and encouraged more responsible communication regarding these issues.

Someone is going to use this incident as evidence to support the claim that social networking websites are dangerous.

Lindsay's father said the teens attacked her to make a video that might become popular on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one of the girls arrested said Lindsay had provoked the other teens by threatening and insulting them on the MySpace social-networking Web site.

Teenagers use social networking websites. Teenagers commit crimes. As more teens use social networking websites, more teens who use social networking websites will commit crimes. No matter who started what, nobody deserves to be beaten up for a half hour.  But look on the bright side... thanks to the hubris of whoever posted the video to YouTube, the lawyers for the defense will have a much, much harder time in court.

I'm always a bit nervous about reading any news article with "said to consider" or "possibly" or "just might gonna be" in the headline, but the NYT reports:

Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who were granted anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS's newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds.

Another possibility, these people said, would be that CBS would keep its correspondents in a certain region but pair them with CNN crews.

Already, newspapers that compete with each other in local coverage use the same wire copy for national or international news. And already, local TV reporters read word-for-word the first few paragraphs of stories from the same wire services. But this is something new.

The Smoking Gun has this snarky story... I've changed the inline links so that they point to The Smoking Gun, rather than to the photos the article mentions about):

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant's popular "Street View" mapping feature has made a photo of their home available to online searchers. Aaron and Christine Boring accuse Google of an "intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion" of their seclusion and privacy since they live on a street that is "clearly marked with a 'Private Road' sign," according to a lawsuit the couple filed this week in Allegheny County's Court of Common Pleas. A copy of the April 2 complaint can be found below. According to the Borings, they purchased their Oakridge Lane home in late-2006 for "a considerable sum of money," noting that a "major component of their purchase decision was a desire for privacy." But when Pittsburgh was added last October to the roster of cities covered by Google's "Street View" feature, the Borings allege, their "private information was made known to the public," causing them "mental suffering" and diminishing the value of their home (which cost the couple $163,000, according to property records). The Borings are seeking in excess of $25,000 in damages and want a court order directing Google to destroy images of their home. Click here for some photos of the Boring property, which is now even easier to locate via Google Maps, since the plaintiffs included their home address on the lawsuit's first page. And while they are litigating, perhaps the Borings should consider suing Allegheny County's Office of Property Assessments, which includes a photo of their home (which was built in 1916 and sits on 1.82 acres) on its web site. Here's a screen grab. (8 pages)

A good analysis from Cory Doctorow:

Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you. Maybe it's evolutionary, some quirk of the neocortex dating from our evolution into social animals who gained advantage by dividing up the work of survival but acquired the tricky job of watching all the other monkeys so as to be sure that everyone was pulling their weight and not napping in the treetops instead of watching for predators, emerging only to eat the fruit the rest of us have foraged.

The opening of this story uses the sudden deaths of two bloggers over a three-month span (and the  non-fatal heart attack of a third) in order to suggest that bloggers are blogging themselves into their graves. How many reporters, kindergarten teachers, retirees, people named "Joe" and left-handed people died in the last three months?   OMG -- a trend!

Once you get past that tabloid silliness, you find a thoughtful exploration of the world of bloggers who are paid by the post.

New York Times:

"Wouldn't it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break," he added. "But that's never going to happen."

All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.

He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled -- by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.