Technology: July 2008 Archive Page

The headline writer was having an off day, but the content -- a thoughtful examination of the trolling subculture -- is excellent. NYT Magazine.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling -- for provoking strangers online -- have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

It was intersting to see online political discourse (with a case study on the Kerry-Edwards attempt to build a blog presence in 2004) and a history of the internet filtered through a folklorist's lens. I'm saving this in case I need ever need to update some of the insights found in the older, classic, historical studies of cyberculture (such as Buckles's dissertation on Adventure, or Levy's Hackers, or Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine).

While mass-mediated communication technologies have empowered the institutional, participatory media offer powerful new channels through which the vernacular can express its alterity. However, alternate voices do not emerge from these technologies untouched by their means of production. Instead, these communications are amalgamations of institutional and vernacular expression. In this situation, any human expressive behavior that deploys communication technologies suggests a necessary complicity. Insofar as individuals hope to participate in today's electronically mediated communities, they must deploy the communication technologies that have made those communities possible. In so doing, they participate in creating a telectronic world where mass culture may dominate, but an increasing prevalence of participatory media extends into growing webs of network-based folk culture. -- Robert Glenn Howard, Journal of American Folklore 121(480): 192-218 (PDF)

A good feature from the New York Times:

Young people "aren't as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn't go in a line," said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. "That's a good thing because the world doesn't go in a line, and the world isn't organized into separate compartments or chapters."

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

[..]

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted "Dieing Isn't Always Bad," about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. "No one's ever said you should read more books to get into college," she said. -- Motoko Rich

Where to begin? Where to end? Lots of food for thought.

Interesting observations on the internet's response to the death of Randy ("The Last Lecture") Pausch.

You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet. --Alexis Madrigal

If you want to label me retrofuturistic so I can fit into your compartmentalized worldview, that's fine. But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle. While many of my kind doubt there'll be a complete societal collapse in the future, a near-cataclysm is likely. In this scenario, I will be able to repair a generator, suture the wounded, and even train carrier pigeons. I'm learning valuable skills. --Marco Kay

When you die, would you rather be remembered as a technology hack who annoyed millions and forced them to waste time by weeding through torrents of junk e-mail, or a brilliant teacher who inspired millions to treasure every moment of the time they have left?

According to police, Edward Davidson, the "spam king" whose wife helped him break out of a minimum security prison, has killed himself, his wife, and a child yesterday. He was famous for getting rich off of the stupid people who respond to unsolicited bulk e-mail advertisements.

According to various news reports, Randy Pausch, whose "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University became a YouTube sensation, has run out of time in his battle with pancreatic cancer today. He was famous for giving the rest of us a model for how to face our final days.

Steampunk is one of my guilty pleasures... I think of it more of an asthetic than a literary movement, and I own neither a pair of aviator goggles nor a wind-up pocketwatch. Nevertheless, it happens that at this moment in another window I'm rendering a 3D view of an brass-and-glass spaceship ethership that features in the steampunk bedtime stories I've been telling my kids ever since I saw the last name "Gearhart" in a student roster.  Randy Nakamura sounds a little mystified by the popularity of the steampunk style, though he does a fair job exposing its sillier excesses.

[A]s Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, "In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it." Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin's theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: "Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended." The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

Does anybody today say -- without shame -- that their hobby is watching TV? Or listening to the radio? These media are so deeply entrenched in our society that we barely think of them. According to Ian Bogost, a time will come when the concept of "the gamer" is obsolete. Not because games will be obsolete, but because they will become so mainstream that the category will no longer be useful.

Videogames suffer under the weight of many misconceptions. Some of these are all too familiar: questions about whether games promote violent action or whether they make us fat through inactivity.

One that some people have tried to overturn is the idea that games are only for entertainment. So-called "serious games" claim to offer an alternative: games that can be used for serious purposes like education, healthcare, or corporate training.

But games, like photography, like writing, like any medium, shouldn't be shoehorned into one of two kinds of uses alone. Neither entertainment nor seriousness nor the two together should be a satisfactory account  for what videogames are capable of. After all, we don't distinguish between serious and entertainment books, or music, or photography, or film. Rather, we know intuitively that writing, sound, images, and moving images can all be put to many different uses.

How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero -- and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game? --Wired

Fascinating stuff... according to CNN, the story is, in order to secure the release of 15 hostages, the Colombian military set up a fake website that borrowed heavily from a real organization's identity.

The organization's logo -- a stylized red bird on a white background in the centermost of three concentric circles, with blue leaves on white in the middle circle and the organization's name on a blue background in the outermost circle -- is featured prominently throughout the site.

That same logo was pasted on the side of a helicopter used on the rescue mission that brought former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers back from the jungle, according to unpublished video shown to CNN by a military source who had been looking to sell the material.

The emblems can't be seen in the heavily edited video released by the Colombian Defense Ministry. CNN declined to purchase the unpublished material. 

But Mision Humanitaria Internacional doesn't exist. Although the site said the group was registered with the Spanish Interior Ministry and the regional Department of Justice, Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman Alvaro Pena said the organization was not registered with the ministry and was not in its records.

http://misionhi.org is turning up 404 now, but there are a few pages left in the Google cache.

ZDNet:

Researchers at software vendor CA have discovered that social networking site Facebook is able to track the buying habits of its users on affiliated third-party sites even when they are logged out of their account or have opted out of its controversial "Beacon" tracking service.

On a listserv of which I'm a member, Jerome McDonough points out that Tennis for Two is an analog game, so not only does it not require a computer, the medium itself -- an oscilloscope -- is an analog, so the information being represented on the screen isn't digital at all.  An even earlier game, and the first game to use digital graphics, is Noughts and Crosses (1952).

This page lists the source code for the world[']s first computer game and incidentally the world[']s first computer based version of noughts and crosses (tic tac toe).

This is the original source code written by A.S. Douglas that was loaded from a punched paper tape and run on the EDSAC machine. It is written in an assembler. even for those of us who are unfamiliar with the EDSAC instruction set and it's assembly language some parts of the code look reasonably comprehensible. The most impressive feature is it's length - this very short piece of code manages a good game of noughts and crosses.

Keen to find out more? Then download the EDSAC simulator and the documentation from www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/ You can then follow this algorithm or try your hand at programming the worlds first programmable computer.

Threat Level has a story on the McCain campaign's tracking of the Obama website. Nothing really new about the practice, and nothing stunning about the revelation that the Obama camp sometimes updates its website (gasp!), but what's unusual is that instead of independent pundits doing this in their pajamas from their living rooms, this is now a tool being employed by the campaign itself.

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.

John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.

Modern recreation of the 1958 video game "Tennis for Two" (Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories)

If the following line doesn't get you reading The Steampunk Home, nothing will:

I can think of two steampunk references to octopodes.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I came across this brief article in Pocket Gamer. I don't have an iPhone, so I can't check out this version of the game.  The 1977 date for the Don Woods expansion is correct, but ("[s]ources that incorrectly date Crowther's original to 1972 or 1974... are sourced thinly if at all. The new evidence establishes that Crowther wrote the game during the 1975-76 academic year and probably abandoned it in early 1976." --DHQ )

Forget motion-sensing and touchscreen malarkey. What you want from a modern-day iPhone game is a proper text adventure, where you get to type GO NORTH, HIT TROLL WITH AXE, and LKHJ VSDJD.

(Okay, we're still having the odd problem with the iPhone's pop-up keyboard).

Anyway, iPhone has its first text adventure, and it's actually the first text adventure ever made.

It's listed as Advent on the App Store, but the screenshot calls it Adventure, and the product text points out that it's also known as Colossal Cave Adventure or just Colossal Cave. Hope that's clear.

From the New York Times blog, The Lede:

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse)

Latest update at 3 p.m. Eastern Agence France-Presse has retracted the image as "apparently digitally altered." More developments at the bottom of the post.

As news spread across the world of Iran's provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

From Shelly Weaver (of Seton Hill's entrepreneurial center), a brief introductory article.

On the subject of social networking, what you don't know can hurt you. These networks create opportunities for businesses that would not previously have been conceivable. One avenue to approach is to follow blogs and 'doers' in your industry as well as that of other industries to keep up with the fast-paced environment --E-Magnify

I remember when I was deeply involved in working on my dissertation, I would have dreams in which I was reading an academic article, and I grew frustrated because the text on the page would keep changing -- apparently my dreaming mind didn't have a buffer big enough to store that much text all at once, but I was able to note that it kept changing.  But this article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes how a teenager managed to send text messages while sleeping:

Castillo's multimedia message to her boyfriend on her Pantech C300 phone involved 11 different steps, not including the typing. First, she had to select "Menu," then "Messaging," type "New," then select "Multimedia message," then punch the "Add" button and the "add text," before entering her garbled message. Afterward, she had to press "OK" twice, scroll to "contacts," find the e-mail address on that contact, select it, and press "Send."

"Not an easy process but once you get used to it, it becomes very easy," Castillo said.

Google's version of Second Life, as explained for the benefit of an audience that isn't expected to know anything about virtual worlds (NYT).

Google unveiled the new product in a post on its official blog -- its characteristically understated way of introducing new features to the world. It can be reached at www.lively.com but is officially part of Google Labs, an area of the company's site where it showcases projects that remain in the beta, or experimental, phase.

Lively and similar products from other companies have the potential to change the way people interact over the Web. Online chat rooms are two-dimensional -- they include text, and sometimes voice and video.

Lively tries to make that conversation three-dimensional, more interactive and more fun. As if they were playing a game, users choose from a selection of unrealistically handsome or Disneyesque avatars. They can also create their own rooms, which can be posted to a blog or social network profile as easily as a YouTube video.

Up to 20 people can occupy a room and chat with one another. (Text appears as cartoon-style bubbles atop the avatars.) Users can design their own virtual environments, hanging on the walls videos from YouTube and photos from Picasa, Google's photo service, as if they were pieces of art.

Rosemary sends me this link from PhillyBurbs.com:

About 600 students are enrolled at Pennsylvania Learners Online, a cyber charter school where online gym is a requirement, and 12 others are enrolled in a program called e-Cademy to make up a failed credit.

Rich Campsie, who teaches physical education at e-Cademy and at Pennsylvania Learners Online, said he works with students one-on-one through an online interface to teach them about concepts ranging from lifelong physical activities and exercise to team mascots and game strategies.

They report back to Campsie via worksheets and written reports. He acknowledges there is no way to know for sure if a student is completing the physical requirements of the course.

This Wired article also mentions the Canadian Roberts variation. When I was living in Canada, I remember being annoyed at having to buy special screwdrivers for furniture that I bought there.  I actually came across a set of Roberts power tool heads that someone had thrown into a gutter. True story. 

The Phillips screw and screwdriver were patented this day in 1936.
Courtesy U.S Patent and Trademark Office

1936: Henry F. Phillips receives patents for a new kind of screw and the new screwdriver needed to make it work. It changes the worlds of mass production and machine repair, not to mention your home toolbox. (Randy Alfred, Wired)

Other, screw-related blog entries:

• Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3
• What is Uni-Screw? - Jerz's Literacy Weblog
• The standardization of screws

Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. (Active and Passive Verbs)

I'm slowly rolling out a new template for my online handouts.

For years, I've been using Dreamweaver to manage my academic website, but I don't have a copy of the program on my laptop, so I can only update my handouts when I'm in the office. Plus, now that MovableType is open source, I'd like to use it.

I love the idea of letting visitors post comments to my handouts, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to keep all the URLs. the same.  MT automatically removes dashes and underscores when it creates URLs, and all my index files are index.html (rather than .htm). I'm sure there's a way to use .htaccess to solve the problem with redirects, but I ran into a brick wall.

This list from Mark Potts (of "Recovering Journalist) is just the thing I needed in order to motivate me to ask my students to think of the online version of the paper as the primary product, and the print version a useful offshoot. (At present, the reverse is true.)

What would you do if you ran a newspaper?

Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:

1. Make the Web the primary product

Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. Breaking news, enterprise and feature stories should be put on the Web as soon as they're ready. Period. The printed paper should be a snapshot of what's online at 11 pm, and that's about it. Publishing on the Web should drive priorities, not publishing in print. And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.

(Full story)

It's been several years since I attempted a redesign of my curricular website, which holds trusty old handouts, some of which I tweak on a regular basis, and some of which I haven't touched in years. I've been thinking a lot about navigation and layout, especially now that most people's computer monitors have fairly high resolution, and the growing number of widescreen monitors is opening up some space on the right-hand side of my web pages, which I hadn't previously been using.  I've already put a "recent related entries" feature on the individual blog entry pages (the system selects those automatically based on category... it's not perfect, becuase it doesn't weight more heavily an entry that shares three cateogries as more similar to an entry that just shares one category with the current entry, but it's better than nouthing). 

I was reading a Washington Times article on the press coverage of Obama's doings, when I noticed this widget.

As one would guess from the triangle over on the right, when you click on the headline, a box opens up.  But if you see an open box, and you want to visit the article on the other side of the link, if you do what comes naturally -- clicking the title -- what happens is the window closes up. You have to click it again to open it, then click on the tiny word "view >".  (I don't want to "view" it... I want to "read" it! But that's beside the point.)

To my mind, the collapsing menu thing is done better at the Evening Standard, where the panels will glide open when you hover the mouse pointer over the title. (Horrors! I just checked, and the mouse-over menu at the Evening Standard doesn't appear to be working anymore.)