Media: September 2008 Archive Page

Via Crooked Timber and BoingBoing:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters' EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base. (Courthouse News)

So, putting this into context... if I, through the sweat of my own brow, manually enter hundreds of bibliographical citations into EndNote, the owners of EndNote are telling me that I can't use a third-party tool in order to convert that information (that I, myself, entered) into a different format.

Every door on every floor is closed, whether or not students are present. This seems so different from my days as a student, when you always left your door open if you were in, I suppose to signal your willingness to talk and to avoid homework if you could just find the smallest pretext to do so. It helped with circulation as well, also a crucial matter in our un-air conditioned rooms.

These days you could launch a flare and not harm a single student. The students who answer their doors invite us in kindly, and seem generally pleased with the attention. Some of them have maintenance complaints, which we address. All of them have television sets connected to cable (cable TV had not yet hit Southwestern in my era), and of course each student has a computer, and an Ipod, and usually video games. Each room seems so self-contained, so independent, and seemingly so isolated from any group activity. -- Todd Diacon, Inside Higher Ed

Pew Internet:

Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories.

Game playing is also social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.

Kotaku reports:

Is it finally game over for Florida lawyer and violent video game opponent Jack Thompson? Judgment has been entered in the case that started last year and came to a head when Judge Dava Tunis recommended permanent disbarment for the bombastic, showboating law man. The court has approved the report and has ordered that JT is officially disbarred as of 30 days from today.

During the Great Depression, Americans flocked to the movies to escape the harsh realities of their daily lives. As the stock market tumbled and loved ones went off to war, Americans disappeared into dark theaters, where Shirley Temple sang and tap danced her way into their heavy hearts.

Now, as the nation faces arguably the worst financial crisis since the Depression, video games may be playing the role movies once filled in hard economic times. (NPR)

Students in my "Media Projects" class are getting practice learning complex, new systems quickly. We've learned Blender 3D, we've started on Inform 7, and later we'll move to Flash. My sister (or possibly her husband, who sometimes uses her e-mail address) sent me a link to an editorial on what it's like to learn a new software system while you're also dealing with the daily deadlines that define the news business.  I hope that my New Media Journalism students will be well-prepared to excel in an environment where their ability to do their job depends so heavily on their ability to adapt to new tools.

Many of you can relate to the learning curve and butterflies that come with switching over to ever more complex and powerful work technology. All of that comes with a few added wrinkles in this business.

Because we create our products entirely anew seven days a week, we can't ease the transition by working ahead or catching up when things settle down. Every day brings a new race against the clock.

Someone at our place likened it to changing a tire on a car while it's hurtling down the highway. I like to think of it in terms of the movie "Speed": The bus doesn't blow up if you don't slow down.

But many of us have been through this drill before, nearly a decade ago when the system we're getting ready to junk was the next big thing. And while the new system we're going live on requires increasingly fine-tuned skills, the circumstances last time were more challenging. (Pat Howard, Erie Times-News)

The technical term is "deep packet inspection," a process by which universities can examine the contents of electronic files that pass back and forth on their networks to see if they contain copyrighted material like the latest M.I.A. single or an episode of Gossip Girl. It's the equivalent of requiring institutions to steam open and read every letter that passes through the campus mail. It's also expensive, slows down the entire network, and won't actually work, because the small number of students who are responsible for the most egregious piracy also tend to be the students with the technical know-how needed to stay three steps ahead of whatever new filtering mechanisms the university might devise.

The entertainment industry insists that it doesn't necessarily want to go this way, but that's obviously a lie. Earlier this year, it supported legislation in Illinois and Tennessee that would have required colleges to implement "technology-based deterrents" to piracy if they received more than a certain number of infringement notices. Around the same time, colleges across the country began seeing a 20-fold increase in the number of infringement notices they received.. When colleges protested the new burden, the RIAA said their past voluntary cooperation meant they were legally obligated to comply in the future. (Inside Higher Ed)

CMJ_Ewoks.mp3 (2min 10sec, 2.2Mb)

The audio is a little over 2 minutes long. Listen to my daughter's final tearful, generous, heart-felt wish for George Lucas, and then take a look at the chronology below.

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985)
Howard the Duck (1986)

We don't have cable TV in my household.

Rather than pay the cable bill every month, we buy a few DVDs when they hit the bargain bins, or we just check them out of the library. My wife also makes regular trips to Blockbuster. I'm not a TV-free purist. I've even browsed through websites giving plot summaries of Lost and the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'd probably give Code Monkey a shot and check out how The Simpsons are holding up (now that it's been about five years since I've seen a new episode). 

My kids don't watch Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel, but they did go through their Barney phase, their Wiggles phase, and we've bought every one of the VeggieTales shows (except for a few compilation sing-alongs).

Last year, a grocery store cashier made a friendly reference to SpongeBob Squarepants, and when my son made it clear he didn't know the character, the cashier gave him a look of genuine pity. (Since then he's seen an episode or two on the TV in a play area in a Burger King, and I agree they're better than lots of the stuff I watched when I was a kid, in the era of NBC/ABC/CBS, just because I was too lazy to get up and change the channel.)

While strapped down in the car during long rides, my kids are likely to have conversations like this:

Peter: You're a Union artilleryman. Your officer tells you to go into a forest and hunt for rebels.
Carolyn: I've got a musket.
Peter: The forest is dark.
Carolyn: I pull a flashlight from my pack.
Peter: Flashlights haven't been invented yet.
Carolyn: I pull a candle from my pack.
Peter: You need a match.
Carolyn: I have one in my pocket. I light it.
Peter: It went out.
Carolyn: I light another one.

This will go on for hours, with Peter making sound effects, and Carolyn sometimes trying to insert comedy -- her character will faint, or have to go to the bathroom at times that are inconvenient to the plot, or find a group of lost babies. 

I feel rather pleased that my children are likely to run around the house pretending to be civil war soldiers, or Doctor Who (from the 1970s Tom Baker era), or even -- and this gives me a real thrill -- re-living the "Captain Gearhart and the Magnificent Blimpship" bedtime stories I've been telling them for several months. (My six-year-old daughter loves adventure and romance, and my ten-year-old son loves technology... no genre holds their combined attention quite like steampunk.)

This is a form of interaction that they've developed on their own.  Even when they aren't buckled in on a car ride, they will often narrate their actions, possibly because when they were little and I would make adventures for them with their toys, I always had the characters discussing their motivations, so that the play unfolded with words as much as actions.

When I say that I tell them bedtime stories, it's really more like I will briefly set up a scenario, for example, Count Catastrophe lures Smart Carolyn from the Moon into his lair and promises to give her a clockwork doll (that has a clockwork teddy bear in its backpack), if only Smart Carolyn will agree to aid the count in his dastardly plot to win control of the moon.

Then, once the "plot time" is over, the "interactive time" begins, and the kids role-play within the story for a while, occasionally vetoing their suggestion ("No, Moonbot does not have rockets that pop out of his legs. Try something else."), and trying to end with a cliffhanger that makes them wake up wanting to talk to each other about what's going to happen next.

Several times, I've had my daughter weeping because the characters seem to be in so much trouble.  When I have a particularly good night of story-telling, I have to write down the key points so I don't get them mixed up.

Truth be told, I can't remember the last time I had a spare moment and chose to put on a DVD for myself. My wife buys me movies for my birthday and Christmas, but they stack up faster than I watch them.  I still haven't watched the special edition of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that she gave me a year ago, or the bargain VHS of Star Trek: Insurrection that we picked up in the grocery store probably six years ago.  (I just checked Wikipedia... that movie came out ten years ago!)

When I want to kill time, I'd rather browse Wikipedia or YouTube, or (gasp!) try some classic literature. This summer I returned to The War of the Worlds and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (both of which I head read as a teenager), and just yesterday I finished Moby Dick for the first time.

TV is just not my preferred medium. Every time I read a story about the declining viewership for broadcast TV, I feel a bit of schadenfreude. 

So I found the recent Wired article on the survival of the TV business to be enlightening.

Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has.

Take a closer look at that pie:

• Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel.
• Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind.
• Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom's list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central.
• Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel.
• Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV).

So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches--including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven't escaped the compound.

In many ways, things have never been better for book readers. Amazon puts reviews at your fingertips, we have easy access to out-of-print titles through eBay and efficient inter-library loan services, and tons of out-of-copyright classics are only a click away. But as this NYMag article ("The End") spells it out, the publishing industry is reeling from the changes.

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century--through wars and depressions--the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It's one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a "mature" industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York's oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won't find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what's coming next. Two, five years from now--who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn't.

A random observation that floored me, reminding me just how different today's Internet is from the trusty, dusty, crusty home PCs on which I first learned the command-line interface.

Today's front page of The New York Times is over 129 kilobytes of code alone, with another 461 KB of supporting code, give or take. That's over a third of a floppy. Oh noes! (crd704ige)

The Commonwealth of Virginia announces plans for a free, open-source physics textbook.

The Virginia Physics "Flexbook" project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open-source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content. The Commonwealth is partnering with CK-12 (www.ck12.org) on this initiative as they will provide the free, open-source technology platform to facilitate the publication of the newly developed content as a "Flexbook" - defined simply as an adaptive, web-based set of instructional materials.

Good editing skills and random, candid video = 2 minutes of awesomeness. This is why I love the internet.

Takes just a tad too long to get started -- give it about 45 seconds before you decide to bail out. You'll be hooked by the second time you see the flip-flops. Via.

"Ah-ah-ah ooh, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah ooh!"  I'll be humming it all week.

Thanks, Karissa, for sending this collection of reasons why it makes sense to be careful when you post photos online..

5. Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

What do you do with a drunken pirate? Throw her in the brig--or, if you're Millersville University, deny her a teaching degree. That's what happened to Stacey Snyder, a then-27-year-old student teacher who posted a self portrait to her MySpace page under the caption "drunk pirate," even though it was not clear from the photo exactly what liquid was in her plastic cup. The Pennsylvania-based university decided the picture was "unprofessional" enough to rescind Snyder's degree, just days before it was to be awarded in May 2006. Snyder sued the university in federal court, claiming it violated her First Amendment rights (not to mention, of course, her Right to Paaaaar-tay). As of publication date of this story, that suit is still active.

Karissa also sends a story that notes YouTube is relying on its users to police its site for inappropriate videos. Every 5 mintes, 13 new hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube.

I haven't seen the ads in question, but thought this InformationWeek commentary was blogworthy.

"Some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software," Microsoft concedes. No, probably everyone who watched the ad is wondering what shoes and Seinfeld have to do with software.

The answer, Microsoft says, is nothing. Oh, right -- that's so very Seinfeld.

The deliberate obscurity shows just how sclerotic Microsoft has become. It's a form of brand-first advertising that says, "Never mind our products, hooking up with Microsoft is a gas." It's just like hanging out with Jerry, Elaine, and the rest of the gang at the coffee shop.

(Apologies to readers under 30 who don't get these references, but you can catch reruns on Fox after the nightly news. Sorry, "nightly news" was a form of broadcast journalism where highly paid anchors once ... never mind.)

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines (a government website that identifies research backing up good web design practices).

A wonderfully expressive, almost wordless essay on language, problem-solving, and code.
The Synonym Problem  (See also Jono DiCarlo's "These Things I Believe" -- a humanist manifesto about computer code.)

Groklaw has a good analysis of the recent Harry Potter Lexicon smackdown. Fair use good, too much verbatim copying bad.

The fact is, Rowling and her editor led the defendant on with praise of his website work, such that there was a suggestion by him that he might be the editor of the official encyclopedia, a suggestion that was turned down. Her prior praise of his fan site weighed against her. But she did tell him he had no role as her editor, and he went ahead with his own book anyway, with some marketing that the judge found misleading. So the question was, is it fair use? It certainly could have been, since a copyright owner can't control transformative derivative works totally, but where the defendant failed was in the how of it, how he went about it.

The impression I get from the Order is that if he'd been less of a fan and copied less and written more of his own words instead, it would have worked out better for him. The court, despite finding against fair use, found the defendant at the time had a reasonable belief that it was fair, and that shows me how close the call was, but in analyzing the four factors courts use for fair use determinations case by case, this judge decided it didn't pass ultimately.

But he managed to do so without, in my view, damaging the field for transformative fair use works. Let me show you what I mean. You'll see how carefully the judge annotates his ruling with prior case law, and if you wish to understand his decision, you really would have to read all the citations, because that is where the judge tells you why he decided each element.

Great news for those interested in the first draft of history. (Not-so-great news for those worried about Google's increasing control over so many kinds of information.) C|Net

Google is making searchable, digital copies of old newspapers available online through partnerships with their publishers, the company said Monday.

Under the ad-supported effort, Google will digitize millions of pages of news archives, including photos, articles, headlines, and advertisements, Google said.

Most gamers have never heard of Braunstein. Sad but true. In the hierarchy of self-awareness you'll find the circle of gamers who know what D&D is (a very, very large circle), then inside of that is the circle of gamers who know what Greyhawk is (large but smaller), and inside that the circle who knows what Blackmoor is (smaller still). And then in the very center, vanishingly small, are the people who've heard of Braunstein. Which is a pity, because Braunstein is the granddaddy of them all. (Metafilter)

Great little vignette highlighting the perils of live TV reporting.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell demonstrates the perils of live television as she gamely tries to report from the Republican National Convention during the midst of a major balloon drop in this clip that's amusing the chattering class the day after the two-week convention marathon has come to an end.

Great use of 3D technology to enable the study of an historic art form. Virtual Vaudeville:

Watch legendary comedian Frank Bush in a vaudeville performance from a variety of perspectives in the theater, from the most expensive boxes to the cheapest balcony seats. Compare the reactions of different spectators and even experience the act through the eyes of the performer. Switch between any of eight perspectives at any time and read the extensive hypermedia notes to gain a richer understanding of the performance in its historical context.

Whenever ice cream sales rise, so do shark attacks (eating ice cream makes you tastier?)  (Part of a great series by the BBC. Bookmarked for a future journalism class.)

Because the children were rarely bored - at least, when a television was nearby - they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. "The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere," Belton says. "But that's a skill that requires real practice. Too many kids never get the practice."

[...]

"The point is that it's not enough to just daydream," Schooler says. "Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative insight." -- Jonah Lehrer, The Boston Globe

Sounds like a promising peek behind the curtain at Wired.  I'll watch this for a while and see whether I can use it in my journalism classes.

What Is This?

An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. You can see more about the design process on Wired creative director Scott Dadich's SPD blog, The Process. This is a one-time experiment, tied solely to the Charlie Kaufman profile scheduled to run in our November 08 issue.

What Are The Rules?

We will post internal e-mails, audio, video, drafts, memos, and layouts. We reserve the right to edit our posts, out of sympathy for the reader or to protect our relationships with our sources. We will not post emails with sources or reproduce communications that take place outside of Wired.

Why Are We Doing This?

See our The Birth of Storyboard video and An Experiment post.

I'm always amused when the TV reports from storm landfalls are peppered with statements such as, "There's nobody here but reporters." Who needs fairness, objectivity, and nuance when there's a storm a-brewin?  Who needs balance, when you've got a pole to lean against? Oh, the drama of the live storm stand-up!

TV correspondents bellowing while taking facefuls of driving rain? Got it. Reporters hunched and squinting in the teeth of hurricane-force winds? Got that, too. Reporters dressed in the standard uniform of the intrepid weather correspondent -- colorful-but-flimsy network-logo jacket and ball cap -- to dramatize the effects of the driving rain and hurricane-force winds? Oh, yeah, got that, too.

It's not enough to report on a storm by showing TV viewers its impact. Dramatic as it is, the standard B-roll footage of pounding surf, wind-whipped palm trees and mangled power lines serves as a mere palate-cleanser. On storm stories, TV reporters are required to interact with the weather and become, potentially, human sacrifices to it.

This makes weather reporting different than every other kind of breaking TV news story. No one covers a house fire by rushing into the burning building, or reports on a war by doing stand-ups in the middle of a tank battle.

With the weather, however, participation is mandatory. -- Paul Farhi, The Washington Post

Last year a colleague in the English department described a conversation in which a friend revealed a dirty little secret: "I use Wikipedia all the time for my research--but I certainly wouldn't cite it."  This got me wondering: How many humanities and social sciences researchers are discussing, using, and citing Wikipedia? -- Lisa Spiro

When the subject is pop culture, political rumors, new internet trends, or if the author is clearly citing something way out of his or her subject domain (such as an engineer citing the literary origin of the term "robot" or a humanist explaining a geek joke) then I would prefer that the body of the paper identify that the source is Wikipedia, in which case I would register the link, absorb the fact that the author has just signaled that this point is simply explanatory and not crucial to the main argument, and I would move on.

But if a growing number of academics are using Wikipedia in their published scholarly work, then the "No Wikipedia, Ever!!" mindset requires re-examination.