Technology: 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.

This is from the robots category of Paleo-Future, which also has categories devoted to picturephones, jetpacks, and each decade's collected futurism (that is, see what our future looked like to people writing in the 1880s, the 1930s, or the 1980s).

Try as it might the robot could not make its desired turn. Its little broken wheel jerked and jumped, but to no avail. Malorie then started crying uncontrollably, quietly pleading, "Why won't someone help that robot! All he wants to do is pick up the ball and put it in the middle so that he can get some points!"

This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates our ability to anthropomorphize robots.

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.

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)

An informative review of Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a book I need to put on my reading list.  I've said many times that I've *never* encountered a student who absolutely cannot switch between txtspk and standard English.  Thus, to unpack that double-negative, I think students can and do regularly make the shift between social texting and more formal writing  -- though I do think I'm seeing more instances of the lowercase "I" than when I first started teaching.

Crystal does an excellent job exposing these illusions in Txtng, even if he doesn't designate them as such. And people seem to be listening. On his blog, Crystal notes that British media coverage has fairly addressed the book's six main points. The first three map precisely to the Zwickyan trifecta of illusions:

• Text messages aren't full of abbreviations - typically less than ten percent of the words use them. [Frequency Illusion]
• These abbreviations aren't a new language - they've been around for decades. [Recency Illusion]
• They aren't just used by kids - adults of all ages and institutions are the leading texters these days. [Adolescent Illusion]

For completeness, here are Crystal's other main points about texting:

• Pupils don't routinely put them into their school-work or examinations.
• It isn't a cause of bad spelling: you have to know how to spell before you can text.
• Texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing.

It remains to be seen if American media outlets will be as responsive to Crystal's arguments. (The book was released in the UK in the beginning of July and in the US in the beginning of September.) Here's hoping they get the (text) message.

Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking is going to unveil a remarkable clock that has no hands and shows time with the help of light. Known as the Corpus Clock, the machine has been invented by and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building. The Clock will be unveiled on 19th September by Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist, has put 500,000 pounds of his own money and seven years into developing the clock, which has been inspired from a design by a clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude. Of John Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the 'grasshopper escapement, explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping. No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escapement 35 mm across, it is 1.5 m across, he said.

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)

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and some of its contents posted on the internet Wednesday. (Wired)

Was Palin's personal account fair game because she has been accused of using her personal account to conduct public business? If there really is damning evidence in that account, and a judge delivers a search warrant, I'm sure that Yahoo can pull the whole thing from a backup tape, even if Palin has deleted the account.

Seton Hill's e-mail servers go down every night from 2 to about 5:30, and I'm sorry to say that I'm often up that late, so I often use my Yahoo account when I am contacting other professors for research projects.  For along time my Yahoo account was much better at blocking spam than my university account, so I always use my Yahoo account to sign up for subscription-only content. 

I'm generally reluctant to use any e-mail account to give out grades or adjudicate disputes between student editors, and there's a boilerplate legalistic disclaimer that we're supposed to append to all our messages.  (I tack on that message where I explicitly say something about a grade or a student's performance; I don't add it to routine replies such as "Thanks for telling me how much you enjoyed my website.")

I'm looking for a current event that will be of interest to my "Writing for the Internet" students, and I wonder if this will fit the bill. But it might be a little too early in the course... we've had a brief unit on e-mail and we're talking about smileys now, but we're mostly focusing on hand-coding HTML.  Today we spent a whole class period on basic file management, since most of these point-and-clickers had never heard terms like "subdirectory," and I notice that once I start asking students to post their online work in directories ("JoeStudent/project1: and "JoeStudent/project2") there's often a bit of backsliding in the confidence level and an uptick in the tension level.

Well, I'll see how the media machine treats this story.

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.

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.)

A financial researcher comes across a six-year-old article about United Airlines. Thinking it is a current news story, he summarizes it, then republishes the summary out of context. Within 10 minutes, a mass panic hits shareholders who are responding to his summary. More than a billion dollars evaporates into thin air.

Tribune Co. said Wednesday that the confusion over a 2002 article on UAL Corp. started because Google Inc.'s automated search couldn't separate breaking news from older stories on the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's website.

Tribune said it identified problems with the search engine months ago and had asked Google to stop using the function to find stories on its newspaper websites. Google continued to pull articles from the Sun-Sentinel's website, where a link to the old story on United Airlines parent UAL appeared last weekend, according to Tribune. (LA Times)

See also Forbes, Slashdot.

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.

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.

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.