February 2009 Archive Page

"Playing video games all day, alone and friendless, is is simply the best way that we have to prepare our children for a life of solitude in a barren wasteland."

The new Kindle is still way out of my price range, though of course I'm still craving one. This news took a bit of the edge off of that craving, since I regularly load my MP3 player with the sounds of a computerized voice reading common-domain texts.

Amazon.com will let copyright holders opt out of having their books read aloud on the company's Kindle 2 book reader, in an apparent concession to concerns raised about the device's text-to-speech feature.

Citing the challenging times faced by its members, The American Society of Newspaper Editors today announced it has canceled its 2009 convention. -- ASNE

According to the ASNE website, one of the items on the agenda at the conference was a motion to drop the reference to "paper" in the organization's name, and to expand the organization's purview to include online-only publications.

Kathleen Blake Yancey offers a thoughtful overview of the challenges and opportunities that technology brings to teachers of English. I particularly like her analysis of an effort, organized by high school students, to get AP test-takers to insert the catchphrase  "THIS IS SPARTA!" into their exams.

['T]he students understood the new audiences of twenty-first century composing--colleagues across the country and faceless AP graders alike.They understood one audience--the testing system--and knew how to play it. Several of the students were concerned enough not to want their scores to be negatively affected, as they revealed on another site where college advisors answer questions (answers.yahoo.com)--and those queries were removed, too!--but these students--and there were thousands and thousands of them--were quite simply bored enough to take the chance. Put differently, they refused to write to a teacher-as-examiner exclusively; they wrote as well to live teachers who might be amused at the juxtaposition between a serious claim about John Wilkes Booth and THIS IS SPARTA. Put differently still, they wanted not a testing reader, but a human one.

Unfortunately, I can only find a PDF of Yancey's report, on a page that includes links to lots of other stuff (if the hosting page displayed an abstract, that would be a start). 

While the average internet user has a fast enough connection that it's not that much of a burden to download the files, forcing web readers to download PDFs are a usability abomination, like a mobile phone that's cabled to the wall so you don't lose it, or a horseless carriage with a fake horse head on the hood and a poop-distribution mechanism in the trunk.  

We can gather that the National Council for Teachers of English still feels its core audience needs to hear this 21s-century message in a 20th-century medium.

The Baltimore Sun publishes this item under the "entertainment" section:

Sanders admitted inserting a graphic phrase into a video to make it appear that John Gibson of Fox News was denigrating U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. In the faked video, which appeared first on YouTube and later on The Huffington Post, Gibson is shown using the phrase "bright blue scrotum" while referring to Holder.

A statement from WBAL claims that Sanders posted the video on his personal YouTube page "without the prior knowledge or consent" of the network or its affiliate.

Nerd heaven.

In chase mode, Pinky behaves as he does because he does not target Pac-Man's tile directly. Instead, he selects an offset four tiles away from Pac-Man in the direction Pac-Man is currently moving (with one exception). The pictures below illustrate the four possible offsets Pinky will use to determine his target tile based on Pac-Man's orientation:

If Pac-Man is moving left, Pinky's target tile will be four game tiles to the left of Pac-Man's current tile. If Pac-Man is moving right, Pinky's tile will be four tiles to the right. If Pac-Man is moving down, Pinky's target is four tiles below. Finally, if Pac-Man is moving up, Pinky's target tile will be four tiles up and four tiles to the left. This interesting outcome is due to a subtle error in the logic code that calculates Pinky's offset from Pac-Man. This piece of code works properly for the other three cases but, when Pac-Man is moving upwards, triggers an overflow bug that mistakenly includes a left offset equal in distance to the expected up offset (we will see this same issue in Inky's logic later). Don Hodges' website has an excellent article giving a thorough, code-level analysis of this bug, including the source code and a proposed fix--click here to go there now.

I recently gave a brief presentation on games to our school's education faculty. One faculty member (I believe he used to be a school principal) got fairly excited, asking me whether he could use Crazy Machines to set up a scientific experiment to show his students. 

I suggested that he was thinking of the game simply as a tool for setting up a demo, but that was missing out on the power of games.  Rather than use a physics simulation program to create a fancy video for the students to watch, he should instead put the students in front of the game, and make them wrestle with the simulated system, as they strive to find their own path to a goal.

Emily Short gives an interesting take on this same idea, drawing on her own extensive experience as an indie game designer and critic.  She asks her students to design a game that will incorporate material they learn in a humanities course.  To pull this off, the instructor would have to know games inside and out -- not any specific games, but rather the principles that define good game design

I've used a variation of the following activity in a couple of different college classes (all of them courses in translation, pitched at a class of 30-40 students with no prior background in classics):

Divide into groups of five or six, and spend 30 minutes or so coming up with a core game design for a game based on some aspect of the Roman economy (or whatever -- specific content varies). Name your game. Choose a group member to present a pitch for it to the rest of the class.

Students love this activity. They think I'm letting them play in class, practically giving them the day off. The discussions are riotous. Certain male students who tend to be otherwise pretty quiet in class actually sit up and talk. It usually starts off a little goofy, but they get interested in some specific questions about the game design, and pretty soon they're paging back through their books to remind themselves about critical dates and data.

You are pleased to find scientific evidence of a phenomenon that you had been familiar with all along through your love of interactive fiction. You check BoingBoing, where you find exactly the same lame second-person intro gimmick.

When the volunteers read statements that began, "You are..." they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However, when they read statements explicitly describing someone else (for example, sentences that began, "He is...") then they tended to view the scene from an outsider's perspective. Even more interesting was what the results revealed about first-person statements (sentences that began, "I am..."). The perspective used while imagining these actions depended on the amount of information provided - the volunteers who read only one first-person sentence viewed the scene from their point of view while the volunteers who read three first-person sentences saw the scene from an outsider's perspective.

[...]

The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements ("You are..."), there is a greater sense of "being there" and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.-- Association for Psychological Science

Great little feature on a nostalgic pleasure.

The Ferris wheel takes you nowhere but up and around. And it is precisely the lack of direction that makes you feel as if you are going everywhere. It doesn't feed us, doesn't clothe us, doesn't give us a home. But man, we're told, does not live on bread alone. --Stefany Anne Golberg

This is fairly recent news, and at the moment I only see press releases and mission statements, and bloggers. So I'm still not sure what to make of this, but it's definitely something to watch: an elementary school with a curriculum built from the ground up on the procedural principles of gaming.

Out of school we are seeing a radical expansion of the collaborative and creative capacities of young people who are eager to learn and participate. Quest responds by balancing traditional academic needs with the reality that students today can and do learn in different ways, often through work with digital media, games, online networks, and mobile technologies. Quest will open with a 6th grade class in Fall 2009.

Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of "systems." Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century. -- Institute of Play

I've had a recurring dream since I was a teenager, somehow riding along behind my old car -- it's always the car I've most recently traded in or otherwise lost -- with a remote control in my hand. I'm controlling my car, which keeps rushing ahead of me, eventually disappearing around the corner where I can't see to steer it, and although I apply the brakes, I always hear a crash, then wake up in a cold sweat and feel very relived that "It was all a dream!"

I installed a bargain copy of Grand Theft Auto III a few years ago, since that game had gotten a lot of scholarly and journalistic attention. I was happily driving through the city when I noticed that many of the buildings in the back streets had low roofs situated near slanted boards of some sort.  Naturally I floored it and drove up one of those ramps, and suddenly I saw a rooftop auto playground that I didn't know existed.

As soon as I tried jumping from one building to another, and was feeling a bit of satisfaction because I'd lined up the jump fairly well, the camera shifted to a different view and tracked my car sailing through the air in slow motion.  While I was not in any "zone" at the time, I was still enjoying my discovery of the hidden level enough that I found the shifting point of view, and the feeling that I was losing control over my vehicle, unsettling.  I wanted to perform the stunt, I didn't want to watch slow-motion, third-person footage of the stunt happening.

While a game like Rock Band does involve players in a team and there is a joissance to be experienced that is not unlike group dance, the truth is that even the relationships between players is a faux social relationship. The players' attentions are mediated by the TV screen which must be studied and followed like a script, rather than performing as a harmonious ensemble, riffing off the sounds created by one another. Indeed, you often have to ignore your fellow players' mistakes if you hope to survive, and the only impromptu action you can take is lifting your guitar into the air to pretend that you're doing a solo. Yet the pleasure of the game comes when everyone is working in uncanny synchronicity, timed with the pulsing lights -- we win when become the stars on the screen by rote repetition of the programmed score, keeping the machine streaming prefab sounds in a steady and uninterrupted stream. Mechanical reproduction is the objective. It is, ultimately, the very antithesis of artistic production. -- Michael Arnzen

Perhaps a better title for these games is "TV Show Simulator." Car stunt sequence, music video, sporting event (complete with play-by-play commentary).  

I play with a 3D modeling tool called Blender. One of the filters you can add to your virtual scenes is lens flare -- the effect of sunlight bouncing around inside a camera. That filter doesn't add anything to the reality of the image, other than associating it with other mediated images that you've seen.

Disturbing, yet cool.  Biotele.com

Update: The AP posted the correction within 18 minutes. Not bad.

However...

Just as I spent the afternoon of 9/11/2001 making a web page, because it helped occupy my mind, I'm spending a few minutes while my daughter is otherwise occupied, observing the phrasing of the WTAE-TV news article:
 

A Seton Hill University student is dead following a police investigation off campus in Greensburg early Sunday morning.

The word "following" simply means "comes after," but journalists often use it as a euphemism for "because of" in situations when there aren't enough confirmed facts.

I realize that, at the moment, the police probably haven't released full details about how the student died -- maybe it was self-inflicted, maybe he jumped out a window.  The headline refers to "incident" -- which is generic enough. But the lead refers to "investigation" -- and that's usually what TV reporters do, make the "investigation" the center of the story, when the story itself is old.

But this isn't an old story yet -- it's still breaking news. I believe a press conference is going on right now... I e-mailed the editor of the student paper a few hours ago... I hope they got someone on the story right away.

For homework that's due Tuesday, students in my journalism class were supposed to look at some examples of online journalism. Here's a very simple slide show about the off-campus shooting incident.

Interactive Fiction Writing Month (Feb 15 - March 15)

This is the blag for Interactive Fiction Month 2009, an attempt to lure beginners into learning Inform through a series of easy tasks with concrete deadlines, and to promote discourse on game design in general.

I bugged out of work a few hours early today so I could meet up with the family for a matinee showing of Coraline. The local theater had a rather defensive home-grown sign explaining that the extra $2.50 they were charging per ticket pays for the cost of renting the 3D projection equipment from Disney. And then there are those big bins that try to guilt us into "recycling" the glasses (so they can sell them back to us the next time). Maybe if they actually refunded you a dollar for turning in the glasses?

But I digress.

I read this book to my kids a few weeks ago. The slow pace of the opening of the movie not only perfectly matches the tone of the book, but it also lets us drink in the scenery (very convincingly rendered in 3D... in the first few minutes of the movie I noticed some jerkiness, but soon got accustomed to it).  As part of the rising action just before the climax, Coraline has to collect three objects (souls in the book, eyes in the movie -- or, rather, pairs of eyes, that are always represented by a single round object... don't ask).  The scene in which Coraline gets the first object is a psychological drama in the book, and I recall it was almost as effective as the riddle contest between Bilbo and Gollum in The Hobbit.  In the Coraline movie, this bit appears as a lickety-split action sequence, and from there Coraline acquires the next two ball thingies so quickly that there's little time to notice a character transformation.

The book has Coraline, through her force of will, transform herself from plucky orphan Newt to surrogate mother Ripley, and it's a thrill to read. In the climactic chapters of the book, the third-person narration keeps us out of Coraline's head, so that we're just following along as she charges ahead into danger; we don't know exactly what she's planning, but by this time we've learned to trust the heroine, so it's a thrill to read along and enjoy her courage.  In the movie, a string of action sequences -- admittedly striking -- takes over the space where the book had ratcheted up the psychological tension, and the change diminished my enjoyment a bit.

The climactic encounter was very faithful to the book, but the "You thought it was over but it isn't yet" was weaker in the movie because it involved the timely return of the sidekick -- something that's more appropriate for a buddy film.  I realize that we can't spend an hour of screen time listening to Coraline's internal monlogue, hence the new sidekick; but once you've created him, you've got to got to give him a subplot and an arc of his own, which leads to his role in the battle that comes after you think you've seen the climax. 

Some very powerful visual effects having to do with the Other Mother's malevolent manipulation of the environment are very well done, giving the film a new set of visual references that added texture and more coherence than the talky attempts to explain what's going on. 

I won't go see it again while it's in the theaters, but the 3D effects were good enough that I'd consider going to see another 3D movie if the effects were that smoothly integrated into the experience. (It seems it would be easy to do that with CGI films.)

I didn't buy a personal Kindle -- the price was too steep. But I did ask our library to buy one, and I have been experimenting with reading PDFs on my new tablet PC. So I was interested when I first heard the hype surrounding what may be Amazon's announcement of the next version of the Kindle, which finally approximates the awesome thin tablets that feature briefly in 2001: A Space Odyssey (one of the astronauts casually places it on the table while eating) and the similar devies (known to fans as PADDs) often seen in Star Trek.

Meanwhile, Forbes has a good article on what the e-book publishing industry might mean to journalism.

Besides books, the Kindle wirelessly updates 31 newspapers, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, 21 magazines (yes, Forbes, too) and over 1,000 blogs. And while most of these publications are free on the Web, scratching out a living on advertising alone, the Kindle versions have subscription prices ranging from $6 to $15 a month for the newspapers and $1.25 to $3.50 a month for the magazines. Even popular blogs like Boing Boing run $2 a month.

Reading the papers on the Kindle is slower than it should be, with lots left to do on design and layout. So far the publishers seem to be moving Web copy directly to the Kindle rather than designing content for this as a unique device. I tried to go to The New York Times' op-ed page, and after an initial blank screen received a full-screen picture of David Brooks. Eeek. Satirical blog The Onion jumps straight into stories, with no organization.

If you have a Facebook account, you're probably familiar with the "25 Things About Me" meme.  Mike McPhaden unearthed "Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me," of which the best (IMHO) is the following:

14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I remind her that i) she was Italian, an impulsive race ii), she was actually played by a middle-aged Eunuch named Ned, and iii) she died. That always shvts her right vp.

Keats can keep his urn with its leaf-fring'd legend. I've got a much better slice-of-life to share. When I called my parents tonight, my father reminded me of an exchange he had with my daughter when she was about four.

My Daughter (to her grandfather): This is my teddy bear.

My Father (to his granddaughter): I like it. Can I keep it?

My Daughter: (No answer.)

My Father: Can I have it when you're done with it?

My Daughter: You'll be dead by then.

My Father: (No answer.)

My Daughter (helpfully): When I'm done with it, I'll put it on your grave.

My Father: (No answer.)

(Later)

My Father (to me): I didn't tell her I want to be cremated. We'd have to get a little urn for the bear.

News about a free-speech dust-up in the department where I used to work at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire:

This fall, the English department, the publication's then "administrative home," voted unanimously to sever its ties to Flip Side, citing, in a statement, interest in "fostering the responsible use of free speech and the mutually respectful community envisioned by the university's Centennial Plan." The move left Flip Side in a precarious position in terms of renewing its university funding until Monday, when a new adviser - a geology professor - stepped in.

"That very controversial article that was in the Flip Side, it definitely led to conversations and very strong debate on this campus," said Kent M. Syverson, the new adviser. "I look at that article and it was juvenile, it was profane, I'm offended by it. I wish he would keep his sexual fantasies to himself, quite frankly, because I'm kind of old school that way. But then when the English department pulls their support for Flip Side because they want Flip Side to exercise 'responsible use of free speech'.... What responsible use of free speech means to them, and to most people, is 'You're going to say what I agree with.' And I don't think that's a very good model for the modern public university." -- Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed

Prof. Syverson claims that the phrase "responsible use of free speech" actually means "You're going to say what I agree with," implying that the Eau Claire English department censored "The Flip Side" by withdrawing its endorsement.

Let's imagine that some eager undergraduates announce an edgy, new, rough-and-tumble publication devoted to geology.  Imagine that, for several years, it proudly publishes everything from Vernian hollow-earth conspiracy fantasies to geocentric Creationist sermons, celebrating them all as "science," even as the contributors frequently parade their ignorance of and contempt for scientific principles.

Now imagine that Prof. Syverson and his colleagues in the geology department decide this publication falls so far short of its professional standards that its members no longer wish to associate themselves with it. Does this judgment suppress anyone's First Amendment rights?
 
When I was on the Eau-Claire English faculty (1998-2003), sponsoring a student group was one of many possible ways to fulfill the "service" requirement of our contracts.  From what I have seen of "The Flip Side," I can imagine why every single English professor might want to fill in the "service" column with something other than voluntary association with this particular publication.  

"The Flip Side" failed to earn the patronage of every member of a department with explicit training in the evaluation of written texts.  But their professional judgment of "The Flip Side" is not censorship. 

It's a real stretch to latch onto this issue in order to defend the First Amendment.   We cheapen the Bill of Rights if we treat it as a magic power-up pill that shields us from social responsibility. 

My brother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey, is a Steelers fan. He asked for a keepsake issue of the local paper, so I sent out an e-mail to my colleagues to beg for their used copies.  The truth is, I wouldn't even take a free subscription to the print edition, since it would mean more junk piling up in my front hallway.

I've done some serious re-thinking after these last few months, as the news business has dutifully and industriously covered its own implosion. We've never had easier access to high-quality journalism online, but the problem is we won't pay for it.

The easy Internet ad dollars of the late 1990s enticed newspapers and magazines to put all of their content, plus a whole lot of blogs and whistles, onto their websites for free. But the bulk of the ad dollars has ended up flowing to groups that did not actually create much content but instead piggybacked on it: search engines, portals and some aggregators.

Another group that benefits from free journalism is Internet service providers. They get to charge customers $20 to $30 a month for access to the Web's trove of free content and services. As a result, it is not in their interest to facilitate easy ways for media creators to charge for their content. Thus we have a world in which phone companies have accustomed kids to paying up to 20 cents when they send a text message but it seems technologically and psychologically impossible to get people to pay 10 cents for a magazine, newspaper or newscast.-- Walter Isaacson, Time

What appears to be a smiley winks out from an 1862 transcript of a speech by ==|;o)>

NY Times City Room

A nifty little primer, compiled by Nate Piekos.

 CROSSBAR I
This is probably the biggest mistake seen amongst amateur letterers. An "I" with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, "I." The only other allowable use of the "crossbar I" is in abbreviations. Any other instance of the letter should just be the vertical stroke version. Although I would debate it, you occasionally see the "crossbar I" used in the first letter of the first word of a sentence, or the first letter of someone's name.

Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica.

 

Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered "yes" to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child's birth, and told me that they didn't play video games. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: if you play video games, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children.

Cantina

The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn't much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it's become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night.

Coincidentally, it's Tuesday night. A host of unsavory-looking people makes up your audience for the night. They're all staring at you expectantly.

A fake plastic guitar lies on the ground in front of you. Bolted to the wall is a television screen, dark and foreboding.

>_

So it begins. Text adventures, in which a world is presented in prose and interaction is through typed commands, are one of the oldest forms of computer game; music/rhythm games like Guitar Hero, in which a world is presented in dazzling color and blaring sound and interaction is through an instrument-shaped novelty peripheral, are one of the newest. When programmer Bill Meltsner combined the two recently in the satirical Champion of Guitars, the result was a textbook example of how an amusing artwork can catch on and go viral in a wired-up community that loves poking fun at itself. It's also a textbook example of the power of the so-called "lazyweb," the blogger practice of tossing a good idea out there in the hope that someone, somewhere, with more resources or less sloth, might make it a reality. -- Darren Zenko, The Toronto Star

Part of a list of jokes the president told at the Alfalfa Club Dinner. This set made me laugh.

"In just the first few weeks, I've had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my BlackBerry.

"I finally agreed to limit the number of people who could e-mail me. It's a very exclusive list. How exclusive? Everyone look at the person sitting on your left. Now look at the person sitting on your right. None of you have my e-mail address." -- Barack Obama