July 2009 Archive Page

Colbert's tag line brought tears to my eyes. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kerry!)

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The Associate Press has for some time claimed that people should pay for reprinting the title of an AP article and linking to the full text. I stopped quoting from AP stories when the AP claimed bloggers needed a license to quote more than 5 words from an AP story.  (Keep both of these things in mind, if you have students post research projects online!) 

Now they're announcing plans to do what looks to me like gaming the search engines. I hope Google and other search engines account for this practice, and penalize search results from organizations that trample on the principle of fair use in such an outrageous manner.

I can completely understand a position that states web authors don't have the right to copy the full text without permission. The fair use defense in copyright law does not apply if a critic or commentator reuses more than 10% of a work  But this new policy goes well beyond existing copyright law.

Each article -- and, in the future, each picture and video -- would go out with what The A.P. called a digital "wrapper," data invisible to the ordinary consumer that is intended, among other things, to maximize its ranking in Internet searches. The software would also send signals back to The A.P., letting it track use of the article across the Web. Newspaper executives have said that by taking the lead, The A.P. ensures a unified approach, saves publishers from having to design their own software and circumvents possible charges of collusion against the papers. -- Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times

The cause of the decline in handwriting may lie not so much in computers as in standardized testing. The Federal Government's landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, on the dismal state of public education, ushered in a new era of standardized assessment that has intensified since the passage in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act. "In schools today, they're teaching to the tests," says Tamara Thornton, a University of Buffalo professor and the author of a history of American handwriting. "If something isn't on a test, it's viewed as a luxury." --Clare Suddath, Time (via Annette Vee's Facebook posting)

I'm teaching "Writing about Literature" this fall, so I should be up on the new changes in MLA format.  (Via the Reeves Library blog.)

I like some of the changes in MLA 2009, including labeling the source of a publication ("Web" or "Print" or "DVD" or the like) and standardizing italics instead of underlining (which has become strongly associated with web hyperlinks). 

I have mixed feelings about the de-emphasis of the URL, though, since it formulates the omission of information that could be very useful to future scholars. Here is how the Purdue OWL puts it:

No More URLs! While website entries will still include authors, article names, and website names, when available, MLA no longer requires URLs. Writers are, however, encouraged to provide a URL if the citation information does not lead readers to easily find the source. --Purdue OWL

URLs from databases, which generally end up crammed full of soon-to-expire session IDs and irrelevant search terms, are useless in a bibliography, so I won't miss them. 

But URLs of static pages can be very useful, particularly if the paper is submitted electronically.  The MLA is still very backwards when we compare our bibliographic procedures with the disciplines of math or engineering, which long ago standardized citation methods, so that whole bodies of papers can be slurped up into a database and the resulting data massaged endlessly.

There might be several different pages in a blog that contain the same information -- such as the blog home page, another page that shows entries from the last month, a category list that shows the last 20 entries, and the permalink. So, a scholar may "easily find the source" on the day he or she looks it up, but weeks or months or years later, that same page may only appear in the static date-based archives and in the permalink.

Mark Bernstein (hypertext publisher and theorist) makes some good observations about the print-based newspaper industry:

I remember visiting the Chicago Sun Times/Daily News building as a kid, where my best friend's dad was a columnist. The place was huge! But it wasn't filled with middle managers; it was filled with compositors and pressmen and ad sales clerks. You didn't just need someone to mark up the HTML; you had to cast the letters in lead type. And, if you needed to make a change, someone had to go take the plates off the press, melt them down, cast new plates, and start the press up again.

Keep in mind, too, the problems of doing business without computers. Every little transaction generates paper, and that paper needs to be reliably filed and quickly retrieved. Every transaction: two bucks for the delivery boy, the rent for the Paris office, the fee for the department store ads. Every paycheck had to be computed and written out by hand, in duplicate. Even in the 70's, the fax machine was so new and faxes were so slow that Peter Gammons was able to write the story of a lifetime faster than the fax machine could send it.

If anything, the newsroom of old was notably short on bureaucracy. That was the whole point of the news room: you had a huge open office in which dozens of people worked because all those dozens of people reported to one editor. Some of those dozens would turn out to be idiots, some of them would be crazy, plenty of them were drunks, and all of them were prone to be unmanageable. Even so, there are remarkably few layers of bureaucracy.

This is a little late, but it's still the right way to handle the criticism. From Amazon:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

I've kept a running tally... I've been bored for a total of 4 and 1/2 hours during our 15 years of marriage. 

You're the organizer and the schedule-keeper and the worrier, which frees me to camp with the kids in the backyard, marshal a pony army against the dollhouse fortress, and read to them until late at night.

Home-schooling is so rewarding, so challenging and exciting.  I'm grateful that you suggested that we try it.

You've put your dissertation and your plots for your fantasy/romance novels on hold for the good of the family, so I'm happy we can arrange things so that you can sleep in late (past noon on the weekends) if you want to.

You've left a grand total of one comment on a weblog -- not my blog, mind you, but someone else's.  I know you're not likely to read this, but I'll say it here anyway.

I love you.

Listservs, a trademarked software for running e-mail lists whose name is often used to refer to the lists themselves, were once a "killer app" that tempted many professors to try the Internet in the first place, back when many established scholars were skeptical of computers. A Chronicle article nearly 15 years ago proclaimed the exciting new world of academic e-mail lists, calling them "the first truly worldwide seminar room."

"This is the academy of the 1990s, where 'being connected' has taken on a whole new meaning," the 1994 article went on. "Attending the right graduate school and being published in prestigious places are still important, but establishing a name for oneself online has become the newest way to win recognition."

But now collaborating online with colleagues is so accepted that scholars are trying new tools that are easier to use and, well, a little more exciting. When was the last time someone enthusiastically recommended a new e-mail list to you? -- Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

David Stanley pointed me to this thoughtful essay.

Modern librarians who prioritize information over knowledge perpetuate a distraction from the real purpose of a library. A library facilitates the patient gathering of knowledge - whose acquisition is superior to almost every other endeavor. Religions have adapted to technology for the most part without being destroyed by it, so why can't libraries? It might not be too late.

Information on the Internet may come across as authoritative, but much of it is one giant Ponzi scheme, especially in the hands of the young, where it can become a counterfeit for the reading and memorization that true learning requires. Scholars are made through the quiet study of one chapter at a time. For that we need silence. We need to restore an appreciation for the close study of words.--William H. Wisner, Christian Science Monitor

I've blogged before about how much I dislike Adobe's arrogant use of popups that take over your computer while you are trying to do something else.

This morning, I set up the computer my kids use so that my son would be able to follow the simulated progress of Apollo 11 on wechoosethemoon.org.  That meant upgrading to Flash 10.  I made a mental note to make sure that the upgrade didn't overwrite my attempt to disable Adobe's auto-update feature (which pops up an aggressive, sticky box that demands far too much attention... I don't want my kids getting in the habit of clicking "Yes" to every box that pops up while they're on the computer), but I was on my way out the door to go to work, so I didn't have time to do check to make sure that Adobe hadn't reset all my preferences to "By all means, feel free to interrupt me as often as you like."

Taking a break at the office just now, I watched the simulation of the lunar descent and landing, and found the experience very moving. ("Tranquility base here... the Eagle has landed."  I did a fist pump and posted "W00t!" to my Twitter feed.)

As I was still poking around the site, listening to the audio from the surface of the moon, the phone rang. It was my 11yo son, his voice quavering.  He had been sitting at his computer, watching the same thing I'd been enjoying.  But on his computer, one of those intrusive, annoying, evil Adobe pop-ups had appeared, blocking the actual lunar landing. 

I had maximized the browser window (following the advice on wechoosethemoon.org), so it's probably the case that neither my son nor my wife knew that I had set them up to watch something that was on a website.  My son does know enough to "cancel" out of a dialog box, but the Adobe popups don't function like normal creatures. 

On the phone, he says he tried closing the box, but it wouldn't go away.  When he sent his sister to explain the problem to my wife, a miscommunication happened, and my wife ended up thinking that my son had closed the web browser himself, and thus was responsible for the interruption.  My son isn't very articulate when he's upset, and my wife is not exactly a techno-troubleshooter.  So, according to Peter, there was shouting and consternation, and what should have been a powerful educational experience was ruined.

Thanks a heap, Adobe.

Lunar Lander -- the game -- at 40.

Among the millions who watched the Apollo 11 landing was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the Apollo 12 launch, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple text-based simulation of humanity's greatest technological achievement on his school's Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-8 minicomputer system.

Tom Wolfe (author of space program biography The Right Stuff (which incidentally was the movie I took my first-ever date to see back in 1983) ) describes how the Cold War derailed the grand adventure of space exploration. Shockingly, the decay started while the Apollo program was still underway.

[I]n October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program's launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus's Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.

Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA's irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists -- irreplaceable! -- there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn't just run an ad saying, "Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert" ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

This tutorial shows how to rig the fingers in a very clever way. I'd seen this technique described in a text tutorial somewhere, but after seeing it here, I understand it. I also appreciated seeing how to adjust b-bones so that they only rotate, without bending (which results in noodly-looking joints).

I really love Blender, since it's forcing me to develop the visual side of my brain. The summer is too short... work for the fall is already starting to pile up. I'm going to have to set aside Blender pretty soon.

The first man on the moon doesn't feel his life is defined by being the first man on the moon? As if the world would remember much more than Armstrong's "one piece of fireworks"? Would his name belong beside Magellan's or Marco Polo's if not for Armstrong's singular achievement? --Paul Farhi, Washington Post

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for--thought they owned.--David Pogue, NYT

The citizens whose Kindles needed rectification had purchased unauthorized George Orwell books.  So 1984 disappeared down the memory hole, and Animal Farm got shipped to the glue factory.

It might sound like a logical extension from the likes of Buzz and You Don't Know Jack, but you'll have to believe that this [Xbox Live] game is ringing the death knell for game shows as loudly and vigorously as it possibly can. Why watch a game show, when you can participate? Why shout at the TV, yelling at the idiot answering wrongly, when you can be playing instead? Why watch some person you have no emotional investiture in win a car, when you can win a car? This game expertly positions Microsoft at the forefront of "digital entertainment". -- Chris Lewis, Expressive Intelligence Studio

Walter Cronkite, the CBS News anchor who famously became the most trusted man in America, died Friday at the age of 92.--NPR

The HD version actually came out better than I thought it would. More photos after the jump...

The LA Times technology blog critiques the new Google Reader interface.

For example, let's say we have a news article that we like. Well, might as well click the "like" button, right?

OK, now we've told the Internet that we think it's cool, and we can see a list of strangers who also think it's cool.

Hmm, we should also share this with our friends to make sure they see it. Let's click "share."

No, wait.

Let's "share with a note." "This is cool," we write.

OK, cool. Now, let's leave a comment.

Wait, we don't have much to say besides, "This is cool." Let's not.

Maybe we'll tag this as "cool." Done.

Our cousin doesn't use Google Reader, but she'll think this is cool. I'll click the "email" button to send her a link to it.

In fact, we think this is so cool that we're going to click the star button so it will save so that we can come back to it later and just reflect on how cool it is.

In short, these new features aren't that cool.

Talk about penny wise and pound foolish!

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking for them.

The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed -- magnetically erased -- and re-used to save money. --Reuters

So the tapes NASA recently released are restored from less-degraded copies.

Amazing!

A great interview, on Adventure Classic Gaming.

Was something like Adventure inevitable? That's a tough question, but I think probably so. I'd say that the real wild-card here is not Adventure but rather Adventure's inspiration, Dungeons and Dragons. You just can't exaggerate the importance of D&D to all of the many storygames that have followed it. It really did revolutionize the way we look at stories and games and the combination of the two in a way totally out of proportion to the number of people who have ever actually played it. But then, we could make exactly the same statement about Adventure, couldn't we? Every story-oriented computer game today, including graphical adventures, can trace its roots straight back to Adventure -- and from Adventure, straight back to D&D.

I'm not omniscient, but yes, I think we'd have something like Adventure come along, probably sooner rather than later, absent Crowther and Wood. Would it have used such a flexible parser for interaction, though? I don't know, really. Certainly the many IF conventions that we still employ that have come down to us from Adventure would be a bit different. We can also say for sure that adventure games wouldn't be called adventure games -- that name is lifted straight from the original Adventure, which might perhaps begin to convey to your readers Adventure's importance in the scheme of things.

But what would the computer gaming landscape look like if Gygax and Arnenson had never invented D&D? Now that's an interesting question, and one I'm not even going to attempt to answer here! -- Jimmy Maher

I like Maher's answer.  A few years ago, David Thomas asked me the same question, and I blogged a tongue-in-cheek response that nevertheless laid out some of the impact of this particular game.

A bit predictable, but still enjoyable.

Wired has a good piece about the value of local reporting.

"In every town in America, almost, you have reporters going out and doing humble jobs and turning over rocks every day and seeing what's under them," says John Carroll, the former editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Times, a man who led his newsroom to 13 Pulitzer Prizes over his 5-year tenure.

These "humble jobs" help keep government honest. David Simon, the creative force behind HBO's The Wire and a former newspaper reporter (once an employee of Carroll's at the Baltimore Sun), put it quite bluntly in a recent congressional hearing: "God, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption."

See also their piece about mobile news (a potential income stream).

And you thought the secrets to academic success would involve sensible stuff like "Study for two to three hours for every hour of class" or "Keep up with the readings" and "Meet all the deadlines your prof sets."

But those won't help you game the system, which is the strategy Don Asher presents as the real key to success.

• This is not about being smart. This is about being savvy.
• Sign up for more classes than you can possibly take, and drop boring or difficult professors sometime in the first two weeks.
• If you get a bad exam or quiz score, ask the professor what you can do to earn extra credit. Reading an optional book, writing a one- or two-page paper, or even just helping the prof out with mundane tasks such as setting up for class can push you back into the A column.
• Professors are people, too. They worry about being liked, whether they're gaining a few pounds and whether or not they're good at their jobs. So go visit them.... It's probably not a great idea to focus on grades only, as in "What do I need to do to earn an A in your class?" Get your professors to help you be a better student. And maybe ask, "Have you lost a little weight?"

The truly savvy student would recognize that pushing chairs around for profs will probably make the profs gain weight, therefore making them even more susceptible to weight-loss flattery.

Clearly by "Them" the sign means "dogs," but the since the sign refers instead to "Your Dog," so it was already in need of some attention even before this alteration took place. Via Bryan Alexander.

The following started out as routine e-mail feedback on a freshman essay, but I thought it came out well enough that I might want to use it again.  I don't want this to get buried in my existing handout on thesis statements, so I figured I'd just post the good bits here.

A good academic thesis is precise -- it makes a specific claim, backed up by concrete, verifiable evidence.

As you begin the writing process, you may have no idea what your own attitude towards your topic is.  Or, you may have a strong emotional reaction to a subject.  Either way, your thesis will grow stronger as you supply concrete details that move it away from the general and towards the specific.

Sample Thesis: "Money as encouragement for good grades, many teachers believe it can be useful."

Let's start by revising so that the thesis makes a claim about the topic (the value of rewards in education).  At present, the thesis simply claims that "some teachers" happen to hold an opinion about the topic of money rewards.

Slight Improvement: "Many teachers believe financial rewards can be a useful educational tactic."

It's not clear from this statement what claim your paper is about to defend.  Either of the two following revisions would be clearer.

• "Although many people believe X, recent studies show Y is a better solution than X."
  
• "Recent studies have confirmed the practice of doing X is more effective than Y."

Of course, you'd have to follow up with specific reference to the "recent studies" that you mention. (Note -- a news article or random website that refers to the "recent studies" is a very weak citation; most professors will expect you to be able to refer to the specific academic publication, government report, or other authoritative source.)

Some People Say...

Of particular note is the vague reference to what "many teachers believe."  In casual conversation, or during a classroom discussion, it's fine to use a general phrase like this to introduce ideas that you know you've heard somewhere before, 

But in academic writing, a phrase such as "some people say" is far too vague.  Your instructor will expect you name the specific teachers, to quote their exact words (if you interviewed them yourself), or cite the page numbers of their published opinions (in academic journals, or possibly news interviews or statements they have posted on their own websites). 

Introduce the opinions of credible authorities by naming names and citing a good source.
 

Instead of saying "many teachers believe it can be useful," actually state two or three good things about debate. 

Compare:  Which gives you a better idea of what the author is saying?

A)     "Many people believe that video games are worthwhile, but there are problems with too much gaming."

B)      "While the claims that video games teach hand-eye coordination are sometimes overblown (Smith 123; Perkins 234), multi-player games teach teamwork and leadership skills (Brown 213), and simulation games exercise the kind of problem-solving skills employers say they want in their new hires (Speer and Lee 23).  Nevertheless, the most hardcore gamers (defined by Jones and Green as playing more than 20 hours per week) run a greater risk of being overweight (Lincoln 232), spending less time outdoors (Johnson 12) and exhibiting anti-social behavior (Young 130).  For these reasons, the Johnson County School Board's May 2009 decision to put a gaming lounge in the library lobby is not a responsible use of taxpayer dollars." 

If your thesis looks like A), try to make it look more like B. 

Weaknesses of the "some people believe" approach... what's the real problem?  Are these unnamed people wrong to believe this?  Are they not really credible authorities, so the problem is that these people aren't the most reliable source of information?  Do "they" have an ulterior motive that would keep them from giving sound, trustworthy advice?  Is their value system actually flawed (like someone who wants to let his pit bull roam through a daycare center's backyard), or are we talking about perfectly respectable but conflicting value systems (early risers who complain about parties at midnight, or late risers who complain about lawnmowers at dawn?)

Revise for Detail

"Although some people believe X, they don't realize the problems X really causes."

"Although [detail P] and [detail Q] may at first make option X seem attractive, a closer examination of X reveals that [detail L], [detail M] and [detail N] all expose X as a faulty solution.

You might be asking yourself, "Where do I get all those details to add to my paper?"

If so, you might still be thinking of research as something that you do at a fairly late stage.  If you first write out your paper as an opinion piece, and only start "looking for quotes" after you've already written out your conclusion,  you'll only be skimming for details that already support what you've written.  Human nature will cause you to ignore those details that challenge your opinions.

Embrace the thought-altering possibilities of a fact or claim that doesn't already fit your world view.  Your instructor is less interested in seeing you supply facts that back up the opinions you already have, and far more interested in seeing how you form new opinions about issues that you would never have thought about before, had it not been for the new stuff you learned while you were doing your research.

When you can spell out the complex relationship between specific details that youv'e learned, you're probably ready to start churning out the paragraphs. 

"Although details P and Q challenges claim X, supporting details A, B, and C make a stronger case in favor of X."  

This is just one possible way to organize a paper -- it's not the only way. 

If you're still at the vague "some people say" or "there are pros and cons to topic X" phare phase, then a little more research is still in order.

I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago.

At Hopkins, Knudson uses Twitter as an extension of the classroom, asking students to raise questions, hold discussions online, keep up with breaking news and share links to interesting stories. She believes the limited number of characters allowed is a useful way to remember to choose words carefully, cut clutter and realize how much can be said in a small space, like a haiku.

There are people known for their writing on Twitter. As one example, she pointed to Arjun Basu, who has thousands of followers for his short-story tweets: "The marriage ended somewhere on a two lane road south of Cleveland. The kids in the backseat sensed it too. The kid in the trunk had no idea."-- Susan Kinzie, Washington Post

My wife was horrified when she turned on the computer to look something up online, and noticed that my blog now includes a Twitter feed. "I learned to deal with the idea of you being on Facebook," she said, "but Twitter?"

A website will re-create the 1969 moon mission in real time (allowing for the 40-year time lag).  http://wechoosethemoon.org/

First, there is a general increase in use of Facebook and a general decline in use of MySpace across the board. In 2007, 79% of the study participants were using Facebook while in 2009, 87% of the sample reports doing so. In contrast, while in 2007, 55% of the group reported using MySpace, in 2009, only 36% do so.

Second, we continue to see ethnic and racial differences as well as different usage by parental education (a proxy for socioeconomic status). Students of Hispanic origin are more likely to use MySpace than others and less likely to use Facebook than others. Asian American students are the least likely to be on MySpace. Regarding parental education, the relatively small number (7%) of students in the sample whose parents have less than a high school education are much more likely to be on MySpace and much less likely to be on Facebook than others. Students from families where at least one parent has a college degree are much less likely to be MySpace users than others. --Eszter Hargittai, Crooked Timber

Yet, a recent study by a company called iStrategyLabs (I've never heard of them) presents stats that argue high school and college participation in Facebook is down, and posts that perhaps younger people are turned off by the number of older adults joining the service. Here's (part of) a chart from their site...

55+ is on the rise, but if that group is tiny to begin with, so that huge increase doesn't really mean a whole not at this point -- just that the oldsters are catching up to those who identify themselves as high school and college students are dropping. 

I like the fact that this chart gives both the percentage increase and the numbers -- that huge increase in "unknown" means very little, since "unkown" is a tiny category.

I wonder also that maybe new HS and college students have no particular reason to join Facebook from January through July... certainly many college students will have switched their ID from "College" to "Alumni" following their spring graduation.  I'd be interested in seeing whether the back-to-school vibe in the fall gets more incoming freshmen to sign up under their new school affiliations.

She said the manhole she fell in to was left open and unattended with no warning signs or orange cones. She said two workers with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection failed to secure the area as they prepared to flush the sewer.

"It was just really gross and it was shocking and scary," she said. "Because of their careless mistake I got hurt." --WCBS

It does sound like the utility workers created an unsafe environment, but the words "careless mistake" pulsate with irony. Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

Post office boxes! Post office boxes!

My face hurts from laughing.


New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time

Older words also making their debut as a result of renewed interest online: sock puppet (a false identity used to manipulate opinions in online forums) and fan fiction. (Via Guardian)

The gradual, and almost invisible, transformation of many "liberal arts colleges" to more comprehensive institutions is similar to another gradual trend that has reshaped the composition and the work of the American academic profession. Over the past three decades, colleges and universities have replaced tenure-track faculty positions with part-time and full-time term-contract positions -- a phenomenon Jack Shuster and Martin Finkelstein referred to as the "silent revolution" in their book The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). This piecemeal process at most institutions was not the result of a careful review of academic staffing needs or a systematic effort to improve the quality of instruction and scholarship. Nor was it the outcome of a national debate on the nature of the academic profession in the 21st century. -- Roger G. Baldwin, Inside Higher Ed

A roundup of the initial reactions, via BBC:

"One of Google's major goals is to take Microsoft out, to systematically destroy their hold on the market," said Mr Enderle.

"Google wants to eliminate Microsoft and it's a unique battle. The strategy is good. The big question is, will it work?"

At the popular blog, TechCrunch, MG Siegler said: "Let's be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of all bombs on its rival, Microsoft."

Microsoft releases Windows 7 later this year to replace Windows Vista and Windows XP, which is eight years old.

I have to make a conscious effort to say "Grand Theft Auto" when I'm talking about the game.

An excellent group blog begins its afterlife.

Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin), is now back as an aggregator of four blogs by the original GTxA authors, including this one. Check it out.

I tell my kids steampunk bedtime stories about the adventures of Captain Rod Gearhart and the Magnificent Blimpship. Since I also enjoy playing with Blender 3D, it seemed natural to make these clockwork heart decorations. (My wife offered detailed pointers to tweak the one on the right.)

At the recent Computers & Writing conference, I found myself, in the Q & A during several sessions, strongly advocating coding skills as a 21st-century core literacy.   (See Ian Bogost, Procedural Literacy. In the following reflection, I talk mostly about my use of Inform 7, but I also touch on Scratch.)

Here at Seton Hill, all students must fulfill a computer science requirement, but it's really set up as a "how to use Microsoft Office" course.  Students who can already use a spreadsheet or make a slideshow can pay to test out of the course, but I've heard from many students who don't want to pay for the test, preferring instead to take the course and get an easy A by being "taught" how to do stuff they already know.  (One faculty member has a special section of that course in which students learn how to program little table-top robots, but they still have to work in all the Office applications along the way.)

But even after students have taken this course, I regularly see evidence they have no idea what's happening when they click an icon or connect to a network drive.  They regularly lose files, saving their website projects onto thumb drives with pointers like "file://c:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/myphoto.png". They're mystified when I ask them to rename a text file with an ".htm" extension, because most have never even *seen* a file extension.

While it's good that the graphical user interface has brought the power of computing to the masses, at the same time, hiding all the working parts behind a streamlined interface turns coders into a priesthood of the elite, and that's not good for culture at large.

This bit of educational theatrical fun sounds awesome! Via.

Travelling from past to future through a landscape of machines and ideas Walk the Plank and Thingumajig Theatre have created an interactive journey through the courtyard of Manchester's Town Hall. The audience will help inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage find the clues to repair his Difference Engine; solve the spider's riddles, hidden in the worldwide web; persuade the counting madman to open the gates to the Hall of Shadows...and discover the secret workings of the steampunk arcade. --The Manchester International Festival

The Facebook epic fail isn't just grist for the teen angst mill. It also affects the head of the British secret service. Via.

The new head of MI6 has been left exposed by a major personal security breach after his wife published intimate photographs and family details on the Facebook website.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all Britain's spying operations abroad.

But his wife's entries on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, who their friends are and where they spend their holidays. -- Jason Lewis, Mail

From a thoughtful review of the Kindle:

The Kindle DX's five-way joystick is quick, convenient, and expertly designed. (Plastic Logic's touch screen really isn't markedly better than using Amazon's joy stick, but that's because the touch options are fairly rudimentary.) The problem is the dearth of good places to direct the cursor.

That's a real shame because one thing we've learned over the last two decades in journalism is that information architecture is everything. Charticles, sections, deep captions, multiple points of entry, these are the hallmarks of journalistic innovation--and successful careers--for this generation of editors and readers. But all of that has been thrown out with the E Ink interface. We're back in the days of William Shawn's New Yorker with no table of contents and bylines at the end of the article. -- Marion Maneker, Slate

This weekend, how can the kids and I spend our time better than playing:

• Political Machine 2008 (try explaining "special interest groups" to a seven-year-old)
• Liberty's Kids (1776, from the perspective of Ben Franklin's printing apprentice, among others)
  
• Sid Meier's Civil War Collection (sort of a stretch, I know, but the fate of the union was at stake)
• The Oregon Trail, 5th Edition (You have died of dysentery)

We don't own a copy, but we always try to rent the musical 1776.

There's no information in the non-subscription IMDB, but there is an entry for a movie based on Rossum's Universal Robots.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300594/

The original play was a talky social comedy mixed with a melodrama (complete with a "missing papers" plot twist), and the big action sequences happened off-stage (with characters either referring in passing to events that happened years ago, or characters looking through windows and describing what they saw). So I worry what "enhancements" might make their way into a big-budget production. (Sigh.)

If anybody knows more about this movie (faithful art-house reproduction of the original play? CGI-infested revisionary abomination?), I'd welcome the news.

The grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon have been grist for the moon conspiracy theory mill for decades.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in archive footage--by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

To the later horror of researchers and scientists, it was those tapes that went missing.

But now, according to the Daily Express, the original high-quality recordings have been found. (It looks like NASA was planning to surprise the world a little closer to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.)

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition--including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead--evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language. -- Jamais Cascio, The Atlantic