I guess I won't be linking to any many more NYT articles.

NYT has disabled their special access for webmasters

I've had a Kindle DX for a few weeks now. I've been using it as I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland to my daughter. I haven't yet used the Kindle to buy any books, but I've stuffed it with out-of-copyright classics and academic PDFs.

It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to set up the text files, break them into chapters, and set my text-to-speech program to generate the MP3s.  Depending on how long the text is, it might take 20 minutes for the MP3s to generate, but there's always something to do while I'm waiting.

Over the past couple of years, I'd gotten rather accustomed to using Text Aloud's file splitter utility to break a long e-text into separate chapter files, converting each chapter in to a separate MP3, and setting my voice recorder to require me to push "play" to start a new file.  I lie there in bed, with my finger over the "play" button, like a train engineer with his hand on the dead man switch. When I fall asleep, the recorder doesn't go on to the next chapter, so when I wake up in the morning I can jump back to the previous chapter, and in between snooze alarms, fast-forward to the last part I remember.

The Kindle has a very useful text-to-speech option, and in the past few weeks I've used it to listen to The Wizard of Oz and A Christmas Carol, both of which I've read several times the conventional way.  I'm teaching them as light after-Thanksgiving books in two different classes, and I've found that listening to a familiar text forces me to think about it in a different way.

But when I fall asleep listening to an e-Book on the Kindle, I wake up the next morning and the Kindle has advanced chapter-by-chapter all the way to the end of the book. It only takes a few minutes to find the table of contents and figure out what was the last chapter I remember before dozing off.  It's not a big complaint, but it is something I'd like to be able to control.

Wired gives Star Wars a good drubbing, focusing on the ending:

There are somewhere between 20 and 30 one-man fighters in the assault, right? And of all of those guys, only Luke, Wedge and some guy in a Y-wing make it back (and Han and Chewie, of course, but they weren't part of the original team). So that means that in this fight, despite its amazing success, the rebels lost somewhere between 17 and 27 of their very best, bravest pilots. Yet all they can do is cheer as Luke descends the ladder of his X-wing. Luke cheers, too, hugs Leia, and is absolutely ecstatic ... until he realizes that R2-D2 got badly damaged in the fight, at which point he is nearly distraught. Losing fellow human beings, including a good friend of his, that doesn't matter; possibly losing a cute but replaceable machine, now that's sad. --GeekDad

Via Jay is Games

We are pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we're calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme "escape". It's text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full details are below, so fire up your Z-code compiler and get to writing!

• Design a one-room game of interactive fiction in Z-code that incorporates the theme: "escape".

• 1st place:
  • $1,000
• 2nd place:
  • $500
• 3rd place:
  • $250

The deadline for entries is
Sunday, January 31, 2010 at 11:59PM (GMT-5:00).

Sadly, I haven't had time to play any of the IF Comp games this year, but here are the winners.

Vote Summary
Place	Game	Avg.	Std. Dev.	No. Votes
1	Rover's Day Out	7.96	1.65	92
2	Broken Legs	7.39	1.72	92
3	Snowquest	7.37	1.41	101

The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying time, emotion and reasoning as it bleeds through a wood pulp page is almost gone. We are going to lose something there, as we have already lost so much. --Jason Scott

A wonderful tribute to an enduring (and endearing) medium for capturing thoughts.

Beatiful graphic visualization of CYOA books.  Not just in the abstract -- these are visualizations of specific CYOA titles.

At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page. A smaller number of pages tell a conclusion to the story and represent an endpoint with no further jumps. We can subdivide these 'narrative' and 'endings' groups further based on the number of choices offered or the goodness of the ending. To visualize this, imagine color-coding every page in the book and then laying the pages out next to each other:

In this example book, page one is a 'branching' decision, meaning there are at least two choices offered to the reader. The second page is a 'story' page, meaning that it was either a text page that had a single forced choice (e.g., 'To continue, turn to page 30'), or an illustration page outside of the stream of the story. The brightly colored pages are endings of various degrees of direness. Great endings come in the middle and at the end of this selection of pages. The first ending in the book is an unfortunate one -- a common trope in these stories. --Samizdat

Do not miss the animations representing paths through the novel. A beautiful site! Thanks for the recommendation, Danielle!

A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and it has resulted in two groundbreaking papers published in the journals Ethology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Specifically, Glocker's series of experiments demonstrated that the act of looking at baby pictures stirs up an ancient part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

"It's in the midbrain," Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, "which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli."

Dr. Glocker is too much of a scientist to say so, but her experiments more or less prove that cuteness is physically addicting. --Vanity Fair

Many have defined the problem -- people are abandoning old media for new in droves -- but nobody has come remotely close to figuring out the formula to monetize this audience in a way that ensures the range and level of news and periodical content and offers the rich experience advertisers will pay a premium to be part of.

Pulling it off would take characteristic Apple hardware/software flair -- and a bit of uncharacteristic magnanimity. But the "X" factor is Jobs himself. Whatever you believe about his health, Jobs will not live forever. We're guessing that he, like all high achievers, believes that yesterday's accomplishments, however fantastic, are also yesterday's news. If he is looking for One Last Thing, saving journalism would be the Holy Grail. --Wired

Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry - and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago.

"I don't think people realize how big this has become, and how quickly," said Weintraub, adding that a popular top flog campaign can generate 10,000 daily sales. --MSNBC

I certainly realize it. Now that a lot of the conversations that used to take place on blogs are taking place on Twitter, I'm getting far more comments from spammers than from visitors. I'm glad to see someone's writing about this advertising trend.

Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that's a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can't turn PDFs into XML.

Flash isn't off the hook either. Government has spent lots of time and money developing flash tools to allow citizens to view charts and graphs online, and while we're happy the government is interested in allowing citizens to do this, Government's primary method of disclosure should not be these visualizations, but rather publishing the APIs and datasets that allow citizens to make their own. Only after those things are completed to the fullest extent possible should government be working on its own visualizations. While Adobe may say in their open government whitepaper:

"Since the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology."

This is nonsense. --Sunlight Labs (via)

The Kindle e-book reader frees academics from having to carry around a huge collection of chunks of matter, but flipping from main text to footnotes is awkward, and the highlighting tool doesn't replace the bracketing, underlining, and commenting that we do between the lines.

In a few days, I expect to be the owner of a new Kindle DX (the full-page reader, designed for magazines and full-page PDF readings). I found the Kindle most useful when I was reading for pleasure.

I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them. --Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed

I hear students tell me that in some disciplines, individual textbooks cost $200. I don't think it's the Kindle that's done the alienating.

Update: MIke Arnzen invokes the Kindle in a good post on teaching creative writing in the digital age. His reflections parallel many of my own, as I contemplate my role as a teacher of journalism.

http://www.60secondrecap.com/resource/

How to Write a Paper

• 1: Get Psyched
• 2: The Thesis Statement
• 3: Organization
• 4: Proving you know what you're talking about
• 5: Your teacher is not a mind-reader
• 6: In Conclusion
• 7: Rah-rah-rah, etc.

Avi sez, "'Mickey Mouse in Gurs' is a tragic 'comic' book made by Horst Rosenthal in 1942 while incarcerated at the Gurs internment camp in France. Rosenthal uses Mickey Mouse as a kind of subversive Virgil to guide us through the hellish experiences of the concentration camp. Horst Rosenthal was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942." --BoingBoing

A few of the many events scheduled in the Pittsburgh region.

"Of Faith and Kristallnacht," a panel discussion with keynote speaker Dr. Robert Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University; Sister Gemma del Duca, National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University; and the Rev. Don Green, executive director of Christian Associates of Southwestern Pennsylvania; among others. 7 p.m., Wednesday, The Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Monroeville (412-421-1500).

"The Use of Comic Books in Teaching the Holocaust," a lecture by Beverly Harris-Schenz of the University of Pittsburgh German Department, on teaching the Holocaust to German students. 8 p.m., Thursday, Jewish Community Center (412-421-1500).

"Brundibar," a children's opera originally performed by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp, adapted by Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh. Friday through next Sunday, CAPA Theater, Downtown (412-456-6666).

--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under the link and the link itself illegible.

I had already included a link to the HuffPo. I had to spend extra time locating and removing this extra crap that appeared in my clipboard buffer.

<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>

I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.

The next time I think of driving traffic to The Huffington Post, I'll remember how their CSS trick messed up my layout, and I'll probably pass.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

Peter Mawhorter offers up a reading list on games:

For anyone curious about what I've been reading, here's the list of what I've read to get an introduction to this area:

• "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story" by Nicole Lazzaro.
• "GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games" by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth.
• "An Experiment in Automatic Game Design" by Julian Togelius and Jürgen Schmidhuber.
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster.

One other thing that I've not yet read but am interested in is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It's not targeted at games, and in fact looks at fun from a psychological perspective, but it's cited by most of what I've read so far, and is the product of some very thorough research.

I don't usually link to sites that collect a bunch of links and serve them up on a page full of ads, but this is a pretty good list from Squidoo.

Here you'll find the educational sites where my kids play online, and that are most often recommended by other parents who value fun learning games for their children.

1. Jumpstart Online Virtual World
2. PBSKids
3. Sesame Street
4. Disney Preschool
5. Nick Jr.
6. National Geographic Kids
7. Kaboose Funschool
8. FunBrain
9. Starfall
10. iKnowthat.com

Will I miss Geocities? No, not really. In 1998 or possibly 1999, I was teaching web authorship as part of a freshman composition class, and this page from a student project made me keep the "make a Geocities home page" and "make a creative hypertext" project around, even though every semester, a certain chunk of students complained about it. The plug has been pulled on Geocities, but I'm preserving a chunk of what it meant to me, as a teacher.

Miraculously, I, [Name], am able to create my own web pages.  The unthinkable is possible.  My ignorance about the computer world is coming to an end.  I am a student at the University of Eau Claire and I'm creating several web pages for English 110.  Come and check out my first web page at meet the family.  This link briefly summarizes a few childhood memories, personality traits, and individual hobbies. 

At the University of Eau Claire's home-page, you find information on UWEC's registration process, available classes, student services, job opportunities, blugold system, International exchange, and much more.  Search the UWEC home page to get a look at what the college has to offer.   

My English Professor, Dr. Jerz, and some of his students have created several web pages for faculty members and students to benefit from.  The Online Reading Room will guide you to helpful information on how to create a web page, how to write effective e-mails, top 5 tips for note taking, and more.    

If you like to play amusing, addicting computer games, try playing Eliza.  You make conversation with Eliza who listens and talks back.  She asks a lot of questions about your problems and sometimes does not make sense. 

English 110 with Dr.Jerz is not like the other English 110 classes.  His course page is the student's syllabus explaining the guidelines to assigned papers and projects.  Helpful examples of problems students run into when writing papers and creating web pages are also found at this site.  

My essay on how the Internet has affected my education. The challenges that I came across at college with computers were frustrating, but later greatly appreciated.  Computer skills are critical for college classes and in the end the frustration turns into gratitude.  

Read Martha's essay  one her web page about how the Internet has affected her education. She used the Internet in high school for fun and for note taking.  In college she now uses her computer skills for academic purposes.  Even though Martha uses the computer daily, she still feels much has to be learned.

 Danielle's essay is about her experience with the Internet.  She had some computer experience in her high school anatomy class looking at a fetal pig, but she came familiar with e-mail in college.  Now Dr. Jerz is challenging her and every student in English 110 to become less ignorant about the computer world.

For my creative hypertext, I wrote three essays from three different perspectives.  I wrote one essay from my dad's point of view, one from my point of view, and one from my point of view if I would still be living in Kansas today instead of living in Minnesota.  The three blurbs below give a brief summary of each essay.

Most students spent their spring break somewhere warm while I spent my break in Kansas visiting relatives.  A little conversation never hurt anyone even if it's farm talk.  With age comes an appreciation of understanding to not take history for granted.

Read from Dad's perspective of Kansas.  He tells how the vacation was through his eyes telling the highlights of the trip were seeing his sister, brother, and old friends.  Abilene recaptures old memories and by visiting he creates new.

Just imagine what life would be like if I would have remained living in Abilene.  Read the what if life where lived differently.   I go to college in Kansas, I am going to school to become a Vet (I hate animals), and I never had the chance to travel.  For my spring break, my brother and I take a trip to New York to visit my sister and trust me cowboy boots and hats don't fit in with the New Yorkers.

Looking forward to this promising resource.

I've wrapped the blogs up,  tidied them up, corrected & updated them and put them into 1 handy ebook for you to download and take home. It means you have have an all-in-one desktop reference to giving your multimedia journalism more spark, and getting in the entrepreneurial mindset.

Chapters include: video, audio, storytelling and branding.

It'll be available from Monday, it's 100% free and there's no registration or anything. Just click on the button and you'll be able to download it outright. --Adam Westbrook

From Awful Library Books.

For more schadenfreud, see Cake Wrecks, Photoshop Disasters, and Fail Blog.

Great stuff from Mark Marino... not only is the content fascinating, but the blog-sized presentation, for discusison, of a fundamental theoretical concept is a great example of what the blogging medium can do for (and to) scholarship.

Item for today: =

In Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo's article on the history of computers, the note the moment at which = moves from equivalency to assignment. Here is a moment where mathematical notation and code separate on the basis of assignment, where it moves from a real that represents abstractions to a realm that controls memory locations.

For all intents and purposes
Algebra: x = 0; and computer code: x=0;
seem to mean the same thing.

However, on the most fundamental levels, they are not. The one establishes equivalence of signs. The other tells the computer to store the value 0 in the location represented by x.

In CCS, we have not just a mathematical system, for surely much of algorithms is mathematical. However, when critics talk about the materiality of these performative declarations in programming languages, they are talking about this latter notion of x=2.

Again, I don't want to rule out the possibility of critically analyzing mathematics. I just want to talk about this moment of the separation, where the computational instructions gain additional semantic meaning because there signs are not just representations, but commands with material ramifications. --Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies

I assigned book one of Maus: A Survivor's Tale to a "Writing About Literature" class, the designated writing-intensive course for our English majors.

The students discussed the abrupt ending, the use of ethnic stereotypes, and of course the comic book medium itself. One student's "Hearing through Yiddish... Seeing in Ink..." is particularly thoughtful.

About a third of the class went on to read book two, even though it wasn't on the syllabus; one student read the book aloud to her nine-year-old sister.

This weekend, Seton Hill is home to a conference sponsored by the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education.  I'm canceling all my classes during one day of the conference.

Movie critics are sometimes asked why all movies cost the same to view, even though some may have cost $100 million to make, and others $500,000. It's a reasonable question. I suppose the reasoning is that you get about two hours of movie either way. Now 3-D has provided exhibitors with a subterfuge to force consumers to subsidise their upgraded projection facilities -- which is deceptive, because most theatres are upgrading to digital projectors anyway. This could be called the 3-D children's tax.

Do kids really care? --Roger Ebert, Spectator

Don't hate on the TV media just because they helped the nation fall for the Balloon Boy Hoax. Back in the day, the print media were the obvious target.

On April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article in The New York Sun, chronicling how Monck Mason, leaving England for Paris drifted off course and had traveled across the Atlantic in three days, landing safely on Sullivan's Island near Charleston South Carolina, while riding an ``egg-shaped gas-filled balloon'', named the Victoria.

The story caused such a stir that an excited mob quickly gathered outside of the editorial offices of the Sun, hoping to land a copy of the historic edition. Not until two days later did the New York daily publish a correction, noting the story was pure fiction. The published correction read: ``We are inclined to believe the intelligence is erroneous.'' -- The Morning Delivery

A fascinating twist to the complex story behind the legal battle behind the iconic Obama "HOPE" poster.

New filings to the court, he said, "state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used...and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images." 

In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster.  In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.

After Fairey's admission, a spokesman for the Associated Press issued a statement saying that Fairey "sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used."

Fairey said that his lawyers have taken the steps to amend his court pleadings to reflect the fact that "the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken." --Los Angeles Times

Jaw-droppingly cool-- though it probably helps if you've ever worked with Flash.

Animator vs. Animation

In a bid to save money, the station is planning to reassign the technicians who operate the electronic prompters that feed scripted news copy to the anchors while they're on the air. Instead, the station wants its anchors to do the job themselves.

[...]

"Instead of orchestrating coverage, fact-checking, handling breaking news, paying attention to the [newscast], engaging reporters, questioning authorities, covering bad writing and technical mistakes, anchors will now spend most of their time" running the prompter, said one newsroom employee, who asked not to be identified because he's not authorized to discuss the change. "It's kind of like a literal one-man band -- singing, banging a drum, crashing cymbals, playing a trumpet and strumming a guitar . . . except we're not playing show tunes here." Washington Post

When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages--from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans--being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.--Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal

The article is more about the rise of microcommunication tools than it is about the end of e-mail, but it does a fair job explaining the difference.