Culture
Just a quick thought (useless of course): Nirvana's Nevermind was released the same year as the world wide web: 1991. It's pure apophenia. That allows me to bring here the definition of apophenia through this nice exemplification:
apophenia: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena.
Via sylvie noel: EtherPEG
EtherPEG is a free program for the Macintosh that shows you all the JPEGs (and GIFs) going by on your network.
EtherPEG was written at MacHack 2000 by Sam Bushell, Peter Bierman and Stuart Cheshire.
EtherPEG works by capturing unencrypted TCP packets off your local network, collecting packets into groups based on TCP connection (determined from source IP address, destination IP address, source TCP port and destination TCP port), reassembling those packets into order based on TCP sequence number, and then scanning the resulting data for byte sequences that suggest the presence of JPEG or GIF data.
Google Scholar is online since wednesday and already spread like a virus. The NYT has a paper about it. It's cool because people felt that I came out of the blue (me too).
The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center.(...) company executives say it is likely that advertisements will eventually accompany search results on Google Scholar. (...) "We don't know where the next breakthrough will come from," he said. "We want everyone to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants." (...) Google Scholar is another reflection of changing habits in the academic world, said Mr. Sack of HighWire Press. In the past decade, students and researchers have begun to go to online search engines first.
I am eager to see of librarians, archivists and documentalists will comment on this new tool. Of course there are some limits (I am quoted because I am a reviewer of a masters thesis for instance or because I am in acknowledgements of a friend's thesis) but the tool is promising with regard to the easiness of access.
The digital web magazine has a compelling paper about how "Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content". They present a "distributed navigation view" opposed to the previous "on-site navigation view" (“home page as the starting point” paradigm):
users navigate completely outside the site containing the target content. The only page they see is the one that the aggregator links to. So the IA that ends up getting users to the target content page isn’t the one on the site they end up on, it’s the aggregator’s site’s IA
I fully agree with Greg Costikiyan's column in Gamasutra about mobile games. He claims that business models killed innovation, even though there are strong technological potential (presence-detection, lbs...).
I got interested in mobile games five years ago, when cell phones capable of supporting games first started to appear. The technology was then primitive, but would clearly improve over time, and I was dissatisfied with the increasing difficulty of getting any kind of innovative game published in the conventional games industry (...) mobile devices offered the opportunity to create a whole new category of media-poor but communication-rich games, quite unlike anything seen before. (...) Virtually all of the mobile games offered today are arcade game retreads, or inferior implementations of game styles that work better on other devices. No new game styles have proven popular; the mobile games industry is basically the same as the conventional industry, writ small. (...) if nothing changes, we have already lost the opportunity to create something novel and interesting in mobile games, and will be stuck, for all time to come, with a grindingly dull appendage to the conventional games industry, based almost entirely on licensed crap.
It's a shame I'm gonna miss the Design Biennale in Saint Etienne, France. I already spotted some interesting elements but I won't find time to go there (even though I would like to say hello to my friends who live there). An interesting topic is the temporary cardboard habitation exhibit:
It seems that Technorati now include a "endorsement" and "vote" feature! Even though it is still experimental, it's really interesting. It is close to the idea I had with roberto one year ago. It's cool to see that paths converge!The discussion in the faq adresses problem we also had:
Why only for and against? How about something more nuanced?
The point of this is to provide a strong yes/no response. Finer-grained measures of agreement don't make much sense on an individual basis; aggregating many votes is more interesting. For example, consider how eBay's user rating system has been reduced to a like/dislike switch by users. The 'Ayes, Noes, abstentions' model has served well in politics and committees, when a division is called for.There are much richer ways to express this idea and similar ones using RDF and semantic web ideas
Indeed there are, but typing them by hand and remembering them is beyond most mere mortals, and automated tools don't do this either. This is meant to be very simple, memorable and easy to type in the current generation of blogging tools, that largely need manual entry of URLs. Similarly, it is easily added to an automated tool.
The syntax is pretty simple:
hree new values for the rel attribute of the "a" (link) tag in HTML. The new values are "vote-for""vote-abstain" or "vote-against", which are mutually exclusive, and represent agreement, abstention or indifference, and disagreement respectively. A link without an explicit vote 'rel' value is deemed to have value "vote-for" or "vote-abstain", depending on the application.
I don't understand why I would put a link on my blogroll that I don't like. Why voting against a blog that I link, if I don't like it, I do not link it...
A"100Gb evening" is a term coined by Paul Baron to refer to, as he says, "events where I have discovered so many things that I want to research more"
Version 2004 is going to be held in Geneva, november 11th - december 19th 2004.
VERSION 2004 SIMulation CITY follows up on the last biennial, The Inhabitable Image VERSION 2002, which delved into the perception of concrete and virtual structured space. This year’s event addresses the question of the contemporary urban city as a project of social organization, on the one hand, and as the focus of a number of imaginative worlds linked with the utopian city, on the other. The latest technologies, a source of fears as much as hopes, are the principal supports for these new representations. It is this utopia then that the artists and other participants in VERSION 2004 SIMulation CITY set out to analyze.
Exhibitions by Peter Aerschmann, Tobias Bernstrup, Blast Theory, collectif_fact, Jonah Freeman, John Pilson, Tania Ruiz
Popular Science has a nice column on the worst jobs in science:
Anal-Wart Researcher/Worm Parasitologist/Lab-Animal Veterinarian/Tampon Squeezer/Landfill Monitor/K-25 Demolition Worker/ Ecologist at St. John’s Harbor/Iraqi Archaeologist/Tick Dragger/Nurse/Computer Help-Desk Tech/Congressional Science Fellow/Public-School Science Teacher/Nosologist/Root Sorter/Crank/Television Meteorologist
Looks like the Personal memory aid (pdf page 13) is close to Dragonball z's gear, maybe a bit more low tech:
fab pointed me on this nice url: FAS.research. It is a social science-oriented research, consulting and training firm in the area of social network analysis. Basically, they did research on the social and political morphology of Austria, the measurement of social network diversity and the social structure of radical innovations.
I stumbled across this research projects which I found appealing: POKÉMON: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Children’s Global Media Culture.
The Pokémon project examined the rise and fall of one of Japan’s most profitable and popular exports. (...) In 1999, Professor Joseph Tobin of the University of Hawaii, an internationally renowned scholar in the field of Japanese/American educational and cultural studies, gathered a multi-national research team to investigate the Pokémon phenomenon.
The conference they held about it was called ‘Pikachu’s Global Adventure’, it is available now as a book. The methodology they used is pretty interesting, especially the last point:
- An overview of the Pokémon phenomenon, considering the production context (of the Nintendo Corporation), the characteristics of Pokémon texts, and debates about audiences. These findings were set in the context of broader debates about the relations between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ in Cultural Studies.
- An analysis of children’s creative writing using Pokémon themes and characters. Four stories written by 8-9-year-olds were analysed in detail, in order to explore the creative nature of children’s engagements with Pokémon, and the ways in which their writing functions as a form of identity construction.
- Research with reception class children (aged 4-5), exploring the nature of children’s play using Pokémon toys and artefacts. This study explored how play can give status to officially ‘disapproved’ forms of knowledge, and thereby empower children whose position in the classroom would otherwise be marginal.
- A case study of one child learning to play the Pokémon computer game. The analysis considered the use of knowledge and skill in game playing; the social negotiations that surround it; the interaction between the game and other media forms; and the nature of ‘interactivity’ in games of this kind.
Interesting account in the journal of hyperlinked organization about the fact that all data is metadata (contents are label).
There used to be a difference between data and metadata. Data was the suitcase and metadata was the name tag on it. Data was the folder and metadata was its label. Data was the contents of the book and metadata was the Dewey Decimal number on its spine. But, in the Third Age of Order (see the previous issue), everything is becoming metadata.
Via Slate:
former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman (who conceded that, yes, whale feces "have got to be massive") and archconservative Patrick Buchanan (who said that Saddam Hussein "was using BLTs on the Kurds"). In one episode, Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of the CIA, found himself debating whether terrorists could drive a train into the White House.(...) How can so many supposedly media-savvy operators—even members of the intelligence community—still be so easily fooled? Don't these people have assistants with subscriptions to HBO or, at the very least, access to the outside world? These questions represent more than idle curiosity.
I watched recently one of my favorite Jacques Tati movie: 'Jour de Fête'. I like this character 'Francois le facteur americain' (Francois the americam postman). There is now a nice website about him.
It should worth it: MAKE... coming in 2005...
Make brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. Make is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. This is a magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.
Via Gamasutra, "The Potential of America's Army as Civilian Public Sphere" by Zhan Li.
This thesis, researched during 2002-03, examines the political life of the America's Army fan community, comparing the activities and identities of three exceptional gamer groups (real life soldiers and veterans; Evangelical Christians; and hackers) to the official understanding of the game's purpose.(...) The thesis argues that the exceptional America's Army gamer groups' grassroots activities demonstrate how objections about the presumed triviality and irrelevance of gamespaces as political spaces may be refuted.
I already mentioned her but I've read an interesting paper by Constance A. Steinkuehler :Videogaming as Participation in a Discourse:
The analysis presented here is an initial attempt to explicate the kinds of social and material activities that MMORPGamers routinely participate in and, more specifically, how language functions within such activities. I will first briefly review the context of my research and the data collection and analysis methods I use to get at meaning-making (thus, cognition) in such settings. The remainder of this paper then focuses on the meaning and function of one utterance that occurred on an MMORPG called Lineage, demonstrating how this instance of language-in-use is situated in its particular (virtual) social and material context, tied to the Discourse community of MMORPGamers, and consequential for marking membership in that community.
Interesting concept: 'serious games' aka non-entertainment games. There is a conference about it in Washington DC in october.
Serious Games are applications of interactive technology that extend far beyond the traditional videogame market, including: training, policy exploration, analytics, visualization, simulation, education and health and therapy.