Thursday, November 24, 2005

Those Video Game "Slackers"

According to the New York Times (Nov. 22, 2005) over 100 American colleges, plus many overseas, are offering courses in video game development, as compared to less than 12 universities offering the subject five years ago. Some universities, like Carnegie Mellon, are staffing their program with faculty from a mix of areas. Carnegie Mellon has a professor with a drama background and another with a computer science background. Bing Gordon, chief creative officer of Electronic Arts was quoted as saying that the most successful graduates of digital entertainment programs had come to the field with a multi-disciplinary background.

It's good that other students have the "new" option of studying and pursuing interactive digital games. I'm not a "gamer," so I will gravitate to another venue.

Schiesel, Seth, " Video Games Are Their Major, So Don't Call Them Slackers" New York Times, November 22, 2005.http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/22/arts/design/22vide.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

New Performance: "Super Vision"

BAM Harvey Theater in New York City is presenting a new performance is about several types of identity theft, put into story form.

Their description:
" The world is at your fingertips. Literally. A few strokes on the keyboard take you, virtually, anywhere you want to go, click by click creating a cyber composite of yourself. Every bit of data—credit card purchases, email messages, academic degrees, medical records—none of it goes away, ever. You’re there for the taking.

What if someone re-created himself out of all that detritus? What if he, essentially, took part of you?

Information anxiety, indeed, brought to you by the New York-based Builders Association (Alladeen, 2003 Next Wave) and multi-disciplinary studio dbox. Under the direction of Marianne Weems, whose unerring ability to tap into the zeitgeist gives her work a breathtaking immediacy, Super Vision explores how our identities seem to be increasingly dependent on, and constituted by, the cloud of data that surrounds each of us.

The production comprises three chilling stories: the machinations of a father who has co-opted his son’s digital identity; a data addict coping with her grandmother’s advancing senility; and a man who exposes more and more of his data in order to travel freely. Science fiction? Just hand over your credit card number and find out."

About Super Vision
http://www.bam.org/events/06SUPE/06SUPE.aspx
Interview
http://www.bam.org/events/06SUPE/06SUPE_ezine.aspx
Super Vision website
http://www.superv.org

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Laptop for students 3rd World

Announced today, a laptop for students in "developing" countries: a laptop that you can hand-crank in case there's no power.
Perhaps we need a hand crank too!
http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/11/16/PM200511167.html

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Microsoft's "Live"

From "Any Big Revolution On the Net Will Be Televised by Microsoft," The Wall Street Journal, November 9, 2005

Microsoft's new software is designed for use in the upcoming New Internet, or "Web 2.0," as some call it. The new Web is not here yet. With the new version of the Web, you will run programs on the Internet that you now run on your home computer. Microsoft is jumping in on the game and competing with Google's Gmail, Google Maps and other competitors. The idea of running personalized programs on the Web is counter to Microsoft's Office and Windows, that run from computers.

Last week, Microsoft unveiled its "Live" collection of services and software in San Francisco. Live is still in the early stage of development. Live's free version will be supported by advertising. If you do not want to see advertisements, then you will have to pay to keep them off your screen.

In case advertisement does not make big profits, or if the Live does not do well, Microsoft has Office and Windows to rely on.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Urban Planning-and Citizen Comments

Urban Planning: This time citizens will be able to participate in workshops and put comments on the Web.

If you're interested in participating with the discussions on the designs for updating the New Haven, CT downtown area to replace the old Mall and the old Coliseum, you can go to an upcoming workshop to be held at Ninth Square, in New Haven, CT.

People could break into groups and tour the sites. Ledbetter and Munday agreed that the ideas generated from the workshops should be put up on the city's Web site so that more comments can be added. I feel that this is a great idea. Hopefully, the workshops and Web comments will generate good ideas that will be taken seriously.

The ideas generated so far are controversial. I hope that the new plans encompass all of New Haven's classes of people, not just for those who can spend lots on the stores in the proposed new marketplace. After all, the new Downtown Gateway Master Plan is supposed to serve community college students, not just Yale students.

Some residential units are proposed, but I do not know how many are marked for "affordable housing." There should be a good percentage of units available at very "affordable" rates. If New Haven's urban planning project goes like those of White Plains and Stamford (20 or 30 years ago), then there will be no housing for the poor. We will then continue the cycle of urban homelessness and blight, instead of improving the issue. When White Plains and Stamford "renewed" their downtown areas, they put the poor in temporary housing in motels for a fixed period of time. No permanent dwellings were provided. People were expected to drift off to Bridgeport. This is only one reason why Bridgeport had so many problems.

After Hurricane Katrina, Mayor DeStefano offered housing for New Orleans' newly homeless population. As one could expect, this evoked an outcry from some people right here in New Haven, because they had already been on the waiting list for years!

I hope that New Haven plans intelligently, and does not make the same mistake that other cities have made!

NOTE: See title for link to newspaper article

Home from a Junked 747

Architect David Hertz of Santa Monica is designing a home made from an old 747 jet. His client, Francie Rehwald wants a curvy, eco-clean home where she can practice yoga, organic gardening and meditation. Scrap from the junked plane will be used to build a number of buildings on the hilly site. The nose will be a meditation building, a wing will be an awning, and other pieces will be used for an art studio, loft and a barn. This venture will come to 1.5 to 2 million. The plane will be buffed to reduce its shine and remove paint so that it will not disturb neighbors or confuse planes flying above. Ms. Rehwald's property is surrounded by former spouses of Bob Dylan and Olivia Newton-John, so it needs a low profile appearance. Other "neighbors" are the coyotes, mountain lions and rattlesnakes that traverse the area. Ms. Rehwald has an archeologist to help her deal with the wildlife.

Source: Title has link to newspaper article: Frangos, Alex, "West Coast Woman To Build Crash Pad Out of an Old 747," Wall Street Journal, Weekend Edition, Nov. 5-6, 2005.
(As posted in my other blog, "Domaround")

Clean Energy Conference

The Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center and the Center for Economic and Environmental Partnership, Inc. will host a conference November 7, 2005 in Boston, to promote business ventures in clean energy in the Northeast. The Massachusetts Hydrogen Coalition and the Energy Special Interest Group at the MIT Enterprise Forum will have special sessions.

A career fair will be held in the afternoon for jobseekers and employers.

Center for Economic and Environmental Partnership:
http://store.mountainmedia.com/ceepinc/calendar.cfm?do=detail&d=3191&c=4943&p=33332
(As posted in my other blog, "Domaround")

NOTE: Title has link to web site.

Friday, November 04, 2005

Moulthrop’s “revolution”

Once again, we have a verbose article [The New Media Reader, by Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, MIT Press, 2003] that could be stated briefly. On page 697, Moulthrop quotes Thomas Pynchon with “paranoia” as “the realization that everything is connected…” If the writers feel that way, perhaps they need either "consciousness healing" or medical attention!

The babble continues with more theories until page 701 when the author discusses that hypertext, when taken to its limit can become “every bit as institutionalized and conservative as broadcast networks.” And, Gibson called cyberspace “a Cartesian territory where scientists of control define boundaries over power lines.”

Then on page 702, the Moulthrop quotes Timothy Leary with “reality pilot.” At that point, I decided to get a Wiki reading on Leary, and later found http://www.llp.armstrong.edu/reese/courses/4700/cornwell/p3.htm to get a better idea of “reality pilot.”

Kelly Cornwell, a student in Savannah, wrote an academic essay, discussing the term, “cyberpunk.” In her essay, she said that Leary calls cyberpunks:
"inventors, innovative writers, technofrontier artists, [...] elegant hackers, [...] media explorers, [... and] all those who boldly package and steer ideas out there where no thoughts have gone before." (369, "The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot.").

Kelly wrote that the Greek definition of “kubernetes” became the Latin “gubernetes.” Kubernetes is the mariner or pilot who has to think independently. Gubernetes is to control actions or behavior, to direct or regulate.
It seems to me that these two terms are a good refection of the two directions that “cyberspace” can take us, according to our readings.

I feel that the most of the academic authors we have been reading in the New Media Reader could each have described their concept within a few pages. What does this say about the power or tradition of literature?

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

More on Reading Online

For online reading, we will need a different style of writing so that it will be easier for the reader.

Laura Ruel and Steve Outing created a heatmap to show how the eye focuses on the left side of a page and then moves right. It is shown below. If it doesn’t show in this threaded discussion, you can see it at: http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm

Jakob Neilson is the recognized “guru” of web design (although his own Alertbox web sites do not seem to follow his own rules)! According to Neilsen and Morkes, studies have shown that users do not actually read web text, but they scan it.

Neilsen suggested that online writers should:
* use hypertext links,
* meaningful sub-headings,
* bulleted lists,
* paragraphs with one idea only,
* use less words than print writing, and
* use the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion.

Contrary to the usual style of journalistic writing, an Inverted Pyramid-style article actually starts with the conclusion. This is followed by the most substantial supporting information. Background information is used last. The inverted pyramid is very efficient for Web readers because they can stop reading at any point in the article and still have the most important points, thereby saving the reader from having to skim the entire article.

Jakob Neilson on how to write for the web:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9710a.html
And on inverted pyramids, Neilsen, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9606.html

Reading Online versus from Print Media

Stanford University and the Poynter Institute collaborated to do a study that started in 1998 to find how Internet readers see news on the Web. The technology implemented to test this study was an eyetracking device. Test subjects wore an SMI EyeLink system that recorded movements of the subjects’ eyes onto a computer database. The results of the 1998 test showed an unexpected strong preference for text over graphics upon entry to web pages. The 2004 Eyetrack III study yielded the following results:

• Headlines attract the focus by entering the page from the upper left and also the upper right.
• Online readers read a minimum of approximately five headlines, even when there are more headlines.
• The first several words of each headline are the most important.
• Flags and Logos are best placed in the upper left areas.
• Large type is used for light scanning of the eyes. Smaller type is read more often.

The Stanford Poynter Project Study, http://www.poynterextra.org