So, let’s see, Microsoft pays AOL $750 million, AOL switches to Internet Explorer, and the two biggest behemoths in the online world start working together instead of competing.
The next time you hear anyone in the Bush administration talk about the importance of competition and the free market, remember whose Justice Department it was that brought us the Microsoft antitrust settlement.
The media have jumped all over this story about the study that shows playing shoot-em-up videogames increases visual attention skills. Could gaming really be good for you?
Well, I don’t doubt that playing games can be a good thing in some cases, and I’m not looking to join any kind of down-with-gaming posse. But there seems to be a huge hole in this study that I haven’t yet seen pointed out.
If, for instance, you read the Wall Street Journal account, this is what you learn about the various skills that seemed to improve among people who played a lot of computer games:
“In one test, a small object flashed on a computer screen for 1/160th of a second, and the volunteer had to indicate where.”
“In another test, between one and 10 small objects flashed on the screen simultaneously for a fraction of a second, too short to count them individually.”
“In another test, the researchers had volunteers indicate the location of a solid triangle in a circle on a screen filled with distracting shapes…”
Notice that one phrase keeps recurring: on screen. The researchers conducted all their visual tests on a computer.
As far as I can tell, this study managed to prove that if you spend many hours in front of a computer screen playing games, you will increase your ability to detect, identify, and remember objects on a computer screen.
That may have some real value in our society — which, after all, is increasingly operated via a computer screen. But it seems a far cry from proving the very different notion that playing computer games actually improves more general visual skills. I am not a student of the science of vision but I know there are such things as peripheral vision and depth-of-field, and that a computer screen — far from testing the full capacity of the amazing human sense of sight — operates in only a very narrow range of that sense.
A Moving N.Y. Times op-ed by Ellen Ullman about how cross-generational knowledge transfer is suffering in the software industry with so many programmers out of work. Read it for her encomium to the “mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers” that are the sources of innovation.
| Had nations better understood the potential of the Internet, I suspect they might well have strangled it in its cradle. Emergent technology is, by its very nature, out of control, and leads to unpredictable outcomes. As indeed does the emergent realm of the digital. I prefer to view this not as the advent of some new and extraordinary weirdness, but as part of the ongoing manifestation of some very ancient and extraordinary weirdness: our gradual spinning of a sort of extended prosthetic mass nervous-system, out of some urge that was present around the cooking-fires of our earliest human ancestors. |
William Gibson, speaking to the Director’s Guild of America. The whole speech is extraordinary.
Dan Gillmor’s on-the-scene report about OhmyNews, South Korea’s hugely successful experiment in grassroots-up online journalism. Most unexpected fact: The site’s progressive founder got some of his inspiration from his time as a student at Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia, observing the way American conservatives get their message across in the U.S. media.
Also: “Dynamics of a blogosphere story”: An unusually comprehensive and detailed study of how blogs and the mainstream media interact to create “hot” stories, with interesting insights into how individual stories do or don’t “go viral.” [link thanks to Scripting News]
One of the things I’m proudest of from my tenure as Salon’s technology editor was whatever role we played in helping the writing of Ellen Ullman — some of the most thoughtful, accessible prose on programming you’ll find anywhere — reach a wider audience. We excerpted her “Close to the Machine” when it came out in 1997, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her at the time. She later did some more memorable writing for Salon.
Now she’s written a wonderful novel called “The Bug.” You can read the excerpt here, and my new interview with her here.
A long long time ago I wrote a piece about the work of Edward Tufte — “data artist” and scourge of badly presented information — and I suppose that is why I found, in my mailbox upon my return from vacation, a copy of a new booklet he has written, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.“
It’s a wonderful broadside against the use of PowerPoint to dumb down the relationship between speaker and audience. Here’s one choice bit:
| PP convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. |
Tufte — whose analysis of failures in the presentation of data preceding the Challenger space shuttle disaster is one of the highlights of his previous work — also deconstructs a slide from a Boeing PowerPoint report on the damage to the Columbia shuttle. And the booklet offers a reprise of Peter Norvig’s hilarious PowerPoint rendition of the Gettysburg address.
The thing is all of 24 pages, but as Tufte’s readers know, he packs a lot into a page.
People who create software are forever trying to explain their somewhat obscure disipline by offering friendly analogies. The most common one is that making software is like building buildings. Recently there’s been some discussion of this notion, including an article on Kuro5hin suggesting that “the software construction analogy is broken.”
Maybe making software is more like politics, or writing laws. Or like writing music. Or like growing critters in vats. Or like…
Brian Marick and Ken Schwaber are trying to broaden the thinking in this area and are organizing an event at an upcoming software conference that they call the Analogy Fest: “The Analogy Fest is an attempt to manufacture serendipity, to create the circumstances in which clever people might have an ‘Aha!’ moment. We’ll do that by having semi-structured, small group conversations about papers that draw analogies between software development and something else.”
Sounds interesting to me. I think they’re still looking for more papers to make the event happen.
If you used an IBM PC in the 1980s — if you used one a lot — you came to know, and perhaps love, the feel of the old IBM keyboards. They were solid. The keys moved. They clicked. Over time, as every aspect of PC manufacturing faced the grim reaper of cost-cutting, keyboards became flimsy and disposable pieces of plastic. The touch and feel of the old IBMs became a lost artifact of the early PC era.
So I was thrilled to read (on MSNBC, via Gizmodo) that somebody is still making a contemporary equivalent of those old keyboards. They cost about $50, or five to ten times the price of today’s junky keyboards, but boy, I think it’s probably worth it.
My column about the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference — a musing on the future of Web services, as the wave of idealistic technological innovation hits the breakers of proprietaty business thinking and legal constraint — is now up on Salon, here. (It’s a Salon Premium-only piece, but anyone can read it if you watch an ad and get a “daypass.”)
For those interested in more session-by-session reports from this conference, there’s a list of those bloggers who provided notes here.
This was beyond a doubt the most heavily blogged, WiFi-hotspotted, wiki-fied, IM-ed, chat-enabled event I’ve ever attended. There was even some cool, Rendezvous-enabled group-note-taking employing some software called Hydra.
At one point at the start of a talk I saw Cory Doctorow and Glenn Fleishman wandering the hall, laptops held open at waist level, moving intently, deliberately, up aisles and down rows. I understood on an intellectual level that their orbit somehow involved a hunt for good 802.11b reception; but what my eyes took in seemed more seance-like, a wireless ritual. It was as though they were scouting for the geek music of the spheres. I hope they found it.
