John Jones

Slate’s Bill James has a great article on the failures of the BCS system. Most of James’s points are based on a 2006 paper (requires login) in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports by UC-Irvine’s Hal S. Stern.

I couldn’t access Stern’s original article, but James summarizes his main points in the Slate piece:

The problems with the BCS are:

1. That there is a profound lack of conceptual clarity about the goals of the method;
   
2. That there is no genuine interest here in using statistical analysis to figure out how the teams compare with one another. The real purpose is to create some gobbledygook math to endorse the coaches' and sportswriters' vote;
   
3. That the ground rules of the calculations are irrational and prevent the statisticians from making any meaningful contribution; and
   
4. That the existence of this system has the purpose of justifying a few rich conferences in hijacking the search for a national title, avoiding a postseason tournament that would be preferred by the overwhelming majority of fans.

The excellent play of the teams at the top of the polls this year has illustrated the need for a college football playoff. Despite the legitimate cases for USC, Texas, and Utah to the national championship, it will be decided by two other teams (who also have legitimate claims on the title) in a one-off game that will settle nothing.

James does a nice job elaborating on Stern’s objections, as in this comment relating to 1.:

There are several things that a ranking system could do. It could rank teams based on their accomplishments over the course of the season—whom they played and whom they beat—or it could rank them based on the probability that they would win against a given opponent. It could rank teams based on how they have played over the course of the season, including perhaps in some early-season games against teams that were not quite sure who their quarterback was, or it could rank them based on how strong they are at the end of the season. It could rank the teams based on consistency, or it could rank them based on dominance.

Which of these is the goal of the BCS system?

Nobody has any idea. It's never been debated. There is a perception among the people who are in charge of this monkey that if you just turn the rankings over to a computer, the computer will figure those things out. The reality is that it can't. It is very difficult to objectively measure anything if you don't know what it is you are measuring.

Update: it appears that the list of objections to the BCS come from James, not from Stern, as I originally stated. -John

One drawback of any academic conference is the constant feeling that you are missing something. Typically, multiple panels are scheduled at the same time, and it can be difficult to know what knowledge is being produced and exchanged in sessions you are unable to attend. Last week's MLA conference, where I was on a panel on microblogging with Brian Croxall, Matt Gold, and David Parry, was no exception.

Because of the quality of the discussion session following our presentations, however, we wanted to take a step toward rectifying this situation. We decided that we would do our best to provide the details of our talks and discussion--as well as the subsequent blogged conversations that have arisen out of the panel--for those who weren't there.

Since the event was initiated and then organized using different social and collaborative media (Twitter, Skype, Pageflakes, etc.), we created a Google Doc of our notes and the following conversation. If you were able to attend the panel and would like to edit and update the document to cover something that we missed, please email the panel chair, Brian Croxall at b.croxall [at] gmail [dot] com, and he will be glad to give you editing privileges on the Google Doc on which this post is based. Otherwise, please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments section below. What follows is our best attempt at a recreation of the panel based on our recollection and notes.

Update: Cathy Davidson blogged about the panel on HASTAC a few days ago. Here's a link to her post.

Overview:

This panel was organized somewhat differently then the traditional MLA panels. That is, rather than follow the typical format in which three presenters read a paper for 20 minutes each, followed by a Q&A session of about 15 minutes, this panel constrained the initial presentation times. Each of the three panelists tried to limit their presentations to five minutes, ending their respective presentations with a series of questions rather than conclusions, leaving much more time for discussion. This was done not only in an effort to foster more discussion, but also in an effort to have the form of the session mimic the object of inquiry: microblogging. If Twitter and other such services were all about conversation, we reasoned, the panel itself should focus on generating that conversation.

Panelists:

Brian Croxall, Emory University (Chair)
John Jones, University of Texas, Austin
Matt Gold, New York City College of Technology, CUNY
David Parry, University of Texas, Dallas

Presentations:

Brian Croxall introduced the general concept of microblogging to the audience--describing it as a cross-platform, read/write networked experience--and outlined a few key terms related to the discussions that would follow. In addition to explaining the unusual format of the panel, Brian also invited the audience to use two hashtags to write about the conference on Twitter: #MLA08 for general MLA microblogging and #MLA140 for tweets about this specific panel, both of which had been used to compile the pre-convention page for the panel.

(Brian's Presentation slides are available at SlideRocket.)

Next, John Jones examined Twitter through the work of compositionist Fred Kemp, arguing that microblogging creates new kinds of aggregated texts that must be understood as collective entities rather than in their individual pieces. Thus, any one "tweet" may not make sense outside of the larger discourse, that is, the larger collective environment, in which that tweet was made. The various ways in which individual tweets can be aggregated, however, destabilize those collective environments since information can be arranged and rearranged in many different ways.

John argued that this leads at least two conclusions. First, debates over the value of internet communication services like blogs, Facebook, or Twitter can be usefully viewed as debates over how to value the texts these services generate and what constitutes the boundaries of those texts. Kemp states: "The value of written conversations … lies in the organic and open-ended nature of knowledge making they display, not in their transmitted factual increments, which are usually, and crudely, termed information" (187, orig. emphasis). When critics attack the worth of Twitter, they are, more often then not, focusing on the "transmitted factual increments,"—that is, singular tweets—rather than examining the non-traditional texts created by these individual tweets.

Second, what we need to consider is not just the individual pieces of information served by Twitter, but rather the various texts that these pieces can be aggregated into. The first way is to gather these texts into a traditional product of print culture. One example of a service that has assembled a useful, traditional text out of many aggregate contributions is Wikipedia. While the structure of Wikipedia is designed to efface individual contributions, the site is built on the back of an aggregative text.

Another way would be to create new texts. One example of these texts would be purposeful aggregations created on the fly to serve the specific needs of a particular audience. These texts may not be permanent, in that it may disappear once it is no longer needed. Examples include the Google Maps / Twitter mashup or politweets.com. Interestingly, both of these sites are now defunct: having served their purpose, these texts are no longer in use.

With aggregations like these, Twitter has allowed for texts that defy the traditional spatial and authorial boundaries we associate with the word "text." What remains for language scholars is how we will begin to interact with these self-constructed texts and the kinds of thinking that they will generate. If we wish to truly understand new services like Twitter, we need to pay greater attention to these new texts. As investigators of language, we need to begin to think about the literary / cultural importance of these texts and how they can be productively analyzed. It is likely that we will need to develop new literary tools to deal with these texts, as older methods of analysis--which often presume a unitary textual product--will likely be unable to deal with their unique properties.

Matthew K. Gold presented next, arguing that critics of Twitter have failed to appreciate the rhetorical nuances of the networked discursive spaces created by microblogs. When the networked environment of Twitter is fully considered, Twitter can be seen not as a proving ground for narcissistic individualism, but rather as a space in which new forms of distributed collectivity have flourished. Critics who have argued that text-speak has resulted in a deterioration of language skills have failed to see that many of the features identified as unique to the texting or microblogging formats--such as initialisms, abbreviated words, pictographs, and logographs--have long histories within English language and literature.

So, what is new about Twitter? According to Matt, it enables new forms of networked collectivity, new forms of ambient intimacy, new forms of performative identity, new kinds of networked literary performances, and new ways to "push" information to distributed audiences. Two concerns we should worry about: (1) What is twitter doing to our sense of time? How do we experience time differently when, as Jean Baudrillard noted, "the instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants"? (2) Tim O'Reilly and Ian Bogost have pointed to a problematic issue: Twitter is, at root, a database, and we are happily populating it with all kinds of information, giving little thought to the uses to which that information might be put in the future. Ian Bogost has suggested that in Web 2.0 environments, individuals are converted into "users" who are manufacturing products that will later be sold to large corporations for billions of dollars. To what extent are users of Twitter complicit in manufacturing their own chains?

(Matt's presentation slides.)

The final panelist was David Parry, who argued that, like blogging, microblogging has made a transition from being initially viewed as a tool of personal expression ("LiveJournal" or "Open Diary") to a valuable and influential space of political discourse. If 2006 was the year of the political blog (with blogs influencing several key races) 2008 was perhaps the year of Twitter, where tweeting became a primary means for tracking political discourse. The real value in Twitter though lies not in the massive followers whom Obama collected (150,000+) but rather the larger conversation, the collection of tweets from individuals who have only a few dozen followers. In this way Twitter represents a way to sample the collective conscious, or what David called "swarm conscious." In this regard Twitter is neither blogging (it is more a collectively authored text) nor micro (it represents something much longer than the 140 characters of individual tweets). Twitter represents just one, albeit the most prominent, instance of what Mark Pesce has called "Hyperpolitics," politics in a hyperconnected world.

David ended his talk with three questions: 1. Does this mean the death, or at least decline of local politics (e.g. how long can something like the electoral college survive)? 2. What happens to a representative democracy when politicians can tweet and be tweeted to directly from the House floor, Senate Floor, or executive offices? 3. Lest we think this is all positive, a growth in democracy, how long until we have the first Twitter mob?

(Slides, which David claims make little sense outside of the audio which accompanied them.)

Discussion:

-Alex Reid: (@digtaldigs): Do we treat microblogs as an add-on or do they require us to rethink the composition of conventional texts?

-Alex Reid: Is Twitter spiky or flat?

-Jill Walker Retteberg (of jill/txt) asked how this differed from other social networking sites such as Faceboook. David responded that it was different in two important ways: 1. It is mobile, you carry it in your pocket, adding to the sense of immediacy and locative based communication. 2. The short nature of the posts allow them to be aggregated, and thus produce a stream, a snapshot of what people are thinking at a given moment, in a way that Facebook or MySpace does not.

-A member of the audience offered that one of the important features of Twitter is its asymmetrical nature. That is, that some people follow lots but are only followed by few, some follow few but are followed by lots, and groups of followers never completely overlap.

-Amanda French (@amandafrench) How does the aggregated texture of Twitter differ from the imaginative texture of a novel? Is the novel still relevant now? How do services like Twitter affect literature? Matt: We don't know what the answer to the last part of the question will be. Think back to the early modernists, who translated the social fragmentation after WWI into a shattered, stream-of-consciousness literary style. Will the stylistic distinctiveness of Twitter (more direct language, constrained as it is by space; networked communication, aggregated consciousness) similarly have an effect on novels? Since so many tweets are episodic and serial in nature, coming as they do in short installments, will we see a return to serialized narrative more generally? Very hard to say what the effect will be, but it seems certain that there will be some effect. Matt also gestured toward the popularity of SMS novels in Japan and elsewhere as a model for how narrative structures are being altered by new distribution media.

-David offered that academics are focused on analyzing or parsing language that is meant to be heard--writing for an audience--but haven't really figured out or need to develop new tools for analyzing writing that is "writing to be overheard."

-There was a lot of discussion about the term "mob" and whether or not that applied to these social media technologies. David explained that often in work about social technology (e.g. Rheingold's Smart Mobs) there is a tendency to treat the technology as that which makes the mob smart, as in tech + mob = smart mob, but this is not always the case, indeed can often be tech + mob =dangerous mob. But he agreed that mob was probably not the right term for analyzing these group phenomena, as the term mob really focuses too heavily on a collection of individuals. Perhaps we need something more like Hardt and Negri's "multitude," but clearly there is a different ontology in play here that requires some new/different thinking.

-A significant part of the end conversation was centered around making students aware of these services not only their existence but how they operate, i.e. developing a pedagogy which fosters a social media literacy. For instance, who controls this massive amount of data being produced? and how does/should that affect how we use these technologies? There is a lot of "work" that goes into twittering, and how/who benefits from this work is not always transparent. Jamie Skye Blanco (@spikenlilli) argued that the key is to teach students to move beyond being users, into being network creators. While the panelists were supportive of the idea of having students as network or tool creators, they questioned whether the same benefits would be available if the tool created was used by only a small circle of friends.

-Matt noted that one of the larger, unsettling backdrops to the discussion of what happens to information posted on Twitter is the new level of surveillance and data mining that the U.S. government is now performing without judicial review. How this will play out with respect to Twitter and similar microblogging networks remains to be seen.

-The final comment came from Sybil Vane (of Bitch Ph.D., @SybilV) who noted the irony of criticism about Twitter that it fueled narcissism. Instead, she commented that the rigorous brevity of the medium as well as the panel opened the possibility for more conversation than typically happens during MLA sessions. As such, she suggested that similar "navel-gazing" at the MLA would be very welcome indeed!

Post-Conference Session-Related Blog Posts:

If you are looking for blog posts about this panel from other attendees, etc. check out:

• Davidson, Cathy. "Digital Media and Learning Plus Twitter at MLA, Part I," The Cat in the Stack 2 January 2009.
• Gold, Matthew K. "MLA 2008 Recap: Part 1 - The Rise of the Digital MLA" 3 January 2009.
• Howard, Jennifer. "MLA 2008: The Last Roundup," The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog 31 December 2008.
• McLemee, Scott. "MLA Goes Tweet," Inside Higher Education 29 December 2008.
• Reid, Alex. "Being on Time: Kairotic Microblogging," Digital Digs 28 December 2008.
• Tryon, Chuck. "More Syllabus Scramble," The Chutry Experiment 2 January 2009.

Other Stuff:

Abstract (from convention program):
While blogging as a form of communication has continued to grow at an astounding pace and to gain social credence, the past year has seen the development of a new, marginal form of networked communication, microblogging. Critics of blogs and other forms of internet communication often criticize its short form, reactionary nature, and favoring of terse witty statements over long sustained analysis. Microblogging would seem to carry these problems to the extreme. Usually composed of 140 characters or less, able to be transmitted and received not only via computer, but equally as well on a cellphone, microblogging posts amplify the always connected, ubiquitously wired, seemingly endless stream of noise that comprises much of the internet's discourse. Indeed, in one regard this practice of microblogging embodies all that we might critique in digital networked communication: increasingly short communication coupled with increasingly solipsistic utterances. Yet microblogging's development in some unforeseen ways has also thrown into question the limitations and possibilities of digital discourse, potentially opening or reinvigorating exactly what "digital discourse" means and will come to mean.

Organization/Planning:

This panel was organized, or at least initially so, via a tweet. That is, rather than a standard CFP, panelists were recruited via twitter. You can see the original post here.

References:

John:

• Kemp, F. (1995). "Writing Dialogically: Bold Lessons from Electronic Text." In J. Petraglia (Ed.), Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction (pp. 179–194). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Matt:

• Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication" in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983.
• Bauerlein, Mark. “Teen Narcissism.” Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind. Chronicle of Higher Education. 18 December 2008.
• Bogost, Ian. “Bloomsday on Twitter.” Ian Bogost. 7 July 2007.
• Bolter, Jay David. Writing Spaces, 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.
• Crystal, David. txtng: the gr8 db8. Oxford: 0xford U.P., 2008.
• Ferguson, Andrew. “Twits on Parade.” The Weekly Standard, 20 October 2008.
• O'Reilly, Tim. "Why I Love Twitter." O'Reilly Radar (11/29/08).
• Otterman, Sharon. "Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail’s Pace." New York Times 21 November 2008.
• "State of the Twittersphere - Q4 2008 Report." Hubspot. 22 December 2008.
• Thompson, Clive. "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy." New York Times, 9/5/08.
• __. "How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense." Wired, 6/26/07.

David:

• Carr, Nicholas. "Twitter dot dash." Rough Type. March 18, 2007.
• Hartley, John. "The Frequencies of Public Writing: Tomb, Tome, and Time as Technologies of the Public." in Democracy and New Media, ed. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 247-270.
• Pesce, Mark. "Hyperpolitics (American Style)." The Human Network. June 25, 2008.

• HASTAC Scholars

I will be participating in a panel on microblogging at MLA 2008 this weekend in San Francisco. To help promote our session, fellow panelist David Parry has created a page with the panel description and panel-related tweets as well as other information related to Twitter and MLA. If you're going to be at MLA this weekend, please think about attending the panel (it's at 8:30a Sunday at the Hilton). Otherwise, when you have a free moment this week, check out the site.

• HASTAC Scholars

Jason B. Jones has posted an interesting response to Mark Bauerlein's comments concerning the role of social media in teen narcissism on his Chronicle.com blog.

In his post, Bauerlein cites recent psychological studies that indicate teens are more narcissistic now than they have been in the past. While Jones points out that these studies provide "multiple causes for this" narcissism, Bauerlein suggests that it can be attributed to the tools of social media. Jones counters

More generally, I think that this is a moment for education, not for condemnation. I’ve argued before that I don’t think students are as familiar with technology as grown-ups tend to think, and this is probably a good example. It may be the case that students turn to such tools as Twitter for endless self-validation or for mere self-expression--but I don’t think that’s the best use of such technologies. Merlin Mann gets at the crucial issue:

And, you know. Just since it bears repeating: If you think you know people from reading Twitter, you probably don’t get Twitter. Or people.

One of the things social media let us do is reflect in more sophisticated ways on self-presentation and on the differences, perhaps, between the self we present to the public and the self to whom all the meaningless events of a day happen. In other words, there’s no reason at all why Twitter, like everything else in a liberal education, can’t help us learn to get over our small shivering selves.

Of course, Bauerlein's comments are timely: in the U.S., the holidays are the traditional season in which we are reminded that adulthood is an alternating series of tragedies and disappointments which only serve to underline our ultimate insignificance. As Bauerlein notes, "maturity means outgrowing" the belief that "your life is, indeed, something special and different and unique and worth sharing." I, for one, agree, and the sooner are kids can be taught how little their thoughts will ever matter to anyone else, the better.

However, while I'm sure we can all support crushing the hopes and dreams of future generations, what I really wanted to comment on is the irony involved in Bauerlein's post. As a rhetorician, I would argue that all he has really demonstrated in this essay is that he is not a member of the target audience of teenaged bloggers, a fact that he then employs to criticize "MySpace page[s] and blog diar[ies]," all the while utilizing one of these very technologies to publicize said critiques. This merely serves to illustrate the paradox introduced by Walter Ong: critiques of high technology must always be made using that same technology.

I wonder if Bauerlein ever stopped to consider that, like those poor, narcissistic teenagers, he himself was composing a blog entry. Why did he think those thoughts were of more intrinsic merit than some teenager narrating his or her life to friends?

I, of course, have no access to Bauerlein's thoughts, but I imagine the reasons are these: he has a Ph.D. and is a Professor at Emory. He has published two books and numerous articles in respected newspapers. His blog isn't on MySpace, it's on Chronicle.com. In short, the (unstated) reasons underlying his assumption that his "opinion [is] just as valid as anyone else’s"--or, at least, more important than anything a teenager could possibly write on MySpace--is deeply dependent on centuries old publishing processes that have served for generations as gatekeepers of what information should be considered important or significant. Since its inception, the internet has destabilized these processes and brought into question the assumptions of quality which they support. To borrow Jones's phrasing, the technologies that Bauerlein is criticizing help us to reflect in more sophisticated ways on information and on the different ways that information is imbued with authority and meaning by technological and cultural forces. What's more, these technologies have demonstrated that in some cases they are able to produce superior versions of the products of the publishing culture they are replacing (cf. Wikipedia, The New York Times Online, etc.)

So, having read Bauerlein's post, I wonder what is better: the tools that allow for Wikipedia, even if they also serve to convince teenagers that they might possibly have something special to say, or the traditional publishing establishment that places the authority of determining what is important to others in the hands of the few?

• HASTAC Scholars

I just posted a response to Mark Bauerlein's latest blog post at Chronicle.com. The link is below.

Social media and narcissism

From now on I plan to refer to “collaboration” as “Cupertino.”

"The Cupertino Effect" is the technical term for a correct word that is consistently erroneously replaced by spell-checkers. It's named for Microsoft Word 97's habit of changing "co-operation" (a common British spelling) to "Cupertino," yielding such boners as "a 1999 NATO report mentions the 'Organization for Security and Cupertino in Europe'; an EU paper of 2003 talks of 'the scope for Cupertino and joint development of programmes'; a UN report dated January 2005 argues for 'improving the efficiency of international Cupertino'."

When spellcheckers attack: The Cupertino Effect

Tamar Weinberg at Techpedia has posted an Ultimate Handbook to the etiquette of interactions on a number of social media sites. Here’s part of Weinberg’s description of the Handbook:

Would you do the following within real face-to-face relationships?

• Jump on the friendship bandwagon without properly introducing yourself?
• Consistently talk about yourself and promote only yourself without regard for those around you?
• Randomly approach a friend you barely talk to and simply ask for favors — repeatedly?
• Introduce yourself to another person as “Pink House Gardening?”

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may need a refresher course on social media etiquette--and perhaps real-life etiquette also. Here are some egregious sins that you must not perform on social media sites. Avoid these violations and learn how to manage and maintain online relationships on a variety of popular social media sites.

At the very list least, this list of dos and don'ts is a great discussion piece for those interested in the evolving norms of online environments.

via LifeHacker

• HASTAC Scholars

I saw these two responses to the our recent economic woes on BoingBoing.

The first, posted by guest-blogger Clay Shirky, is a graph showing the distribution of the returns of the S&P 500 in 10-percentage-point increments since 1825. The placement of 2008 adds a chilling perspective to our current crisis.

The second is a humorous response to the proposed auto industry bailout in the form of a car advertisement:

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A recent New York Times article on the invention and dissemination of atomic weapons included the infographic above on the travels of the atomic bomb. The article references some new works on the history of the bomb, noting that it was only invented once:

All paths stem from the United States, directly or indirectly. One began with Russian spies that deeply penetrated the Manhattan Project. Stalin was so enamored of the intelligence haul, Mr. Reed and Mr. Stillman note, that his first atom bomb was an exact replica of the weapon the United States had dropped on Nagasaki.

Moscow freely shared its atomic thefts with Mao Zedong, China’s leader. The book [Robert S. Norris’s Racing for the Bomb] says that Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy in the Manhattan Project who was eventually caught and, in 1959, released from jail, did likewise. Upon gaining his freedom, the authors say, Fuchs gave the mastermind of Mao’s weapons program a detailed tutorial on the Nagasaki bomb. A half-decade later, China surprised the world with its first blast.

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I downloaded FluidTunes, a gestural interface for iTunes, yesterday and started playing with it. The software, which is Mac-only, uses the iSight camera on your Mac to interpret waving gestures which are used to browse your iTunes music library. Right now FluidTunes is only available for Mac, and it only works on systems with a camera. Here’s a demonstration:

While the software is pretty innovative, I found the user experience to be disappointing. Your iTunes library can only be navigated song-by-song which makes FluidTunes unwieldy for large music libraries. Additionally, I found it somewhat difficult to control the interface. Positioning my hand in the correct part of the camera’s view to get the program to recognize my motions was tricky, so it was hard for me to select the song I wanted. My head, however, was always in the right position, so if I moved it slightly—by stretching my neck, or turning around—it caused me to further lose my place.

Overall, I think this project is a great demonstration of the kinds of things that can be done with the iSight camera, even if it still needs a bit of tweaking.

via: LifeHacker

This article on creating the illusion of body swaping using virtual reality gear made me think of the mirror therapy for phantom limb pain (Wikipedia description / smarty-pants description). Here’s the abstract of the new study, by Valeria I. Petkova and H. Henrik Ehrsson:

The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person's body or an artificial body was one's own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person's body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one's body.

via Boing Boing

Amazon has just released an iPhone app. Called Amazon Mobile, the app simply allows users to browse the products on the site. As some commentators have noted, this doesn’t make it much better than visiting the Amazon site online with your phone.

However, the app does have one unique feature. Called Amazon Remembers, it allows users to snap a picture of an item they want. The photo is then uploaded to Amazon, and, if the item can be identified in Amazon's catalogue, users will eventually see a link to purchase the item, both on their phones and on the Amazon home site.

This feature is interesting because Amazon is using people—rather than any kind of fancy image recognition—to identify the items in the photos, presumably using their Mechanical Turk service. It will be interesting to see how well the service works. Perhaps more interesting will be what Amazon does with the usage data the service generates. I wouldn’t be surprised if the company will use the information gathered by its classifiers to develop some kind of automatic image recognition, just as Google used GOOG-411 to build its voice recognition database.

CNET’s Rafe Needleman on tomorrow’s launch of Facebook Connect. A lot of companies (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have tried to crack the portable-I.D. nut with little success, so it remains to be seen how the Facebook venture will work out.

Michael Wesch, the Kansas State professor behind The Machine is Us/ing Us and Information R/evolution, has posted an article on the Britannica blog about students' use of technology in the classroom.

Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”

Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.

The article is a thoughtful look not just at the fact that students are using technology to distance themselves from the classroom environment but also at the reasons why they are doing so.

via AcademHack

From Slate.

America's unprecedented showing of financial and emotional support helped the Obama campaign win the Oval Office. It was a beautiful thing. And I really am going to miss seeing "Barack Obama" in my inbox three times a day. But it's high time for us voters to get back to panicking about our 401(k)s. So please stop e-mailing to ask for money. You're president-elect now, Barack. Consider yourself cut-off.

The Audacity of E-mail: Dear Mr. President-elect, please take me off your spam list

“What’s the best thing on the internet right now?” you ask? Well, it’s Roger Ebert’s blog.

Don’t believe me? Here’s The Maple Syrup Story from one of his recent posts to prove it:

My parents put me aboard the Panama Limited from Urbana-Champaign to Chicago. It was my first train trip alone. I had a new tweed sport coat, a tie that was choking me, and a $20 bill in my wallet. I would be met by my cousins Blanche and Ethel Doyle and taken to visit my Aunt Ida. I was to buy myself breakfast on the train. I rushed to the diner, was greeted as “young man,” and assigned a table for two. The other seat was soon occupied by a passenger from further front on the train. This meant he was from below Cairo, because from New Orleans to Cairo the train was all Pullman, and then they added day coaches for the people from Illinois who were making the trip to Chicago—around two hours in my case.

In those days you filled out your own Guest Check. This news seemed to subtly alarm my new companion. There was a sturdy pewter pencil holder with one of those stubby golf card pencils. I carefully printed out: “Pancakes and coffee.” The waiter picked up my order. He asked my companion, “What will you-all be havin’ this mornin, sir?” He replied, “I think I’ll have the same thing my friend here is having.” He could not have seen my order. He could not read or write.

Our orders arrived. Before me sat arrayed a majestic assortment of heavy pewter containers, which would not spill if the train rocked. Water. Coffee. Maple syrup. Cream. Half and Half. Sugar. I carefully poured syrup over my pancakes, and coffee into my cup. This was a big deal: The first cup of coffee in my life. I was king of the world. I dug into my pancakes. Something was wrong. They tasted bitter. I looked again at the table. If the coffee was on my pancakes, then where was the maple syrup? I blushed bright red. I was never going to admit my mistake to the waiter. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, I picked up my coffee cup and poured it over the pancakes. My friend studied this, and then poured his own coffee over his pancakes.

Twitter downtime has been less of an issue lately, and Wired is claiming that the record site-usage during the election season might mean the site has corrected some of it’s technical problems.

Proving itself capable of handling traffic on one of the biggest days of its existence is an important step for the site, which has yet to nail down a revenue model but is growing rapidly and becoming more mainstream.

The service faced episodic downtime earlier this year, but Stone says they’ve developed a strategy that has been successful in preventing visits from the notorious "fail whale."

“Our approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it's no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point and so on. This simple technique has vastly improved performance, reliability and capacity,” said Stone.

Another Election Result: Twitter Comes Through

Interesting.

Obama ad appears in Xbox 360 car racing game

Last summer I worked with Matt King, the CWRL’s resident video game expert, on the html for an article describing the current status of Rhetorical Peaks, a video game for teaching rhetoric and writing. The article has recently been published by CCC Online. Check it out.

Last summer I worked with Matt King, the CWRL’s resident video game expert, on the html for an article describing the current status of Rhetorical Peaks, a video game for teaching rhetoric and writing. The article has recently been published by CCC Online. Check it out.