Thursday, May 29, 2003

$25,000 competition for professionally written Query Letters and Book Proposals, the John T. Lupton "New Voices In Literature" Awards. 12:42:54 PM    comment []

China Sentences 4 in Internet Dissent (AP). Geologist Jin Haike and journalist Xu Wei, were sentenced to 10 years for incitement to subversion the New York-based group [Human Rights in China] said in a statement faxed to journalists late Wednesday. Internet engineer Yang Zili and free-lance writer Zhang Honghai were sentenced to eight years on the same charge, it said. The four, all around age 30, were arrested in March 2001 after posting essays on the Internet with titles such as China's democracy is fake, and Be a new citizen, remake China, according to a copy of the original indictment against them released by a Hong Kong-based rights group. 11:42:46 AM    comment []

Fire Up That Game, Boy. Video-game players have better visual skills than non-players, according to a new study of young men. Gamers process fast-changing visual information more efficiently -- and the military says they're better at operating long-range unmanned aerial vehicles. [Wired News] and Video-Game Killing Builds Visual Skills, Researchers Report. Attention, parents. Video games that require players to knock off enemies that pop out of nowhere sharply improve visual attention. By Sandra Blakeslee. [New York Times: Education] 7:09:25 AM    comment []

Home Schooling in Cyberspace. Some parents seeking home schooling are enrolling their children in schools that exist only in cyberspace. By Bonnie Rothman Morris. [New York Times: Education] 7:07:21 AM    comment []

The death of etiquette. For proof positive that "gracious living" is now extinct, look no further than the new revision of Amy Vanderbilt's classic guide. [Salon Headlines (a year ago)] 7:06:04 AM    comment []

Discussion and Citation in the Blogosphere... by Tom Coates. A few days ago a stunningly interesting article was published on Microdoc News called Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story which aimed to look at exactly how a story or discussion moved through weblog space. I've been thinking along similar lines for a while now - at least partly as a way of articulating my problems with the iWire Scaling Clay Shirky piece. I've been trying to put down on paper why I think the iWire assertions are incorrect and to develop an alternative model of how discussion can occur usefully through the 'blogosphere'. In fact more than that - I wanted to illustrate why I believe the system works to actually generate better discussion than a simple discussion board - by (on average) helping to hide the bad content and making it easier to find the good content. I most recently wrote something that gestured in this direction (How do we find information in the blogosphere?) The Microdoc News piece is particularly illuminating because it's dragged some actual examples into the fray. After examining 45 "blogosphere stories" they found four kinds of posts and a relatively predictable pattern of their usage, with an initial weighty post generating an explosion of smaller fragmentary reactions, commentaries and votes (cf Casting the microcontent vote). These posts are then aggregated or collected into another weighty post, which itself might have the potential to push forward the debate. . . . I've been working in similar directions as this - in an attempt to resolve the questions, Can you have good discussion across the blogosphere?, What is the nature of that discussion? and How does it differ from message-board conversation?. And I think the answer lies - yet again - in going back to the beginning and looking at the way the web in general (and weblogs in particular) operate like an academic citation network. Coates argues that discussion among bloggers moves forward through "micro" paradigm shifts. It's intriguing to try to think through how discussion happens in the blogosphere. I'm going to try thinking it through in the context of a presentation on gave on virtual community at a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy some years back. If anything good turns up, I'll report back, 'mkay? 7:04:56 AM    comment []

There's Something About Rummy. Donald Rumsfeld may have his share of critics, but Bruce Sterling isn't one of them. The president's gnomic futurist, the outspoken defense secretary, knows what's right for America, Sterling writes in a commentary from Wired magazine. Faced with potential annihilation, the administration panicked. That's why it's violating Rumsfeld's rules. 6:56:18 AM    comment []

Behind the Six Degrees of SARS. Researchers are creating mathematical models based upon the 'six degrees of separation' idea to understand how social interaction contributes to the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News] 6:50:58 AM    comment []

For TiVo and Replay, New Reach. Why hasn't the digital video recorder become the must-have, smash-hit, world-changing appliance of the digital age? By David Pogue. [New York Times: Business] 6:39:19 AM    comment []

Graham Drubs Dubya: No More Beating Around the Bush. Mondo Washington, by James Ridgeway, in The Village Voice. Unswayed by Republican counterattacks, Florida Democratic senator Bob Graham took another swing at Bush last week. Appearing at the 9-11 Commission hearings here, he charged that frustrating Bush administration inaction was keeping hidden his congressional joint inquiry report on the World Trade Center attack. Thus, he said, the public doesn't know what the government knew about Al Qaeda and the potential for terrorist attacks on our homeland before 9-11. 5:11:17 AM    comment []