Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Can't wait. Adam Curry: It's going to get interesting when iPods are outlawed and assault rifles are legal. [The Doc Searls Weblog] 8:22:46 PM    comment []

UCLA to stop short of P2P snooping. Though it has system for giving notice to file-swapping students, school will stop short of attaching "digital fingerprints" to files. [CNET News.com] 8:22:24 PM    comment []

Zuckerman: Wikipedia needs to cover non-nerdy subjects Ethan Zuckerman, who founded the GeekCorps org that works to help bring tech to Africa, has created a call-to-arms for the free, collaborative Wikipedia encyclopedia to address its systemic bias towards subjects of interest to white, Anglo-American nerd-boys, expanding its net to cover things like the Congo Civil War, nursing, and agriculture. Wikipedia is biased toward over-inclusion of certain material pertaining to (for example) science fiction, contemporary youth culture, contemporary U.S. and UK culture in general, and anything already well covered in the English-langauge portion of the Internet. These excessive inclusions are relatively harmless: at worst, people look at some of these articles and say "this is silly, why is it in an encyclopedia?" Of far greater (and more detrimental) consequence, these same biases lead to minimal or non-existent treatment of topics of great importance. One example is that, as of this writing, the Congo Civil War, possibly the largest war since World War II has claimed over 3 million lives, but one would be hard pressed to learn much about it from Wikipedia. In fact, there is more information on a fictional plant Link (via Many2Many) [bOing bOing] 6:42:22 AM    comment []

Useit.Com: Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons. Am I just being picky when I insist on the correct use of checkboxes and radio buttons? No. There are good usability reasons to follow GUI standards and use the controls correctly. Most important, following design standards enhances users' ability to predict what a control will do and how they'll operate it. [Tomalak's Realm] 6:30:08 AM    comment []

This will be familiar territory to those who heard him speak at Webster last winter, but they might enjoy seing where his thinking has gone and reading more fully fleshed out arguments. The Myth of Fiction. I'm happy to report that we finally got Professor Ludlow off of his fat derrier and got some product out of him -- in this case a paper titled "From Sherlock and Buffy to Klingon and Norrathian Platinum Pieces: Pretense, Contextalism, and the Myth of Fiction." Wordy mofo ain't he? Not sure I get the point of it, except that EA's Jeff Brown was his inspiration (can a romantic cruise be far behind?). A description of the paper byProfessor Bill Irwin (Seinfeld and Philosophy) follows. If you would rather just cut to the chase (rtf version): Download file "We readily recognize that real people, places, and things can appear in works of fiction; in Annie Hall Marshall McLuhan appears as himself in line at a theater in Manhattan. More curiously though, people places and especially things from works of fiction have invaded the space of reality. Klingon and Elvish are spoken by real people outside Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings­ and the currency of online roleplaying games, such as the Norrathian Platinum Piece of EverQuest, have real world exchange value. How are we to account for this? In “From Sherlock and Buffy to Klingon and Norrathian Platinum Pieces: Pretense, Contextalism, and the Myth of Fiction,” Peter Ludlow draws on his experience as a renegade journalist and founder of the The Alphaville Herald in The Sims Online to address the question. Ludlow had the plug pulled on him after reporting in his Alphaville Herald on unsavory elements of game play and criticizing the game owner, Electronic Arts (EA). Much real world controversy ad media coverage ensued, leading Jeff Brown, Vice President of Corporate Communication for EA, to remark, “If Peter Ludlow is a journalist, then I’m a railroad tycoon whenever I play monopoly.” Reflecting on Brown’s statement, Ludlow concludes that he is in fact a journalist when playing the Sims Online and Brown is indeed a railroad tycoon whenever he pursues the losing strategy of buying up the railroads while playing monopoly. How can this be? Ludlow argues against pretense theory a la Kendall Walton and in favor of contextualism, an idea imported from epistemology to metaphysics. In being or becoming real it is not the ontological status of fictional objects or identities that changes but their contexts that change. Indeed fictional objects don’t become real; they always were real. Sarah Michelle Geller does not just play Buffy Summers; in some contexts she is Buffy Summers. There are, then, no fictions per se; fictional statements are merely statements that hold true in certain contexts." -- Bill Irwin If you want a rtf version, click this: Download file [The Second Life Herald] 6:17:51 AM    comment []