Subscribe to this blog in Radio:
Didn't find what you were looking for?
E-mail this blog's author, Bruce Umbaugh:  |
|
 |
Sunday, December 11, 2005 |
Digital Immigrant or Native?.
George from OCLC mentioned this simple test at the Gaming, Learning & Libraries Symposium during his presentation.
Are you a Digital Immigrant or a Digital Native?
- Take out your cell phone.
- Pretend to dial a number.
Did you use... your index finger (Digital Immigrant) or your thumb (Digitial Native)?
I wondered how many in the audience actually keyed in a number versus accessing their phone book functionality and scrolling to a number.
I actually like this "digital immigrant/digital native" concept much better than the whole Baby Boomer, Gen-X, Millennial labels since it shows that people from any generation can become a digital immigrant or embrace the change enough to appear as a digital native. Regardless of generation, people of varying incomes have access to different amounts of technology.
['Brary Web Diva]
11:02:38 PM 
|
|
Planespotters vs. the CIA.
Ever-increasing requirements that every item be uniquely identifiable are combining with the power of the internet to invade everyone's privacy. The Guardian (UK) has a story about how 'planespotters' are gathering data that allows the after-the-fact tracking of CIA torture planes. ("How planespotters turned into the scourge of the CIA.")
Paul last saw the Gulfstream V about 18 months ago. He comes down to Glasgow airport's planespotters' club most days. He had not seen the plane before so he marked the serial number down in his book. At the time, he did not think there was anything unusual about the Gulfstream being ushered to a stand away from public view, one that could not be seen from the airport terminal or the club's prime view. The picture is an executive jet, owned by an owner of the Boston Red Sox, and used for moving people to be tortured. ("Red Sox Owner's Jet Used for CIA Extraordinary Rendition.") More on the story at Farber's IP List. I've also covered the story in the past in "Choicepoint vs CIA."
Just remember, when you give up privacy for a little security, it's the CIA who suffers.
[Emergent Chaos]
11:02:31 PM
|
|
Gamers are better at multitasking.
Gamers are better at multitasking than baseline humans. A researcher at Oregon State U is measuring the "switching cost" of going from one task to another, like paying attention to your mobile phone and to the road in front of you. Multitasking gets more expensive the more complex each individual task is. She concludes that gamers have higher proficiency at multitasking, however.
There are individual differences in the costs of multi-tasking, Lien said. In her lab studies, a typical response to a single stimulus might take 300 milliseconds. Adding a second task increases the response to about 800 milliseconds. A millisecond is 1/1000th of a second, so the delay may not seem like much – until you extend the difference to a car driving 60 miles an hour and realize the response rate more than doubles, Lien said.
In her lab studies, she has yet to test any volunteers who are immune to delays in multi-tasking, though she says some students do much better than others.
"I have to say that the best ones are those who play a lot of video games," she pointed out. "Those are lab studies, however, and not driving tests."
Link (via /.)
[Boing Boing]
11:02:05 PM
|
|
Higher Education: Barriers Still Exist.
Joint statement last week from the Nine Presidents including a call for research institutions to develop a culture that supports family commitments (their itals) Here's the context. And an opinion.
EXCERPTS
...barriers still exist to the full participation of women, not only in science and engineering, but also in academic fields throughout higher education.
...While considerable progress has been made since 2001, we acknowledge that there are still significant steps to be taken toward making academic careers compatible with family caregiving responsibilities.
...Our goal as research universities is to create conditions in which all faculty are capable of the highest level of academic achievement.
David Baltimore, California Institute of Technology
Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard University
Susan Hockfield, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton University
John Hennessy, Stanford University
Robert Birgeneau, University of California, Berkeley
Mary Sue Coleman, University of Michigan
Amy Gutmann, University of Pennsylvania
Richard C. Levin, Yale University [Girl in the Locker Room!]
11:00:08 PM
|
|
Farmer's Market.
Last July, I wrote about the phenomenon of "Chinese farmers" -- people (almost always in China) employed to play online games such as World of Warcraft, collecting virtual money and valuable items for resale in real-world exchanges. This practice is said to be a multi-million dollar industry, despite being against the rules of most online games. Now the New York Times has caught wind of the story, and takes us behind the scenes of one of these "virtual sweatshops."
The article provides some interesting depth to the story, such as the observation that there may be more than 100,000 people now employed as "farmers" in China, and some example prices for goods and services (although it should be noted that the "100 grams of gold" claim is factually incorrect, as the game in question tallies gold in coins, not by weight). The accompanying multimedia presentation is worth a listen, as well.
This could well be the globalized industry to watch as a metric for the degree of development of a nation. Online role-playing games are extraordinarily popular. World of Warcraft is said to have over 4 million players, while the Lineage series may have far more than that, almost entirely in Korea, Japan and China. The buyers of these virtual goods and gold are people who have more money than time; right now, the buyers are largely in the US, Europe, Japan and increasingly in Korea. But as Internet access continues to spread, and places like China continue to grow economically, we will almost certainly see the locations of buyers and sellers change.
The proliferation of Chinese virtual farmers is clear demonstration that language is not an issue. Therefore, there's no reason why the next generation of online farmers couldn't be in India, Kazakhstan, or Kenya. At the same time, a growing number of Chinese gamers may well see the value of outsourcing their gold & magic sword accumulations to places with cheaper labor. Developing nations could follow the path of Internet access leading to virtual world service provision leading to virtual world service demand.
This is a model for what globalization in the fabrication scenario could look like. Overseas labor is cheap, but not free, and rising fuel prices will inevitably make imported goods more expensive. There will come a point, probably sooner than most pundits expect, that running shoes and CD players can be more cheaply printed (at home or at the mall) than imported. At some point in the next decade or so, the bulk of globalized labor will be in online services. Such services won't all be connected to online games, but the model will be the same: money exchanged for time performing tasks that require little more than a bit of training and a broadband connection.
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
10:26:24 AM
|
|
Richard Pryor dies at 65. Richard Pryor, one of the most influential US comedians of the last four decades, dies at 65. [Guardian Unlimited]
Ending the tales of two great men.
Richard Pyror, the most truthful comedian who ever lived, is dead of a heart attack a quarter century after joking on stage about his last one. He was 65.
Eugene McCarthy, the most successful failed presidential candidate who ever lived, is dead now as well, at the age of 89.
Both men changed things.
Richard Pryor made comedy more real and raw and tender and funny than it ever was before. Or since.
Eugene McCarthy took the antiwar movement to a presidential campaign that knocked the incumbent president of his own party, Lydon Johnson, out of the white house. McCarthy was also a funny guy. One of my favorite lost books on politics was one of cartoons and witty text co-written with by James K. Kilpatrick and Jeff MacNelly, the funniest political cartoonist who ever lived. All three of those men are gone now. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
10:23:21 AM
|
|
[Scripting News:
New feature in the right margin. Click on the green Technorati logo to see who's pointing at this site. It's an experiment to see what will  happen. Now there's a way to trackback to Scripting News. If you have something to say about something that's posted here, try commenting on it on your blog and point to the post on this site. If it proves popular there are some obvious ways to enhance the feature.
10:23:20 AM
|
|
|
