Tuesday, April 04, 2006

On Education: No Child Left Behind? Ask the Gifted. Despite all the talk about America losing its edge in the global market, programs for the gifted and talented are threatened on several fronts. By MICHAEL WINERIP. [NYT > Education] 10:37:03 PM    comment []

Virtual property laws in Guangzhou. The smh reports "China has upheld a guilty verdict and fine against a man who stole and sold players' games IDs and online equipment amid growing calls for more concrete virtual property laws,state media said on Monday.A court in Guangzhou,the provincial capital of China's southern province of Guangdong,dismissed an appeal by Yan Yifan,20,found guilty of selling stolen passwords and online equipment from 30 players of the online historical quest game,"Da Xihua Xiyou," last year.Upholding Yan's original 5000 RMB ($870) fine,the court said that online game players had spent time,energy and money gaining the game's equipment and adding value to the virtual goods,Xinhua news agency reported".Further,"the Guangzhou ruling follows a suspended death sentence delivered to a Shanghai online game player last year for stabbing a competitor to death for selling his virtual cyber-sword". Verdict on virtual property thief upheld [Smart Mobs] 10:36:58 PM    comment []

Video: Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3 in 1992. keep in mind, Windows 3.1 was released the same year   [Waxy.org Links] 5:41:32 AM    comment []

semapedia physical wiki entries. the process of physically 'tagging' real-world objects with semacodes, so that users with mobile phone cameras can automatically retrieve relevant wikipedia articles on their device. see also qr code & grafedia. [semapedia.org] [unmediated] 5:41:28 AM    comment []

Micropayments Drive Asian Games. In Asia, the most popular online games are free. They make their money off small impulse purchases from players wanting to customize their virtual presence. Are subscription fees a misguided Western artifact? By Kathleen Craig. [Wired News: Top Stories] 5:31:58 AM    comment []

Show us your blog. ResourceShelf has posted this paper by Dr. Gilad Mishne and Maarten de Rijke of the University of Amsterdam which says "show us your blog, and we'll tell you what books to buy".This from the introduction."Blogs are a rich source of information for commercial purposes.At the aggregate level,various uses have been made of blogs and their contents,e.g.,predicting spikes in consumer purchase decisions using the mere volume of blog postings.We are interested in a different commercial aspect of blogs -- not at the aggregate level -- but at the level of individual blogs,aimed at advertisers:what offers should be made to a blogger,what advertisements should be shown to her readers,and so on.Personal blogs provide reports about experiences and interests of individuals,objects they surround themselves with,and activities they engage in.Our working hypothesis is that from a blogger's writings we can derive her commercial taste.In this paper we zoom in on books:given a blog,our aim is to generate a list of suggestions of categories of books for the blogger to buy.We begin by mining a blog for indicators of book interests;we then use external resources to match these indicators with actual products,aggregating their category information to arrive at a book profile.We evaluate profiles thus generated by comparing them against wishlists created by the bloggers themselves.Overall,our goal is to show that valuable insights can be mined from blogs at the individual blog level,using a combination of text analysis and powerful external resources''. Deriving Wishlists from Blogs (pdf) [Smart Mobs] 5:31:13 AM    comment []

What can we learn from game developers?. Here's my first attempt at a couple of short audio remixes pulled from recordings of my public talks. Both are a partial answer to the question: what do game developers know that we can use on non-games to help create passionate users? What games do games.m4a (5.8 mbs, 4 minutes) Note: this particular talk was focused on technology products (including software and tech documentation), but the same principles apply to any kind of product, service, cause, etc...with a little imagination. The difference between men and women Differences.m4a (1.9 mbs, 2 minutes) [Creating Passionate Users] 5:30:53 AM    comment []

Tehran Journal: As Liquor Business Booms, Bootleggers Risk the Lash by Nazila Fathi. [New York Times: International News] Every month, newspapers report that tens of thousands of bottles of illicit liquor are confiscated by the police around the country. The Mehr news agency last month quoted a senior security official, Gen. Hooshang Hosseini, as saying that the amount of liquor in the country was increasing at an alarming rate. Despite the crackdown, there is no sense of an alcohol shortage. With one phone call, one can get anything from smuggled French-made wine to Russian or homemade Armenian vodka. One bootlegger delivers the goods on a scooter, wrapping bottles in black plastic bags and hiding them in a saddlebag. Allan puts them in the trunk of his car. Before the revolution, about a dozen Iranian factories produced beer, vodka and wine. The Iranian grape is so good for making spicy wine that Australian Shiraz, sometimes known as Syrah, is made from the same grape that grows in Iran's southern city of Shiraz, which gave the wine its name. In fact, the Islamic leaders are caught in a bewildering situation. Islam forbids the consumption of alcohol and the Koran explicitly calls intoxicants "the abominations of Satan's handiwork." But drinking and wine are integral parts of Persian culture. Mey, the word for wine, and Saki, the wine pourer, have been the central theme of Persian poetry for more than a thousand years. Most poems by Iran's popular 14th-century poet, Shamsudin Mohammad Hafiz, who was from Shiraz, revolve around wine. "A rose without the glow of a lover bears no joy," he wrote. "Without wine to drink the spring brings no joy." Wine in ancient Persia predates the birth of French wine. The earliest evidence of wine making dates from 5400 B.C., in Haji Firuz Hills, near Western Azerbaijan Province, south of where the city of Orumieh is today. "The French are in fact jealous about that because the earliest evidence in France goes back to 500 B.C.," said Rémy Boucharlat, a French archaeologist who works in the southern archaeological sites in Iran. 5:30:17 AM    comment []

Blooker (blog-book) prize winners announced. Cory Doctorow: I was a jurist for the first Blooker Prize, a prize from Lulu.com for the best book adapted from, or published throuhg, or written via a website. The winners in all three categories (fiction, nonfiction and comics) are all tremendous, as were many of the entries (it was a tough call!). Congrats to the winners! Overall Winner Julie & Julia by Julie Powell in Non-Fiction Julia Powell, a 30-year-old secretary living in a bohemian apartment in Queens, spent 365 days cooking all 524 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. With Julie's charm, humor, and occasional delirium, this book makes everything from shopping for the perfect piece of liver to extracting marrow from the bone a poetic experience. Fiction Winner Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest A modern-day ghost story in the Southern gothic tradition, Four and Twenty Blackbirds begins the tale of Eden, an orphan constantly watched by three ghostly figures. To save what's left of her family, Eden must uncover the sinister secrets of her own lineage. Comics Winner Totally Boned by Zach Miller "Joe and Monkey" is a webcomic about two regular guys (well, in Monkey's case, a regular monkey) who have lots of hilarious adventures. Along the way they come up against an evil robot and a variety of terrifying waterfowl. One of the books that didn't win was the Belle Du Jour volume, prompting the headline "Cooker Beats Hooker for Blooker" -- love it! Link (Thanks, Stephen!) [Boing Boing] 5:29:21 AM    comment []

DeLay has left the building. A brief moment of silence, please, for the political career of Tom DeLay. The Hammer has fallen. He's leaving Congress and abandoning his re-election bid. Time has the story. DeLay makes the usual noises about how he's doing it for the good of his party. Time says: "He decided last Wednesday, after months of prayer and contemplation, to spare his suburban Houston district the mudfest to come." Oh, come on. Tom DeLay has never been one to shun a mudfest. He lives for the mudfest. Le mudfest, c'est DeLay. We're not supposed to pay any attention to those investigations behind the curtains -- the ones connected with Jack Abramoff, in which two of DeLay's key aides have already pleaded guilty to corruption charges. No, they don't have anything to do with this move. "It had nothing to do with any criminal investigation," DeLay's lawyer told the Times. Right. Sure. . . . . No, I think it will become obvious soon enough that this is the act of a cornered man. As Josh Marshall writes: "DeLay's lawyers must have sat him down over the last 72 hours and explained to him that he needs to focus on not spending most of the rest of his life in prison."  . . . DeLay specialized in party discipline, the harvesting of lobbyist money, and creative innovation in the realm of political-machine funding. As I wrote a month ago, DeLay is no garden-variety bribe-taker (like that clown Duke Cunningham); he is clearly a new wave, Enron-style crook -- the Andy Fastow of the Republican Party. The K Street Project he spearheaded set out to make sure that lobbyists, formerly understood to have a need for bipartisanship, directed their largesse strictly in the GOP direction. And his dream, seemingly delivered on by the grotesque Texas gerrymander, was to use the money and power he accumulated to cement a permanent Republican majority. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 5:29:16 AM    comment []