Wired Campus: Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program

The Mellon Research in Information Technology program is being closed according to a Chronicle of Higher Education story by Marc Parry titled, “In Potential Blow to Open-Source Software, Mellon Foundation Closes Grant Program.” (Jan. 5, 2010.)

Mellon described the change as part of an effort to “consolidate resources” and concentrate on core program areas like the liberal arts, scholarly communications, and museums. RIT will merge into the Scholarly Communications program, which will manage its existing grants.

This program funded a number of really cool projects like Zotero, SAKAI, and Fedora. I wonder what will happen to ongoing projects like Bamboo that are not yet off the ground?

Update: Bamboo has been “smoothly migrated into the Scholarly Communications program.”

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them

Gizmodo has a short article on Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them. The article showcases graphic designs by Mark Coleran who did work for movies like Mission Impossible 3, Mr & Mrs Smith, and Children of Men. There is a screen reel that summarizes his work and he responds here in his blog. Thanks to Stan for this.

GRAND NCE funded

The Graphics, Animation and New Media Canada Network of Centres of Excellence has been funded, see NCE News Release.

New Media, Animation, and Games — these technologies are the building blocks of the Digital Age. The Science, Technology and Innovation Council report in 2008 recognized this as a priority research sub-area within Canada’s Science and Technology Strategy. This application responds to the needs identified in that report. The GRAND NCE will undertake a comprehensive research program whose goal is to understand the underlying technologies and to make selective advances in a coordinated, multidisciplinary setting that lead to social, legal, economic, and cultural benefits for Canadians.

This brings significant challenges because the ability to access, manipulate, and disseminate information in its various media forms radically changes on almost a daily basis. The research program will meet these challenges through a dynamic set of interconnected projects built on a conceptual framework of five themes. Three themes focus on the technology clusters identified by the Science, Technology and Innovation Council: (1) New Media Challenges and Opportunities, (2) Games and Interactive Simulation, and (3) Animation, Graphics and Imaging. The other two cross-cut the first: (4) Social, Legal, Economic and Cultural Perspectives, and (5) Enabling Technologies and Methodologies. Thirty projects each explore a different aspect of selected problems. Fifty Network Investigators lead projects, with Collaborating Researchers and Partners from the public and private sectors participating as domain experts and receptors to exploit the resulting new knowledge and technologies. (Executive Summary)

This truly interdisciplinary NCE is led by Kellog S. Booth at UBC and includes network investigators from across the country. The U of Alberta lead is Jonathan Shaeffer. I’m one of the network investigators at U of A and will be working on serious games. Isn’t that grand!

Text Analysis in the Wild

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The Globe and Mail on November 13th had an interesting example of text analysis in the wild. Crossing pages A10 and A11 they had a box with the high frequency words in the old citizenship guide and the new one with a word cloud in the middle. Here is what the description says:

Discover Canada, a different look at the country

The new citizenship guide, Discover Canada, is much more comprehensive look at Canada’s history and system of government than its predecessor, A Look at Canada, which was produced under the Liberals in 1995. It’s longer (17,536 words to 10,433), with 10 pages devoted to Canadian history, compared to two in the previous version. Its emphasis also differs, with more attention paid to the military, the Crown and Quebec, and less to the environment.

>> Below is a graphi representation of the most frequently used words in the new citizendship guide. The bigger the word the more often it appears.

I had to fold the page to scan it as it is longer than my scanner, but you get the idea. The PDF is here. I would have preferred the two lists at either edge of the box to be closer to let us compare. Note the small print – they used May Eyes and WriteWords which has a word frequency counting tool.

SSHRC, Yasmeen: “Technopreneurship” and social innovation

Lynne pointed me to a blog entry by SSHRC’s Gisèle Yasmeen on “Technopreneurship” and social innovation.

Canada has a grand history of involvement in developing technopreneurs, and not just in the video-game and hand-held device industry. Indeed, Canada has one of the strongest “digital humanities” scholarly communities in the world, with many of these researchers becoming “technopreneurs” in their own right and working with partners across the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. Many of these scholarly “technopreneurs” had their work incubated by SSHRC in the Image, Text, Sound and Technology (ITST) funding program which began in at the beginning of this millennium. Recently, SSHRC awarded one of its Major Collaborative Research Initiatives to a consortium of 35 digital humanities researchers and 21 partner agencies under the leadership of Ray Siemens at UVIC — an indication of how mature this type of activity has become.

Technopreneurs are those who develop new information and communication ideas. I would like to say that they don’t necessarily commercialize their innovations, but see innovation as a human and social enterprise. The digital humanities are more about the gift of innovation than profit.

Federation of American Scientists :: National Summit on Educational Games

The Federation of American Scientists held a National Summit on Educational Games that has released a report titled, Harnessing the Power of Video Games for Learning. This is not, despite the sponsor, a scientific report. It is a call for funding for research into educational games. The report, however, slides into hype about American competitiveness. I think the pitch is that games will save American education and keep the country competitive. So, for example, on the first page it reads,

The success of complex video games demonstrates games can teach higher order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change.

The phasing may be unfortunate, but I read this as suggesting that financial success demonstrates educational value. Does that mean that the success of Celine Dion demonstrates that pop music can teach higher order skills? Further on they write,

Many companies and industries have transformed themselves by taking advantage of advances in technology, and new management methods and models of organization. As a result, they realized substantial gains in productivity and product quality while lowering costs. No such transformation has taken part in education. Education is not part of the IT revolution. (p. 6)

How can scientists say that education is not part of the IT revolution? Have they been to a school or university recently? For that matter, where are the companies using computer games to teach management methods and models of organization? (Perhaps the financial sector was playing a bit too much World of Warcraft to worry about managing our pensions.) My impression is that gains in productivity have come through automation and inventory control.

My counter proposal would be to invest in board games for teaching higher order skills. Lets bring back Monopoly (or the Landlord’s Game it was based on) as a way of learning about property, mortgages, and bankruptcy. Board games would be cheaper and probably teach the same higher order skills.

I’m sure I’m being unfair, and they do call for more research into what skills games could teach which is needed.

Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult

The Guardian online has a story about how novelist Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult. According to the story by Alison Flood (Monday 26th of October, 2009),

He said it was “the print that’s the problem, it’s the book, the object itself”. “To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities,” he said.

I wonder if it true that screens take less concentration than books. I can believe it about television, but not about doing things on the screen like programming or even playing a console game. I can finish most books much faster and with less hard work than playing a console game (which may say something about my gaming skills.) Is it really the form of the object (screen vs book) or the content (typical TV show vs difficult novel)?

Canada 3.0 Forum: Stratford Declaration

Ian Wilson of the new U Waterloo Stratford Institute talked to the York/Peking Symposium on the Canada 3.0 Forum among other things. He talked about the Stratford Declaration (reproduced below) that emerged. It is a national declaration that calls for a Canadian project.

Canada 3.0 – The Stratford Declaration June 22, 2009

On June 8-9, 2009, over 1500 people interested in the digital economy gathered in Stratford, Ontario to review and debate the opportunities and challenges for Canada’s future. Canada 3.0 brought together industry, government and academia in workshops and discussions all focused on Canada’s digital future.

Recognizing the need for urgent attention to the issues of digital media, the participants in the Canada 3.0 Conference agreed to the Stratford Declaration:

• Success in digital media will be central to national prosperity in the 21st century. This fast growing field is producing jobs, ideas, products, services, companies and opportunities at a rapid pace – but Canada is not yet a world leader.
• Canada has the potential to be internationally competitive in this field on a sustained and focused basis, but it will not get there based on current trends.
• The foundations of Canada’s digital economy and society are not yet strong and stable. Significant upgrades are required to the digital infrastructure, including both the technological infrastructure and made-in-Canada digital content.
• Consistent accomplishment in the digital economy will require collaboration, partnership and collective action on an unprecedented national and cross-sectoral scale. Canada must use the digital revolution to reinvent the manner in which this country trains, educates, creates new businesses, cooperates, serves the population and views its collective future.
• Canada’s competitive advantage lies in its ability to bridge the technological and content fields, and to thereby produce and deliver internationally competitive products and services. The creative talents of this country must be connected to the technological potential of this age.
• Canada must become a global test-bed for new digital products and services and must be seen as a new economy incubator where consumers, governments and companies are known for embracing digital innovation.
• Canada needs to produce a regulatory and legal environment attuned to the 21st century and needs to use these arrangements to propel the nation into a position of global leadership in digital rights management.
• The digital ecology produces global competition for talent, ideas, patents and emerging companies. Canadians need to make a strong commitment to the country as a place to train, innovate, work and prosper if the digital economy is to flourish.
• There is an urgent need for a national project of such scale, scope and impact that Canadians come to understand the potential of the digital economy and that produces the collaboration, cooperation and cross-country engagement necessary for international digital leadership.
• Canada must set an ambitious target – to become the first truly digital nation in the world – and must move with urgency and determination toward this goal.

Canada 3.0 – La Déclaration de Stratford Le 22 juin 2009

Les 8 et 9 juin 2009, la ville de Stratford, en Ontario, a accueilli plus de 1 500 intéressés qui se sont penchés sur le dossier de l’économie numérique et ont débattu les possibilités et défis qui se dessinent pour le Canada de demain. Réunissant des délégués de l’industrie, des gouvernements et du monde universitaire, la conférence Canada 3.0 a été le théâtre d’ateliers et d’échanges portant sur l’avenir numérique du Canada.

Conscients de la nécessité de porter une attention immédiate aux enjeux liés aux médias numériques, les participants de la conférence ont entériné la Déclaration de Stratford :
• Au 21e siècle, la réussite des médias numériques sera au cœur de la prospérité du pays. Emplois, idées, produits, services, entreprises et débouchés se multiplient à un rythme effréné dans ce domaine en plein essor. Cependant, le Canada n’y occupe pas encore une position de chef de file mondial.
• Le Canada possède tous les atouts requis pour affronter de façon durable et ciblée la concurrence internationale dans le domaine. Cependant, ce potentiel ne se réalisera jamais à moins que le pays ne change de cap.
• Le Canada ne dispose pas encore d’assises stables et solides en ce qui touche l’économie et la société numériques. L’infrastructure numérique doit faire l’objet d’améliorations marquées, notamment sur le plan de l’infrastructure technique et des contenus numériques de confection canadienne.
• En matière d’économie numérique, la cohérence des réalisations nécessite une collaboration, des partenariats et une action concertée sans précédent à l’échelon national et intersectoriel. Le Canada doit profiter de la révolution numérique pour réinventer ses modèles de formation, d’éducation, de création de nouvelles entreprises, de coopération et de service au public ainsi que pour revoir la façon dont il envisage l’avenir collectif de la nation.
• L’avantage concurrentiel du Canada tient à sa capacité de conjuguer techniques et contenus et, ainsi, de produire et de diffuser des produits et services compétitifs dans l’arène mondiale. Les talents créateurs de ce pays doivent être « branchés » sur les possibilités techniques de notre époque.
• Le Canada doit devenir une plateforme mondiale d’essai des nouveaux produits et services numériques. Il doit également être perçu comme un incubateur de la nouvelle économie où consommateurs, gouvernements et entreprises se distinguent par leur capacité de faire place à l’innovation numérique.
• Le Canada doit se doter d’un milieu réglementaire et légal qui s’accorde avec le 21e siècle. Il lui faut également miser sur de telles dispositions pour se propulser au sommet du palmarès mondial de la gestion des droits d’auteur électroniques.
• L’écologie numérique alimente la concurrence mondiale sur le plan des talents, des idées, des brevets et des nouvelles entreprises. Les Canadiens doivent s’engager résolument envers leur pays pour en faire un lieu où apprendre, innover, travailler et prospérer. Le développement futur de l’économie numérique en dépend.
• Il est urgent de lancer un projet national d’une envergure, d’une portée et d’une incidence telles que les Canadiens en viendront à saisir les possibilités offertes par l’économie numérique et qu’il en découlera la collaboration, la coopération et la mobilisation intersectorielle requises pour l’exercice d’un leadership numérique mondial.
• Le Canada doit se fixer un objectif audacieux — devenir la première véritable nation numérique du monde — et s’employer prestement et résolument à atteindre cet objectif. (This is from the Facebook Page.)

PONTYPOOL | Shut up or die

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Last night I watched a Canadian gem of a zombie movie, PONTYPOOL | Shut up or die. The movie takes place almost entirely in a radio studio in the basement of an old church in the small town of Pontypool Ontario. Grant Mazzy, a talk-radio host at the end of his career, exiled from the big city, stays on the air dealing with the eruption of a language plague where English words (primarily endearments like “honey”) carry the new type of virus that infects people. With his producer and technician they try to figure out what is real or not as strange reports come in and they are interviewed by “our affiliate” the BBC. Eventually the zombies, who follow the sound of speaking, repeating words or phrases, break in to try to eat their way to the voice. Grant and his producer figure out that talking in their poor French (remember the importance of bilingualism in Canada) is one way to avoid infection and they work out a cure which involves disrupting mean by asserting things like “kill is kiss”. Back on the radio to talk through the cure, the movie ends with a count down from 10 in French from off camera. Are the French Canadian troops sent in to eradicate the plague about to blow up the radio station just when they have figured out the cure? Was the talk show of the radio station the source of the plague in the first place or was it the posters for a lost cat “Honey” plastered all over town? Could the interview Grant gives to a BBC news announcer have spread the logorrhea abroad? Can words spread ideas (or memes) like a plague closing down our understanding until we are babbling zombies. After all, in the beginning was the word, not its understanding.

Talking of how zombie movies are often a metaphor for things we fear infection from like communism, the author of the screenplay and original book, Tony Burges, says about the movie that,

(a zombie is) really a metaphor for metaphors that keep hunting you long after they have been meaningful. They keep coming at you. … They’re figures of speech that become predatory long after their sort of meaning as figures of speech have sort of left the stage. And so … that for me is the interesting last hundred yards of a zombie’s life. (From an interview with Tony Burgess in December of 2008 at the Drake Hotel in Toronto. Interview by Ian Daffern, co-produced and edited by Tate Young of Vepo Studios.