Edmonton Sun: More fam-Wii fun despite downturn

So I got another minute of fame being interviewed for a story in the Edmonton Sun, More fam-Wii fun despite downturn. The interesting thing is how games seem to be recession-proof and how well the Wii is doing.

Despite a flagging economy, $1.31 billion US was spent on video games in October in the U.S. alone – a gain of 18% from September.

The spike is being led by Nintendo’s Wii interactive console, which according to figures from market research company NPD Group outpaced its competitors by selling 803,000 consoles in October.

I wonder how high definition screens will do this Christmas? I would have thought this is the time for people to switch, but the news suggests otherwise.

Globe and Mail: 1858: How a violent year created a province

The Globe and Mail yesterday had a full page story on 1858: How a violent year created a province. This story about the birth of British Columbia 150 years ago draws from the University of Victoria site Colonial Despatches which has images and text of the despatches. Neat project.

It’s remarkable, what a slender thread British authority hung by,” UVIC history professor John Lutz, who helped give birth to the new website, bcgenesis.uvic.ca, said in an interview.

University Affairs: Some graduates question thesis publication requirement

University of Affairs has a story online about how Some graduates question thesis publication requirement. The article gives as examples, students in creative writing programs who obviously want to go on and publish their theses. They don’t mention the serious issue of the license that Theses Canada makes you sign. I wonder if it would be possible for a graduate student to edit the license before signing it?

State of Science & Technology in Canada

Stan pointed me to the 2006 Council of Canadian Academies | Conseil des académies canadiennes report on The State of Science & Technology in Canada (Summary and Main Findings, PDF 2.6 mb). The report tries to identify Canada’s strengths and weaknesses in the Science & Technology field, though they have a broad understanding of S&T. There is good news for arts and technology.

The ICT field demonstrating the most promise in the view of respondents – i.e., with the highest net upward trend rating – is New Media, Multimedia, Animation and Gaming, where Canada is internationally recognized as a leader, with a number of successful companies as well as a reputation for superb skills training. (p. 9)

They also identify Humanities Computing as a transdisciplinary field of strength,

Survey respondents perceived significant strength in some emerging fields such as nanoscale materials and biotechnologies, quantum informatics and humanities computing. These latter transdisciplinary fields are specialities for which future prospects are seen to be more significant than currently established strength. (p. 10)

Here is a chart from page 39 showing the Humanities and the Arts:

Chart

Social Computing in 2020: Bluesky Innovation Competition – UC Transliteracies Project

From Susan a link to Social Computing in 2020: Bluesky Innovation Competition – UC Transliteracies Project. This competition is hosted by the University of California Transliteracies Project and UC Santa Barbara
Social Computing Group and is open to any student from any discipline. I think competitions like this and T-REX are going to become a more common way of fostering innovation and rewarding ideas.

Rome Reborn in Google Earth

Image of Google Rome Ever wondered what it was like to stand in the Roman forum back in 320 CE? Well, growing up in Rome and being dragged through the now hot and dusty forum I have wondered what it was like back then amny times. Now I can fly around imperial Rome thanks to a collaboration between the Rome Reborn project led by Bernie Frischer at Virginia and Google Earth. You can download the latest Google Earth viewer and relevant layers at Google Earth Rome. All that is missing is people.

This project has recieved a lot of press like the BBC story, Google Earth revives ancient Rome. I first noticed it on the Italian Google News where it made the Top Stories front page yesterday (called Prima Pagina in the Italian.) The mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno even blogged it on the Google blog inviting people to tour.

The idea that virtual technologies now let people experience the city that I guide as it appeared in 320 A.D. fills me with pride — a pride that I inherited from Rome’s glorious past.

As a humorous aside, there is an interesting view to be had if you go through the “floor” of ancient Rome. Then you see the satellite view of modern Rome (flattened) below the ancient 3D model in an interesting inversion of the archaeological layers.

Screen Shot from Google Earth Rome

Here you see the distinctive design of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio beneath the model. The lines are the flags for items of interest that you can click on to get descriptions of the buildings.

ESAC: Girl Gamers

Cover of ESA 2008 Fast FactsThe Edmonton Journal has a story today titled “It took a while, but Ms. Pacman has her audience: Girl gamers take up controllers” by David Wylie for the Canwest News Service (A10, November 12, 2008.) The story reports that a Entertainment Software Association of Canada study “found that half of Canadian gamers are women”. (The study isn’t available on the ESA Canada web site, which, for that matter, doesn’t have any press releases after 2007. Time for an update, Eh!) The story also reports that the Entertainment Software Association (of the USA?) 2008 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry (PDF) puts the percentage of female game players at 40%. The Edmonton Journal story has some cute quotes from the woman they interviewed for the story:

“I think womean and gaming are a perfect match,” she (McIndoe) says. “It is incredibly social.” … “There is always something to talk about. And the ladies love to talk.”

“Things really took off once I met my husband; we didn’t have a lot of money, so we would stay up and play video games together. To be honest, it was him working the congroller and me shouting instructions — truly th beginning of a happy marriage.”

The story goes on to make the usual points about how games are marketed to me, how there are female-focused tournaments like Fight like a Girl (think Halo 3 for charity), and how there are all-girl clans.

I’m not sure I trust the ESA or ESAC facts, but I suspect there is a trend towards more women playing games, especially social games. What would computer game culture look like if it was dominated by older women? How would they design games?

Ithaka: Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources

The Ithaka organization has released a report on the Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources with support from the Strategic Content Alliance and JISC in the U.K. The report deals with the difficult question of how to sustain all the free online resources we have built in the first enthusiasm of the web.

There is no single formula that Online Academic Resources (OARs) can apply to achieve sustainability, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ plan that any organization can follow to reach a point of financial stability. There are, however, a variety of processes and approaches that can help to improve the likelihood of entrepreneurial success. In an age when traditional content producers – including scholarly publishers and newspapers – struggle to maintain their financial footing in face of the challenges of the digital world, OARs cannot turn to lessons of the past to find their way, but must see themselves as nimble players in a quickly shifting field.

Part of the problem is that we think of the digital as if it were a grant project with a print outcome. You do the research, you develop the resources, you publish it and then you move on. Digital publication seems to be cheaper and faster than print, but the true cost is the sustainability. You can get it up faster, but then you have to maintain it forever. The report argues that the problem is that academics, as smart as they are, don’t know how to think like entrepreneurs.

Clearly the leaders of these initiatives are competent professionals; why do they not rely on processes that have proven effective in both commercial and not-for-profit contexts? We have concluded that a key reason for this is that academic researchers tend to approach these problems from a different perspective, and with a different mindset, than do commercial entrepreneurs. (Page 5)

For this reason the report presents an entrepreneurial start-up model which excludes academics who can’t focus soley on a project (which is most of us):

Running a start-up is a full-time job and requires full-time leadership. The mode of principal investigators, in which they divide their time between overseeing a variety of research grants, teaching courses, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success. New initiatives aiming for sustainability require fully dedicated, fully invested, and intensely focused leadership. If a principal investigator cannot provide it, he or she will have to retain a very capable person who can. (Page 7)

This is the second time in a week or so I have heard people calling for the professionalization of academic resource development (the other time being at the Tools for Data-Driven Research meeting where the view was voiced that tool development should be taken out of the hands of the academics.) Reading the report I wonder what the role of academics in scholarly resources is, if any? It reminds me of calls for MBAs to run universities rather than academics. I wonder what it would look like to apply the logic of this report to the university itself (as a type of institution.) I think it fair to say that the university has clearly proven to be longer lasting (more sustainable) than commercial enterprises. For that matter ask how many software companies still exist ten years later (see my blog entry on In Search of Stupidity, over 20 years of high-tech marketing disasters). To be fair I think the report is looking at models for large-scale academic resources like online journals and other non-profit resource organizations that are often run by professional staff already.  Hereis a list of their major points:

  1.  Most OAR projects should not assume ongoing support from initial funders.
  2. Sustainability plans must include and provide for resources to support future growth.
  3. OAR projects create value through the impact they have on users.
  4. Projects should think in terms of building scale through partnerships, collaborations, mergers, and even acquisitions.
  5. In a competitive world, strategic planning is imperative.
  6. OAR leaders must see both the needs of users and the competitive environment as dynamic and constantly changing.
  7. OAR leaders must become fully accountable both to their projects and to their funders.
  8. Catalysing a dynamic environment for agility, creativity, risk-taking, and innovation is imperative.

While I am skeptical of the entrepreneurial thinking the report starts with we can learn from these points about sustainability by looking at the issue from an entrepreneurial perspective still stands. We can and should think about the long term sustainability and we can learn from other perspectives.

The really useful part of the report is “Section 4: Revenue Generating Options for OAR  Projects” which systematically discusses direct and indirect ways of generating revenue including the much avoided approach of allowing ads into academic sites.

Brandon Crisp and Game Addiction

The sad story of Brandon Crisp and his parents is over. The Globe and Mail reports that an Autopsy shows Brandon Crisp died from fall. Brandon had run away from home after his parents revoked his Xbox privileges after he had skipped school to play Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Microsoft got involved when they doubled the reward for information about Brandon’s whereabouts and shared information about his online team. His parents were afraid he was addicted to the game though the truth may be that he was caught in a network of obligations to team members with whom he played. As an article in Maclean’s puts it:

What they didn’t know at the time, his parents say, was just how much the game meant to their son and how troublesome that connection had become. Since his disappearance, the true extent of his involvement has become clear. While he had few friends in Barrie, his Xbox had a list of 200 people whom he played Call of Duty with online. Judged too small to keep up in hockey, the shy but competitive teenager found respect and success in the video game world, where he played on “clans,” or online teams. It wasn’t just a game, it was Brandon’s life — something he might even make money playing in professional tournaments one day, he once told a friend. “These are the things I didn’t realize,” says Steve, standing in a police command centre near where Brandon vanished, his hands wrapped around a bottle of water. “When I took his Xbox away, I took away his identity.” (What happened to Brandon? by Colin Campbell and Jonathon Gatehouse, Oct. 30, 2008)

The article mainly talks about the possibility that computer games are addictive and includes a response from the ESA that the media is “addicted” to such stories. The Escapist in response to Maclean’s has an editorial by Andy Chalk (sent to me by Calen) titled The Stigma of Normal which argues that the evidence of a connection between games and Brandon’s running away is scant.

Playing videogames in this day and age is no more remarkable than watching television or listening to music. Did he overindulge? Maybe, although we have only his parents’ word to that effect, and if he did, it would hardly be beyond the pale for teenage behavior anyway. Yet even though the only videogame connection to the case is the fact that he played them, it’s virtually impossible to see or read anything about his disappearance without the gaming angle being thrust in your face like the armored crotch of a victorious deathmatch opponent. (The Stigma of Normal, Andy Chalk, Nov. 5, 2008)

It seems to be both sides, the media and … the (gaming) media are addicted to each other and this issue. They both have their audience and play to them. How could the discussion around gaming mature?

Alternative DNS roots

In the category of “why didn’t I think of that” I recently discovered that there are alternative DNS roots. Domain name services are what resolve domain names like “theoreti.ca” into an actual IP Address. The available root names like .com, .ca and so on are limited and you can’t invent your own like “.rockwell” without paying a lot or convincing ICANN. That’s where alternative DNS root name servers come in. Obviously there are good reasons to not use alternative roots systems. As the Internet Architecture Board puts it in RFC 2826:

To remain a global network, the Internet requires the existence of a globally unique public name space. The DNS name space is a hierarchical name space derived from a single, globally unique root. This is a technical constraint inherent in the design of the DNS. RFC 2826: IAB Technical Comment on the Unique DNS Root

That said, Guy pointed me to a blog entry on Why I use my own DNS resolvers that explains why one might want to run your own DNS service (speed) and how you can then use OpenNIC root servers to resolve alternative names.