IBM’s “Watson” Computing System to Challenge All Time Greatest Jeopardy! Champions

Richard drew my attention to the upcoming competition between IBM’s Watson deep question and answer system and top Jeopardy! champions, IBM’s “Watson” Computing System to Challenge All Time Greatest Jeopardy! Champions. I’d blogged on Watson before – it’s a custom system designed to mine large collections of data for answers to questions. Here is what IBM says its applications are,

Beyond Jeopardy!, the technology behind Watson can be adapted to solve problems and drive progress in various fields. The computer has the ability to sift through vast amounts of data and return precise answers, ranking its confidence in its answers. The technology could be applied in areas such as healthcare, to help accurately diagnose patients, to improve online self-service help desks, to provide tourists and citizens with specific information regarding cities, prompt customer support via phone, and much more.

what you are missing – bookforum.com / in print

Bookforum has a thoughtful review of Jane McGonigal’s book, Reality if Broken, titled What You Are Missing: The utopian visiion of one ardent proponent of gamification by Clay Risen (Feb/Mar 2011). Risen is critical of the view that we can transform learning by gamifying it.

Like a lot of hard-core gamers, McGonigal believes that game worlds offer something better than reality: “In today’s society, computer and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy.” One could say the same about a drug high—indeed, McGonigal often mimics the chatter about marijuana’s world-altering potential common to freshman dorm rooms. Still, if she’s right, it’s only because, as real as some games look and as human as some of their characters appear, games are by design not real. Huge chunks of the human condition have been left out. Decisions have been simplified. Despair, anger, jealousy—emotions like these are engineered out of the gaming experience, not because game companies want to turn us into zombies, but because that’s what we demand: escape into a simplified existence from the messy disappointment of reality. Simply put, video games can’t help us change the world if they’re designed to divorce us from it.

I share the skepticism about the transformative power of gamifying things. Some of the issues we need think about are:

  • Anyone who has taught K-12 has already tried gamifying with stickers, friendly competitons, using games and so on. It is already in the portfolio of a good teacher to try to make things playful.
  • Games and simulations may work to teach some topics but it is likely that they won’t work for others. Flight simulators are examples of simulations that are clearly useful, but they work because we can actually model success on a computer. We cannot, however, model success in writing which means that games for writing are limited to gamifying things, not actually providing useful feedback.
  • If we gamify things then we risk making gaming the least fun thing around. Gamification sounds like an Orwellian plot to dress up exploitation as play. Most people will see through it at the expense of serious attempts at serious games.
  • Play is not work. Work dressed up as play is still work. At the end of the day it is a waste of money to dress things up instead of facing work as work.

Bill of Rights for Collaborators: Recommendations Off the Tracks

Paul pointed me to recommendation by the Off the Tracks workshop for a Collaborator’s Bill of Rights. This document nicely starts a discussion about collaboration and credit which is important to the digital humanities. The comments are also worth reading. For example, Adam Crymble raises questions about where we draw the line between collaborators and other forms of support or inspiration. Does an RA for a prof who writes a book deserve to be credited as a co-author? Is the builder of a tool like Omeka a collaborator? My philosophy is generally:

  • Credit should be discussed at the beginning of a project with RAs, colleagues and programmers. As most of my projects now come out of labs where groups of people meet, we try to discuss credit at the start of any particular project.
  • In general most projects don’t lead to one outcome. Interdisciplinary projects will often lead to papers written up for different communities. Working with CS folk we have a general rule of thumb that we can each propose and write papers (conference and print) as long as inform others at the start of the writing/proposing and recognize the key players from the other side. Thus I am encouraged to present/publish in my community and I get to be first author on any paper I initiate. The same is true of grad students and other faculty.
  • Listing co-authored papers on a CV for purposes of merit, promotion and tenure leads to problems at the level of Faculty Evaluation Committees. At U of A you are explicitly asked for each item for which you want merit to specify whether you had co-contributors and what your role/percentage of work was. I try to avoid in my own CV specifying percentages of contribution even though that is encouraged. Instead I try to describe the role I played in a collaborative paper in a consistent fashion. Some of the roles include “led the project”, “wrote the paper”, “edited the paper”, “programmed the site”, “managed the usability research” and so on.
  • A couple of the comments to this post mention the constraints on programmers and research assistants to starting projects. This is perhaps one of the major reasons I left a nice job in university IT support to take up an academic position – I was tired of waiting for others to initiate projects or trying to be a tail that wagged them. This is the fundamental split in our academic caste system that we have to overcome in the small workings of our labs. In my experience it is often to my advantage to ask research assistants to take leadership and propose things within the context of a research area. The more ideas, the more directions taken, the better the research coming out.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s man behind Mario

The New Yorker has a great story about Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s man behind Mario. Written by Nick Paumgarten the story is titled “Master of Play; The many worlds of a video-game artist.” (December 20, 2010.) The story nicely weaves an interview with Miyamoto into an introduction to game design.

Fishermen have a saying, in reference to the addictive sensation of a fish hitting your line: “The tug is the drug.” Gamers, as video-game players are known, thrill to “the pull,” that mysterious ability that good games have of making you want to play them, and keep playing them.

On a related note, Susan pointed me to a satirical about how Waiting for Godot for Wii breaks first week sales records.

Modkit – Software

Garry send me a link to a very cool project which has developed a visual programming language for the Arduino called Modkit. Watch the screencast to get the idea.

I’ve seen a number of visual programming environments and this one reminds me of the old programming environment for Lego Mindstorms. What is new is that it runs off the web the way Design By Numbers does.

Whether it actually makes programming the Arduino easier or, as is often the case with visual programming, turns out to be slower and still as complicated, remains to be seen. It has a nice code view so you can switch to writing code if you get irritated with clicking around for stuff.

Could we build a visual programming language like this for text analysis?

Compute Canada’s “Strategic” Plan Isn’t

I have become involved in Compute Canada (in addition to being a grateful user of WestGrid.) I came across this critique of their recent strategic plan, Compute Canada’s “Strategic” Plan Isn’t. What interests me is that education is the main issue for Software Carpentry. One of the things in the plan is to establish a virtual HPC centre of excellence for the humanities and social sciences which would run workshops and seminars to help bring people on board.

My sense from the comments is that for funders it is more attractive to develop new technologies than to educate people to use those in place. What government brags about workshops, but petascale computing sound special.

Addicted to Games?

Today I came across stories about game addiction. One is from the BBC that had an episode of Panorama titled Addicted to Games?. The web page has video clips and articles like Can video gaming cross from innocent fun to addiction? by Raphael Rowe. (BTW the web page will expire in 11 months – I guess the BBC pulls pages after a year.) Edge has an article reviewing this episode, Was Panorama’s Game Addiction Report Fair? where they conclude:

Videogames are a powerful form of entertainment. Last night’s Panorama report acknowledged this, and – despite an anxiously concerned tone throughout – also acknowledged that the vast majority of gamers have nothing to fear from their hobby. But beyond a superficial look at basic game mechanics, the report made little attempt to find out why, for the unlucky and unfortunate young men it interviewed, gaming had become such an all-encompassing force in their lives.

From the Los Angeles Times is an article about Video game addiction: Researchers identify risk factors which reports on a study just released by Pediatrics (Jan. 17 issue) that says,

“Greater amounts of gaming, lower social competence, and greater impulsivity seemed to act as risk factors for becoming pathological gamers, whereas depression, anxiety, social phobias, and lower school performance seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming.” (quote from original study in LAT article)

Edge again has an article ESA Refutes Pediatrics Videogame Studies commenting briefly on the research.

The CBC has an article by Amina Zafar on Video game addiction: Does it exist? which is longer, thoughtful, and has lots of useful links down the side. It is part of a “special video games feature package”, Pushing Buttons.

TagCrowd

created at TagCrowd.com

TagCrowd is another web based word cloud generator that seems clean and works on URLs, uploaded files, and pasted files. They also offer a commercial version for a small license fee.

Interdisciplinarity

Thanks to Humanist I came across this Chronicle of Higher Education essay by Myra H. Strober about fostering interdisciplinarity, Communicating Across the Academic Divide (January 2, 2011.) Strober has written a book about interdisciplinarity titled, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought whose conclusion she summarizes in the essay,

The three common explanations for a lack of faculty interest in interdisciplinary work are that the academic reward system militates against it (hiring, promotion, salary increases, and most prizes are controlled by single disciplines, not by multiple disciplines), that there is insufficient funding for it, and that evaluating it is fraught with conflict. These are significant barriers.

However, while doing research for my new book, Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Thought, I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture.

I am chairing a committee that is developing a vision for the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Alberta. We have been talking to people, running brainstorming events, and writing up case studies to identify the barriers to interdisciplinarity just in our Faculty of Arts. One thing that is clear is that there are a tremendous number of faculty/students who want to try interdisciplinarity from team-teaching across disciplines to blowing up departments. One of the things that hinders many is the extra effort it takes to get out of the department, to find people, to find the support mechanisms, and to navigate the bureaucracy (which is really oriented around departments.) We need a “front desk” type function where you can get advice and mentoring.