DFC Intelligence on Online Games

DFC Intelligence is a game industry research company that produces reports for sale. They have some articles online for free like Monthly Briefing on “Who will benefit from the growth of online game subscription revenue?” (March 7, 2006). This briefing article makes some interesting points, including, “Most notably, over 50% of online game subscription revenue in 2005 came from Asian countries outside Japan, most notably South Korea, China and Taiwan.”

A welcome caveat in the article,

The online game market has supposedly been on the cusp of booming for 20 years or so. There has been a great deal of trial and error in getting the market to where it is today. Many of the success stories have seemingly come out of nowhere. Future growth will require companies to take some significant risky investments. Most companies that have invested with a conscious goal of growing their online game business have not been successful. Right now there is even a question of whether traditional publishers need online games for growth over the next several years.

Xich Lo (Cyclo)

Xich lo (1995) by Vietnamese/French director Anh Hung Tran is unlike the other two features he directed (see
my earlier entry). The photographic cinematography is there, but the style is urban and violent. In Cyclo a poor and naive brother and sister enter a cycle of underworld prostitution and gang violence, almost losing their innocent lives. The treatment of the random violence in post-war Vietnam is unlike the methodical American lyrical violence. It is the random cutting of street life. The director puts it well in this Film Scouts Interview.

That’s why I hope you felt another kind of violence here, a moral violence. I often hear people say that in American films violence is gratuitous, I don’t agree. It’s always justified, meaning the hero’s wife gets killed early on, so he retaliates, therefore it’s justified. That’s mechanical violence. In Quentin Tarantino’s films, on the other hand, the violence is playful, jubilant.

When you deal with violence, you must avoid the playful, the jubilant, the laughter, and the justification. It’s easy satisfaction. When Cyclo’s bicycle is stolen, there’s no need for the young robbers to hit him. Yet they do, and I show it, to give you the feeling of how unfair it is. I even make the scene a tad longer, so as to make the unfairness of it all, and the violence it entails, even more unbearable, and you can’t desire it. As opposed to “Reservoir Dogs” where, after the guy has had his ear chopped off, you’re frustrated because he’s not burnt to ashes.

That’s why I’ve never been comfortable with Tarantino’s taste for blood.
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Kottke: the first professional blogger

According to the Jason Wikipedia article, Jason Kottke of kottke.org was the first to try to make a living from blogging through a PBS-like micropatrons approach where he had a 3 week “fund drive” which raised enough for him to blog for a year.

After a year he reflected on the experience in Oh, what a year. felixsalmon was not impressed.

This story, which was big news at the time, is old now, I know. Thanks to Matt for alerting me to it (back when it was news.)

Frank McCourt: Teacher Man

teacherman.gifThere is no seeping fear like the first year you teach school. Reading Frank McCourt‘s Teacher Man brought it back to me. There are no easy secrets to get you through, just doing it until you can smell the type of class you have as they walk in. Just doing it until there are some moments that worked and stories to tell.

It wouldn’t have helped my teaching if I had read this book back then at 23 when I first taught, but I would have recognized the fear when I wondered at night just what I thought I was doing.

I’ve had to ask myself what the hell I’m doing in the classroom. I’ve worked out an equation for myself. On the left side of the blackboard I print a capital F, on the right side another capital F. I draw an arrow from the left to right, from FEAR to FREEDOM. (p. 253)

Continue reading Frank McCourt: Teacher Man

Regular Expression reAnimator

StÈfan Sinclair has blogged in Visualizing Regular Expressions a project by Oliver Steele that animates regular expressions (those cryptic things you write when searching texts for patterns.) Regular expressions and pattern matching have a long and interesting history that has yet to be written. Two points:

  • Steve Ramsay has a nice page on regular expressions where he provides a short history,

    Regular expressions trace back to the work of an American mathematician by the name of Stephen Kleene (one of the most influential figures in the development of theoretical computer science) who developed regular expressions as a notation for describing what he called “the algebra of regular sets.” His work eventually found its way into some early efforts with computational search algorithms, and from there to some of the earliest text-manipulation tools on the Unix platform (including ed and grep). In the context of computer searches, the “*” is formally known as a “Kleene star.”

  • The Haubens in the online archive of Netizens describe the development of Grep as the one of the first tools to demonstrate the power of piping in Unix,

    Grep is listed in the Manual for Version 4 Unix which is dated November, 1973. The date given for the creation of grep is March 3, 1973, following the creation of pipes.(43) The creation of grep, McIlroy explains, was followed by the invention of other special purpose software programs that could be used as tools.

    Regular expression (regex) matching since Grep shows up as a language within most other languages (like Ruby and Java) for handling strings. It is the archetype of the software tool – a utility within a larger environment or application. This is something I commented on in MIMes and MeRMAids.

Undergraduate Research

Let’s face it; research and teaching are in conflict in the university. Despite all the talk about connecting research and teaching there are few models for how to do it systematically. For most of us it is a matter of time. Time to teach is time away from research. It’s that simple.

So what are the models for connecting the two?

  • Scholarship of teaching is the model where faculty do research about teaching. (See my entry on the Boyer Report). This model has the advantage that it can legitimize those interested in teaching and learning as researchers. If systematically deployed it also would mean that there are teaching scholars accessible to those who are interested, but not devoted. The down side is that it doesn’t make sense, except in small undergrad institutions, for all to be teacher scholars.
  • Undergraduate Involvement in Research is a second model where undergraduates are involved in research. See Mitchell Malachowski’s opinion piece “Undergraduate Research as the Next Great Faculty Divide”, in Peer Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 2006. This is done informally by many of us where there are opportunities. McMaster has an Applied Humanities course which is an inverted form of an independent studies course. The researcher proposes the topic and tasks and then recruits students to join them. Unfortunately, as Malachowski points out, in many disciplines where solitary research dominates, there are few opportunities to involve students in anything more than glorified photocopying. (See quote in the Extended Entry.) To involve students systematically, by which I mean across the curriculum, we need to adapt our research. I can imagine a discovery-centred university that values the learning through research of both students and faculty (and staff) where the structures encourage learning and research to adapt to each other.
  • Undergraduate Led Research is a related model where undergraduates are given credit or funding for imagining and conducting their own research. Senior undergraduates interested in continuing to graduate school are often ready to run with projects on their own and they can be given opportunities structured like a research culture with poster sessions, mini student conferences, and so on. This is not for all students, however.
  • Researchers make better Teachers is the standard answer we give, but I don’t think it stands up. Top researchers rarely see undergraduates, they get endowed chairs with little teaching or release to run projects. If we believed this the last people we would give teaching relief to would be the top researchers. Instead teaching release is treated as an incentive, especially today when teaching means large classes that need to be entertained rather than the conversations where research experience could make a difference. No, if we want student-centred programs it is best to not hire too many superstars.

Are there other models then?
Continue reading Undergraduate Research

The Fog of Memory: Eco and “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna”

mysterious.jpgWhat if you only remembered what you had read? In Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, the narrator Bodoni wakes from a stroke with no memories other than the cultural ones – what he, an antiquarian book collector, has read. The first two parts of this novel dramatize the personal (and its loss) in memory. What if memory were only a hypertext of associations like Bodoni’s memories? What makes a memory meaningful? What gives it the “mysterious flame” of immortality?

The novel draws its name from a comic book from Eco’s youth that was based on a novel She by H. Rider Haggard (1886). The narrator tries to recover his memory returning to his grandfather’s country estate in the town of Solara and reading through the adventures and comics of his youth. Eco uses this to trace Italian fascism through its impact on popular youth culture, reproducing through the novel illustrated images, especially comics, from his youth.

In the third and final part Bodoni has another stroke and in his coma trys to see the face of his first love, Sibilla (Sibyl). Eco is playing with myths, both those of comic books and the Greek ones of return. The Cumaean Sibyl leads Aeneas into the caverns of Hades to see his father just as Bodoni is led into the caverns of memory where he finds his childhood with his father. Bodoni, named after the type designer Giambattista Bodoni, seeks but cannot recover, the memory of his Sibilla – he has no way back. He is lost in the caverns of what can be read and can’t find his way back to the sun – Solara. The novel ends with the smoke of memory eclipsing that sun.

I feel a cold gust, I look up.
Why is the sun turning black?

Eco’s novel, like Baudolino before, also feels like it doesn’t know when to return. Both begin well and then get lost in antiquarian detail. Eco doesn’t know when to stop, when to return home and leave the loving details to others. Is this the curse of scholastic writers?
Continue reading The Fog of Memory: Eco and “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna”

No Dead Air!

Listening to chosen music enables these iPod users to focus in on themselves. In
these situations the music enables users to clear a space for thought, imagination
and mood maintenance. (p. 349)

No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening is a good article by Michael Bull that gets at the how the iPod gives users control over mobile times and places (gives them a musical bubble when filling in time.) This article recognizes that an imporant chronotope is the “in-between” space of commuting, walking, taking the tube, or jogging. These spaces are typically public, but the iPod gives one a way of personalizing it, creating a private auditory space out of the public space.

Thanks to Sean for this.
Continue reading No Dead Air!