Kill Screen – Infinity Blade Review

Ivan sent me a link to a very smart review of the iPad game Infinity Blade. See Kill Screen – Infinity Blade Review. The review starts with:

Infinity Blade is a game about interation, about retreading old ground, about the small changes that surface across endless repetitions.

In the game, every time you die you come back as your son, but with slightly more experience and better powers. The review has a “Begin Bloodline X” at the bottom. Clicking on it replaces some of the words in the review with another review. Small changes are animated and the process then repeats. The review is a meditation on the game as life where you “live the same life a little bit better, a little bit smarter, a little bit longer than the time before.”

Very smart. Better than the game.

Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions

There is hope in the battle against spam. The New York Times is reporting on a study that has identified a weak point in the spam chain. See Study Says Spam Can Be Cut by Blocking Card Transactions – NYTimes.com.
The study by Kirill Levchenko and colleagues is titled, Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain (PDF of unpublished manuscript). They followed up on a lot of spam ads and bought thousands of dollars of stuff (like Viagra.) They then analyzed the chain of servers and services that make spam a viable business. The weak point is the credit card processing, because this is a business and some money has to be gathered at some point to finance it. There are a small number of banks that process the credit card transactions, and these banks may be vulnerable to political pressure.

Finally, we have used this data to provide a normative analysis of spam intervention approaches and to offer evidence that the payment tier is by far the most concentrated and valuable asset in the spam ecosystem, and one for which there may be a truly effective intervention through public policy action in Western countries. (p. 15)

Amazon and Waterstones report downloads eclipsing printed book sales

So, ebooks are finally taking off! The Guardian reports that Amazon and Waterstones report downloads eclipsing printed book sales . This doesn’t mean that the value of print sales has been surpassed, but it is still indicative that ebooks are here to stay.

Now, can we redesign the book for the ereader? The current crop of ebook readers are page turners that don’t use the medium. Instead the medium has been made to work like the book and perhaps that is right, but I would still like to see something more interesting. Here are some ideas:

  • e-audio-books – ebooks that come with either voice synthesis or synchronized audio so that you can listen or read them.
  • An API for reading apps so that you could buy apps that work with all your ebooks. The apps might allow you to search across books or visualize books. There might be apps that quiz you with random quotes or help you pull linked data out of a book.
  • A standardized way of citing passages in an ebook.

Defining the Digital Humanities April 6, 2011

Sean pointed me to a YouTube video from Columbia in which Dan Cohen starts the talk by talking about our Day of Digital Humanities. See Research Without Borders: Defining the Digital Humanities April 6, 2011. Dan talks about definitions for the digital humanities and talks about what they do at their Center for History and New Media.

Dan talks about how he doesn’t think there is anything like “armchair digital humanities”. He argues that you learn about technologies like blogging and twitter by doing.

5 Companies Building the “Internet of Things”

ReadWriteWeb has a nice article on 5 Companies Building the “Internet of Things”. I like the phrase “internet of things” – it gives a sense of what we might achieve if objects could be networked. The cool part is that there are now affordable kits that use RFID that can you can buy to start connecting things. I am reminded of a project I learned about at the GRAND meeting called The Reading Glove. Wearing the “reading glove” users pick up “narratively rich objects” that then trigger audio clips that then weave a puzzle narrative.

Is College Worth It? Pew Social & Demographic Trends

I came across this chapter from a report from the Pew Research Centre on
Is College Worth It?. The report looks at the value of education over a lifetime of work and concludes that “The typical college graduate earns an estimated $650,000 more than the typical high school graduate over the course of a 40-year work life…”

This chapter is part of a larger report on The Value of College. The authors make a number of points:

  • “A majority of Americans (57%) say the higher education system in the United States fails to provide good value for the money students and their families spend, and about four-in-ten college presidents say the system is headed in the wrong direction”
  • “just 19% of the 1,055 college presidents surveyed say they believe that the U.S. system of higher education is the best in the world. And just 7% say they think it will be the best in the world 10 years from now.”
  • “most college presidents (52%) say college students today study less than their predecessors did a decade ago, while just 7% say they study more. And 58% say that public high schools are doing a worse job of preparing students for college now than they did a decade ago, while just 6% say they are doing a better job.”
  • “the Pew Research survey finds that college graduates, on average, are happier and more satisfied with their jobs, their financial situation and their education than are those who did not attend college.”
  • “When asked what it takes for a young person to succeed in the world, more people point to traits such as a good work ethic (61% say this is extremely important) and knowing how to get along with people (57%) than say the same about a college education (42%).”
  • “the cost of a college education—at both public and private institutions—has roughly tripled since 1980 in inflation-adjusted dollars”
  • “By a small but statistically significant margin, the public says that the main purpose of a college education should be to teach work-related skills and knowledge (47%) rather than to help an individual grow personally and intellectually (39%). … College graduates tend to place more emphasis on personal and intellectual growth (52%) over career preparation (35%), while those who are not college graduates lean the other way, emphasizing career preparation (51%) over personal growth (34%).”

All of these quotes are from the Overview of the full report.

People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande

I heard a keynote at the GRAND 2011 conference who mentioned a “learning pyramid” which purports to show that lecturing is the worst way to teach.

I went looking for the research behind this and it seems that the pyramid is a hoax. People remember 10% of what they read…? – a knol by Rutger van de Sande is a short study that tried to figure out what were really the percentages. Van de Sande’s study came up with different numbers: Hearing: 36%, Reading: 51%, Seeing: 35%, Hearing and Seeing: 54%, Discussing: 50%, Experiencing: 70%, and Explaining: 58%.

Other blogs and essays on the subject include: Will Thalheimer‘s blog debunking the pyramid. There is an article in Education titled, The Learning Pyramid: Does It Point Teachers in the Right Direction? (that I haven’t read) that looks at the source for the numbers. Finally there is a long blog post on the subject by David Jones. He says that the “research is generally referenced back to the National Training Laboratories in Bethel Maine.” The NTL has apparently lost the original data.

This then raises the question of whether lecturing is really so bad.

GRAND 2011 Conference

I’m at the GRAND 2011 Conference. GRAND is a Networks of Centres of Excellence funded project that brings together researchers across Canada and across disciplines to study gaming, animation, and new media. I am part of two subprojects. In one we are developing smartphone augmented reality games for learning and health. In another we are developing gestural and performance games. Our fearless leader, Kellogg S. Booth (UBC), opened today’s events talking about the network.

Having organized large groups and participated in others, I’m impressed by how GRAND gently gathers us. We are coerced by the network, though we do have to report carefully.

See my conference notes for more on the conference.

David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker

The other day I got into a fascinating discussion about cognitive science and whether the humanities might be replaced by neuroscience. (See my previous blog entry, Harpham: Science and the Theft of Humanity.) For example, the study of beauty (aesthetics) might be replaced by the study of how people think about beauty and what parts of their brain light up when they experience beauty. This conversation was with a neuropsychologist who was patient with my fumbling critique. Then Bethany sent us a link to a story in the New Yorker where the featured scientist says,

“There’s always an impulse toward phrenology in neuroscience—toward saying, ‘Here is the spot where it’s happening,’ ” Eagleman told me. “But the interesting thing about time is that there is no spot. It’s a distributed property. It’s metasensory; it rides on top of all the others.”

via David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain : The New Yorker.