Computing Research News has an analysis of survey results from the Highter Education Research Institute at UCLA showing the drop of Computer Science majors.
One thing that is interesting is that this isn’t the first time interest has dropped. It looks like there was a spike of interest in the early 80s that then dropped off to then start spiking again in late 90s.
See also my previous post on this at Dropping Enrollments in Computer Science.
I am (finally) upgrading my blog software. This is going to take a while. My apologies if you find links within the blog don’t work, or if it vanishes for a while. The promise is that I might be able to turn commenting on later.
I once wrote an XML language to replace PowerPoint that had style sheet that turned my class outline into slides, but I have found a better way. HTML Slidy by Dave Raggett is a slide show about using XHTML to do slide shows. Dave has done a nice job at it using Javascript and CSS. My one problem is that the code is verbose – it needs a wiki crib language for quickly getting ideas out.
Another approach is to use Opera – see the Opera Show Tutorial. They have a online Opera Show Generator which creates the HTML for you. Neat.
Continue reading Web Slide Shows
I’m behind on blogging as I’ve been busy at conferences. I was invited to speak at a special session of Association francophone pour le savoir – Congr?©s on Interactivity and Narrative. The papers were excellent – well theorized and provocative. Some worth noting:
If there was one problem with the papers it was that everyone was connecting interactivity to narrative and few questioned whether narrative was appropriate. Sometimes the fit seemed forced.
The Final Report for the University of Virginia Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities is now posted as a PDF at the site. The describes how we identified the opportunity for new tools to support these areas of humanities scholarship:
I posted on this before at grockwel: Research Notes: Virginia Tool Summit.
Plaintext_Tools is a Zwiki (zope wiki) for the discussion of, “Theory and poetics of tools and codes. The analog and the digital. … ” It is run by the Center for Literary Computing at West Virginia University. Most of the wiki at the moment seems to be essays by Alan Sondheim with a few pages by others. I like the list of topics so far.
Microsoft may change gaming with their “Live Anywhere” plan that lets games be played across Xboxes, PCs (with Vista) and mobile devices like phones. At the E3 conference today Bill Gates pitches “anywhere” gaming at expo according to a story by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kemp Powers (May 9, 2006). This service (?) could change the site and pace of gaming by allowing people to start games on an Xbox and then keep up with their cell. Tamagotchi style caretaking games could be played “live anywhere”. More likely my son’s fanatic gamer friends will use it to keep their Orc avatars busy during the slow period in the day when they have to be in class. (Hi David)
The next generation of consoles is unfolding one press conference at a time at the E3Expo (Electronic Entertainment Expo). See the E3Expo – Reuters Newsblog or the E3 Blog from GameSpot. (I’ve noticed that time-limited blogs can provide effective summaries of conferences. Longer than an article, broken in to key announcements and impressions, they can give one a good overview.)
What’s the most popular form of online gaming? Surely one of the answers has got to be Internet Gambling which according to the American Gaming Association the Justice Department in the US considers “illegal under existing law.”
What is amazing are the facts from the AGA:
- The first online gambling site launched in August 1995. It is currently estimated that there are well over 2,000 Internet gambling Web sites offering various wagering options, including sports betting, casino games, lotteries and bingo.
- Internet gambling revenue in 2005 was estimated at $11.9 billion and is projected to double by 2010, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors (CCA).
- CCA estimates that nearly 23 million people gambled on the internet in 2005. Approximately 8 million of those gamblers were from the United States.
Keep in mind that gambling revenue for 2004 according to the AGA was $78.6 billion across everything from Card Rooms to Lotteries. (See Fact Sheets : Statistics.)
There is a 2006 State of the States (PDF) report which includes a section on Gambling and the Internet (and a spotlight on poker.) 4% of the US population gambles online, but that is a doubling from the year before. A greater percentage of online gamblers are men (68% men to 32% women) while among casino customers the numbers are close (53% to 47%.) There are differences in age (online gamblers are younger.) More online gamblers have a university education and they are affluent. They use the net heavily for things like online banking and 49% of them have posted to a blog in the last year! They like online gambling because it is convenient.
For a summary article that led me to this report see the Reuters story from May 8, 2006, Online gamblers doubled in 2005: study by Paritosh Bansal.
You wonder whether Canada is different. Its hard to find a comparable study but, the Canadian Gaming Association has some stats at Canadian Gaming Association. The rhetoric of the site is, if anything, less balanced. They talk of creating “a better understanding of the gaming entertainment industry and the issues that affect the thousands of businesses across the country that depend on it for their livelihood.” Defintely an advocacy group.
One site that does have critical information is the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre which, unlike the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario actually has information about the effects of gambling. For example, they have an abstract and links to reports like, Gambling@Home: Internet Gambling in Canada. The following is one of the Key Findings:
Online gambling has unique potential to increase the social cost of gambling and problem gambling because it combines the acknowledged double threat of high speed and convenient access with a technology that appeals to youth. Unregulated Internet gambling also has a potential for criminal involvement.
Mark my words, despite how the gaming associations try to spin it, gambling is coming back as a social issue. It will play out differently now that governments are addicted to it in order to raise revenue. Note, the final page of 2006 State of the States (PDF) shows a marked rise in the number of people who think gambling is “Not Acceptable for Anyone” (from 15% to 18% between 2005 and 6) and a corresponding drop in those who think gambling is “Perfectly Acceptable for Anyone” (57% to 54%). This is after years of stable numbers. Why the change? Is it a blip or is it indicative of a new wave of prohibition? What would trigger such a wave? According to Gambling in California (CRB-97-003), a 1997 California Research Bureau report by Roger Dunstan, in the second chapter on the “History of Gambling in the United States” (last paragraph),
The first and second waves ended in part because of a resurgence of public concern about morality and scandals in gaming. People can live with adverse odds but not cheating. What kind of events could lead to scandals today? If lotteries were plagued by fraud that would probably have an impact on people’s perceptions.
Could poorly regulated offshore online gambling trigger a reaction? If online gambling overtakes taxable or government run gambling, and if there are a couple of scandals involving cheating by online gambling sites, we could see the mood swing rapidly towards prohibition (with all the problems of prohibiting anything online.)
As part of the We Media 2006 Forum that just ran in London the BBC, Reuters, and the Media Center ran a pol on Trust in Media. They polled the US, Brazil, UK, Germany, Russia, Eygpt, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, and South Korea. An interesting choice of countries to make the poll international. Blogs didn’t come out as a trusted source:
Internet blogs are the least trusted news sources across the 10 countries, with one in four (25%) saying they trust them and almost as many (23%) saying they distrust them. Blogs are least trusted in Brazil (where 20% trust them and 45% distrust them) and the US (25% trust vs 38% distrust). Blogs are most trusted in South Korea (38% vs 25%), Indonesia (36% vs 16%), and Egypt (30% vs 15%). Across the 10 countries, one in two felt unable to say whether they trusted blogs or not.
On the most trusted sources internationally:
The most trusted global news brands among those tested include the BBC (with 48% across the 10 countries saying they have a lot or some trust) and CNN (44%). Even though Internet web sites in general do not receive particularly high trust ratings, three Internet portals received the next highest prompted trust ratings across the 10 countries; namely, Google (30%, a lot or some trust), Yahoo (28%), and Microsoft/MSN (27%).
The Wall Street Journal Online has a story by Katherine Meyer, The Best of the Worst (May 3, 2006) about dot-com duds that failed like Microsoft’s iLoo portable toilet with an internet connection. (Yes, it was supposed to have a waterproof keyboard and would be used at UK music festivals.) Other duds include CyberRebate.com, Flooz.com, iSmell, and the CueCat. The last dud mentioned is PointCast which offered a custom browser for push content which I actually tried for a while. This came from Slashdot.