Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime

ars technica has a good summary of the Kaiser Family Foundation Report: Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds. Their story, Kids consume media as a full-time job—many getting overtime (Chris Foresman, Jan. 21, 2010) ends with some good news,

The report notes that kids spend less time reading magazines or newspapers, though online reading has supplanted that to some degree. However, the average time spent reading books has stayed relatively steady, at about an hour per day. Only the heaviest of media users reported increases in poor grades or low levels of personal contentment. And it seems parents that are active about placing restrictions on media use have kids that consume significantly less media than kids without restrictions. Leaving the TV off, limiting hours of TV, video game, or computer use, and having rules about types of content all help curb media use. One final bit of good news: kids on average spent almost two hours a day engaged in physical activity, up slightly from five years ago.

The bad news is that media consumption is becoming a full time job for kids taking up all the time they are asleep or at school. Is there anything other than media consumption?

Whatever happened to Second Life? | Analysis | Features | PC Pro

Willard, on Humanist, asked about an article titled, Whatever happened to Second Life? ,

Does this decline in popularity matter? What, do you suppose, does it tell us about VR techniques generally?

According to the article Linden Labs is making more money than ever,

Money is, of course, what makes the world go around – even the virtual ones. So has the Second Life economy suffered the same nervous breakdown as the real-world markets over the past year or so? Amazingly, it appears not.

Linden Labs claims Second Life has turned over more than $1 billion in its six-year history. Nor is it slowing down; quite the opposite in fact. Linden claims the in-world economy grew by a staggering 94% year-on-year from Q2 2008 to Q2 2009.

It sounds like it may be sex that is making money for Linden Labs.

Another answer to the question Willard poses about VR is that now we have tools like the OpenSimulator which allows us to build and adapt virtual worlds on our own server. OpenSimulator is compatible with the Second Life client, but we can customize it to do different things, for example, we can turn it into an authoring environment for an Augmented Reality Game platform. Place your items in virtual space and they show up in the corresponding real space.

There is a discussion about SL and this story at iDC https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2010-January/004138.html . In particular. Simon Biggs points to a report on education and SL (PDF) he wrote.

The General Inquirer

Reading John B. Smith’s “Computer Criticism”, (Style: Vol. XII, No. 4) I came a reference to a content analysis program called the The General Inquirer from the 1960s. This program still has a following and has been rewritten in Java. See the Inquirer Home Page. There is a web version where you can try it here (DO NOT USE A LARGE TEXT).

The General Inquirer “maps” a text to a thesaurus of categories, disambiguating on the way. The web page about How the General Inquirer is used describes what it does thus:

The General Inquirer is basically a mapping tool. It maps each text file with counts on dictionary-supplied categories. The currently distributed version combines the “Harvard IV-4” dictionary content-analysis categories, the “Lasswell” dictionary content-analysis categories, and five categories based on the social cognition work of Semin and Fiedler, making for 182 categories in all. Each category is a list of words and word senses. A category such as “self references” may contain only a dozen entries, mostly pronouns. Currently, the category “negative” is our largest with 2291 entries. Users can also add additional categories of any size.

As they say later on, their categories were developed for “social-science content-analysis research applications” and not for other uses like literary study. The original developer published a book on the tool in 1966:

Philip J. Stone, The General Inquirer: A Computer Approach to Content Analysis. (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1966).

The Chess Master and the Computer – The New York Review of Books

Humanist pointed me to a review in The New York Review of Books by Garry Kasparov titled “The Chess Master and the Computer” (Volume 57, Number 2; February 11, 2010) that reflects on how computing has been applied to chess. We all know that Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue in 1997, but then what?

One followup experiment that Kasparov mentions was a “freestyle” competition sponsored by the chess site Playchess.com where teams of humans and computers could compete against each other.

The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

I find it interesting that it is a hybrid of human machine that played best not pure AI. This is Engelbart’s augmentation outperforming experts or AIs.

GHOSTSIGNS: hand painted wall advertising

GHOSTSIGNS.CO.UK is a site dedicated to the hand painted advertising murals that we often see like ghosts of text on the sides of buildings. The site presents itself as,

a collaborative national effort to photograph, research and archive the remaining examples of hand painted wall advertising in the UK and Ireland.

The images of these ghostsigns are up on a Flickr group pool. See also HAT (History of Advertising Trust) web site which has a gallery.

Tagging Full Text Searchable Articles: An Overview of Social Tagging Activity in Historic Australian Newspapers August 2008 – August 2009

D-Lib has an article by Rose Holley of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP), on Tagging Full Text Searchable Articles: An Overview of Social Tagging Activity in Historic Australian Newspapers August 2008 – August 2009 (January/February 2010, Volume 16, Number 1/2.)

The Australian Newspapers project is a leader in crowdsourcing. They encourage users correct the full text of articles and tag them. This D-Lib article focuses on the tagging and mentions other projects that have researched the effectiveness (and found it wanting compared to professional subject tagging.) The conclusion endorses user tagging,

The observations show that there were both similarities and differences in tagging activity and behaviours across a full text collection as compared to the research done on tagging in image collections. Similarities included that registered users tag more than anonymous users, that distinct tags form 21-37% of the tag pool, that 40% or more of the tag pool is created by ‘super-taggers’ (top 10 tag creators), that abuse of tags occurs rarely if at all, and that spelling mistakes occur fairly frequently if spell-check or other mechanisms are not implemented at the tag creation point. Notable differences were the higher percentage of distinct tags used only once (74% at NLA) and the predominant use of personal names in these tags. This is perhaps related to the type of resource (historic newspaper) rather than its format (full-text). It is likely that this difference may be duplicated if tagging were enabled across archive and manuscript collections. There was an expectation from users that since this was a library service offering tagging, there would be some ‘strict library rules’ for creating tags, and users were surprised there were none. The users quickly developed their own unwritten guidelines. Clay Shirky suggests “Tagging gets better with scale” and libraries have lots of scale – both in content and users. We shouldn’t get too hung up on guidelines and quality. I agree with Shirky that “If there is no shelf, then even imagining that there is one right way to organise things is an error”.

The experience of the National Library of Australia shows that tagging is a good thing, users want it, and it adds more information to data. It costs little to nothing and is relatively easy to implement; therefore, more libraries and archives should just implement it across their entire collections. This is what the National Library of Australia will have done by the end of 2009.

MagCloud | The Best New Magazines, Printed on Demand by HP

Looking at my Flickr account (where I’m steadily uploading pictures taken in Kyoto) I came across MagCloud, a print-on-demand service for publishing magazines, catalogues and other visual printed works. The idea is that you upload a PDF and then people can come an buy a copy off MagCloud who then print and mail it. I wonder what the quality is like.

Onè Respe is an example of a publication using MagCloud. It is a collection of photographs of Haiti donated by many photographers. The proceeds from sales will go to benefit the victims of the disaster.

HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing

The web site for our graduate conference is up: HuCon 2010: Current Graduate Research in Humanities Computing. This follows on the successful one that students ran last year. We hope to have Jon Bath and Yin Liu from the University of Saskatchewan as speakers. The conference is free thanks to support from our Office of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.