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Wednesday, December 27, 2006 |
Piracy Outstripping Legal Video Sales?. b.burl writes to tell us a recently released report by the NDP Group supports the horror stories being fed to us by studio execs, but not quite in the way those execs would have you believe. The study shows a continued rise in video piracy compared to legal video sales. The largest target continues to be adult oriented content and TV shows, with only an estimated 5 percent being mainstream movie content. From the article: "[A]mong U.S. households with members who regularly use the Internet, 8 percent (six million households) downloaded at least one digital video file (10MB or larger) from a P2P service for free in the third quarter of 2006. Nearly 60 percent of video files downloaded from P2P sites were adult-film content, while 20 percent was TV show content and 5 percent was mainstream movie content."[Slashdot]
9:59:01 PM  Google It!.
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Teaching Beyond the Basics with Video Games. Fred Koch alerted me to another story about video games in education. This Chicago Tribune piece is about David Williamson Shaffer, of Epistemic Games and the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There's not a lot that is new in the article, but we have another serious researcher to pay attention to. Video games that teach beyond basics | Chicago Tribune: For the past 10 years, Shaffer has been creating and researching the effects of computer games that immerse kids in virtual worlds that require them to solve real-world problems of specific professions. The key is "using computer games to prepare children for a life of innovation and creativity rather than giving them standardized skills for life in the factory," he said. "We can create worlds where players learn to think in innovative and creative ways about important topics." Specifically, Shaffer's games immerse young players into the worlds o 2 Cents Worth, December 27, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
9:56:47 PM Google It!.
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Mystical placebo. Discover magazine in its year-end round up reports on an experiment done by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins (covered here in New Scientist) in which he gave 36 patients either psilocybin or Ritalin. They were told they'd be getting an hallucinogen but not in which of two or three sessions they'd receive it. More than 60% of the essence-of-mescalin eaters reported having a mystical experience, while only 11% of the Ritalin consumers achieved mystical one-ness. Thus, the experiment concludes there's truth to the common idea that mescalin helps you get your mystic on. But, says Griffiths, you should not try this at home because psilocybin can also cause schizophrenia. (Ah, remember in the '60s when schizophrenia was just another lifestyle choice?) All that's fine, but isn't the fact that a full 11% of the people taking Ritalin had a mystical experience the interesting result of this experiment? Just for the record, whatever that is, I took mescalin a few times in college and shortly th Joho the Blog, December 27, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
9:54:43 PM Google It!.
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Collaborative spaces: taxonomy after Second Life and Web 2.0. Intellagirl has a great post offering a taxonomy of virtual spaces. It's a nifty approach to thinking through MMOGs, Second Life, and Web 2.0 all at once. Headers include relationships with other users, document/object ownership, size of user base, persistence of content, open access, etc. That post is towards a chapter in her upcoming book, which I'm looking forward to. Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education, December 27, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old]
9:51:52 PM Google It!.
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Newest Energy Source [~] Pond Scum. An anonymous reader writes to tell us that several start up companies include one from MIT are looking at using (both natural and engineered) algae as source of bio-fuel. Since algae grows quickly and absorbs green house gases. From the article "Soybeans can give you 50 to 60 gallons of oil an acre compared to 75 to 125 gallons for canola, but algae is almost limitless because it grows so fast, so potentially you could get 10,000 gallons per acre."[Slashdot]
9:43:52 PM Google It!.
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Wii. John Blake points to a very cool hack of the Wii gaming system. This hack involves using the Wiimote (that's Wii remote) to control a Roomba. Speaking of the Wii, my kids got a Wii for Christmas from their uncle and I'm pretty impressed. This morning I played nine holes of golf, then took in a bit of batting practice. Maybe tonight I'll go bowling. I downloaded the DarwiinRemote software and will mess around with that later. Bookmark to: Education/Technology, December 27, 2006. [Conversation]
[Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ Edu_RSS Most Recent - RSS old] -- this may well open up a new world for exercise management into the otherwise sedentary electronic lifestyle -- BL footnote (this connected exercise might well be used to develop the neural networks below the brain)
10:22:59 AM Google It!.
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An experiment in online community.
For my sabbatical project, I[base ']m laying foundations for a community website. The project is focused on my hometown, but the idea is to do things in a way that can serve as a model for other towns. So I[base ']m using cheaply- or freely-available infrastructure that can be deployed on commodity hosting services. The Python-based web development framework Django qualifies, with some caveats I[base ']ve mentioned. And Django is particularly well-suited to this project because it distills the experiences of the developers of the top-notch community websites of Lawrence, Kansas. The story of those sites, told here by Rob Curley, is inspirational.
I[base ']m also using Assembla for version control (with Subversion), issue tracking (with Trac), and other collaborative features described by my friend Andy Singleton in this podcast (transcript). It[base ']s downright remarkable to be able to conjure up all this infrastructure instantly and for free. I[base ']m a lone wolf on this project so far, but I hope to recruit collaborators, and I look forward to being able to work with them in this environment.
I have two goals for this project. First, aggregate and normalize existing online resources. Second, show people how and why to create online resources in ways that are easy to aggregate and normalize.
Online event calendars are one obvious target. The newspaper has one, the college has one, the city has one, and there[base ']s also a smattering of local events listed in places like Yahoo Local, Upcoming, and Eventful. So far I[base ']ve welded four such sources into a common calendar, and wow, what a messy job that[base ']s been. The newspaper, the college, and the city offer web calendars only as HTML, which I can and do scrape. In theory the Yahoo/Upcoming and Eventful stuff is easier to work with, but in practice, not so much. Yahoo Local offers no structured outputs. Upcoming does, the events reflected into it from Y Local use hCalendar format, but finding and using tools to parse that stuff always seems to involve more time and effort than I expect. Eventful[base ']s structured outputs are RSS and iCal. If you want details about events, such as location and time, you need to parse the iCal, which is non-trivial but doable. If you just need the basics, though [~] date, title, link [~] it[base ']s trivial to get that from the RSS feed.
I[base ']m pretty good at scraping and parsing and merging, but I don[base ']t want to make a career out of it. The idea is to repurpose various silos in ways that are immediately useful, but also lead people to discover better ways to manage their silos [~] or, ultimately, to discover alternatives to the silos.
An example of a better way to manage a siloed calendar would be to publish it in structured formats as well as HTML. But while that would make things easier for me, I doubt that iCal or RSS have enough mainstream traction to make it a priority for a small-town newspaper, college, or town government. If folks could flip a switch and make the legacy web calendar emit structured output, they might do that. But otherwise [~] and I[base ']d guess typically [~] it[base ']s not going to happen.
For event calendars, switching to a hosted service is becoming an attractive alternative. In the major metro areas with big colleges and newspapers, it may make sense to manage event information using in-house IT systems, although combining these systems will require effort and is thus unlikely to occur. But for the many smaller communities like mine, it[base ']s hard to justify a do-it-yourself approach. Services like Upcoming and Eventful aren[base ']t simply free, they[base ']re much more capable than homegrown solutions will ever be. If you[base ']re starting from scratch, the choice would be a no-brainer [~] if more people realized these services were available, and understood what they can do. If you[base ']re already using a homegrown service, though, it[base ']ll be hard to overcome inertia and make a switch.
How to overcome that inertia? In theory, if I reflect screenscraped events out to Upcoming and/or Eventful, the additional value they[base ']ll have there will encourage gradual migration. If anyone[base ']s done something like that successfully, I[base ']d be interested to hear about it.
On another front, I hope to showcase the few existing local blogs and encourage more local blogging activity. Syndication and tagging make it really easy to federate such activity. But although I know that, and doubtless every reader of this blog knows that, most people still don[base ']t.
I think the best way to show what[base ']s possible will be to leverage services like Flickr and YouTube. There are a lot more folks who are posting photos and videos related to my community than there are folks who are blogging about my community. Using text search and tag search, I can create a virtual community space in which those efforts come together. If that community space gains some traction, will people start to figure out that photos and videos described and tagged in certain simple and obvious ways are, implicitly, contributions to the community space? Might they then begin to realize that other self-motivated activities, like blogging, could also contribute to the community space, as and when they intersect with the public agenda?
I dunno, but I[base ']d really like to see it happen. So, I[base ']m doing the experiment.
[Jon Udell] There may well be a model here for small college towns to sparkle inside of the web infrastructure into a golden age of community in the eCulture era. Possibly with the parallel universe of second life as a bridge "seeing" the community hotspots via community television as a way to make it all seem strangely familiar and approachable for both young and old. The challenge of any community is developing and maintaining a sense of trust and small college towns may well have a peculiar advantage in community socialization processes. -- BL
10:11:51 AM Google It!.
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© Copyright 2007 Bruce Landon.
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