April 2007 Archives
The semester is over! And not a moment too soon. Whew, this was a rough semester.
Joe's and my project has been posted online. It's the one entitled "A Network Approach for Exploring Television Show-Commercial Message Interactions." You can find it near the bottom; it's got a graphic of a block model. I would love to hear your comments about it!
I'm relieved. I'm relieved that this week is over. Just one more week, and the semester will be over. It flew by--but not in a good way; I'll be happy to see it go. It's just been a rough semester. Not that there haven't been good parts - there have - but I don't really feel like I had any time to genuinely relax. I'll quit my bitching now.
The president spoke in Michigan yesterday.
"There is ample time to debate this war. We need to get the troops some money."
What's going on here? I want to address this question as uncynically as possible. Certainly I'm not the only person to see a disconnect here. Is it that the president doesn't see that Democrats are putting stipulations on the money so as to generate a discussion? Or, is the president so deliciously, diabolically audacious and calculating to think that he's going to successfully pull the wool over every pair of eyes in America?
I think this second scenario is highly unlikely. Not to suggest anything about the president's intelligence, mind you. I actually think that the president is a highly intelligent guy - but not the type of intelligence that makes someone articulate, frankly. Nor is it the type of intelligence that makes someone calculating. His is an intelligence of ambition, charisma, schmoozing, loyalty, zealotry, and mass appeal. I admire him, in a sense, because some of the qualities that I lack. That I will always lack, but I want.
So that leaves the first scenario: the president is blind to the reasons why Democrats are doing this. I think he believes that it's all for the sake of political theater. Obviously, there's some truth in this; from the Democrats' perspective, this seems to be a low-risk political gamble with potentially a very high payoff. But nothing in Washington is untinged with politics, and I think we have to accept that fact. I wish the president would.
When Mr. Bush talks, people listen. He just has that magnetism to make people believe in his agenda--with little or no hard evidence. In effect, he is -- unmaliciously -- pulling the wool over many of the eyes in America. A popular notion in the media is that obviously highly-intelligent actors like Cheney and Rove (calculating people) actually pull the strings and Bush is just a mouthpiece; an image. I dispute this. I think Mr. Bush's administration represents an unlucky nexxus of great charisma but poor leadership, and the belief in and the wherewithal to enact policies (Rove and Cheney). I think maybe we can't attribute the blame on any one person, or indeed on several people. I think that most of the blame must go to the dynamic in place between all of these actors. Perhaps Rove and Cheney, for example, have legitimately bought into Bush's vision, and have come up with the resources to bring it into fruition.
I don't think Rove and Cheney are "evil" men. Nor do I think Bush is. Given different circumstances -- in a different time, perhaps -- I think history would have come to judge them as great men.
Quick: choose a number between 1 and 20.
What did you pick? I chose 3. Thanks to Jon for sending me this link.
On my way driving back to Ann Arbor from Ohio yesterday, I heard a segment about people having nightmares about their workplaces. Coincidentally, I had one last night.
In my dream, I had created and copies all of the final exams for the class in which I TA. Just before distributing it, I happened to glance at the last page, and I noticed that I had inadvertently copied the solution page for that particular problem. DOH! Let's hope that that doesn't bear out in real life.
One of the challenges of making a final for this class is that it is open-book, open-notes, open-web. I'm generally an advocate of these kinds of open-resource policies for these kinds of classes, but later I heard that some of the students were using online Java applets to do, for example, online AVL tree balancing. I'm trying to find a way to recharacterize questions like these so inputing them in a Java applet is at least extremely hard.
This is a <test>. I'm writing some blog software, & I needed a "test entry" that uses HTML entities. ®
Probably the best session that I attended at this year's GDC was one hosted by Chaim Gingold called SPORE's Magic Crayons. The topic was about developing content-creation applications that were high quality, yet fun and easy to use. The game SPORE, for example, has a creature painter, in which players (not skilled at drawing or anatomy, necessarily) draw their animated creatures. The system is intuitive to use, and has resulted in a lot of high-quality assets being produced. Once players of SPORE have created their creatures, they can upload them to a master server. Other players can download them and extend them. What we have, then, is another example of a huge, distributed content-creation network.
While the magic crayon component of the lecture was interesting, Chaim said something somewhat tangential that really made me think. These distributed content-creation networks kind of represented a partial surrendering of privacy (I can't remember all the details of why), but players gained a lot more to compensate for the privacy loss by participating in these networks. This, Chaim argued, was indicative of an overall trend in our society to move away from privacy. But that's fine, he argued. In fact, the notion of personal privacy may only be a small blip on human history.
Many thousands of years ago, there was no privacy - everyone in a tribe, say, saw what everyone else in the tribe was doing at all times. Everyone knew what everyone else knew, essentially, and probably nobody thought anything of it. Once people started building cities and living in houses, we started having more privacy, and over thousands of years, non-tribal societies have gotten used to it. We've known no other way. Now, in the age of the Internet, satellite surveillance, facial recognition software and RFID, we're returning to the old ways--and some people are kicking and screaming about it. And yet, our continued jettisoning of privacy may offer us a lot of gain as a society.
Just a thought. I haven't fully thought it out yet, and indeed, I think of at least one compelling reason to retain a culture that values privacy at least a little. The argument is that, if we have no privacy in our society, then eventually everyone will just copy everyone else when a new innovation comes along, and we'll not achieve any significant breadth for other innovations. In other words, our world society will tend towards near-complete intellectual homogeneity. We will have sacraficed exploration for near-complete exploitation. These types of scenarios really occur in networks in which there is a tendency to try to achieve (by, for example, adjusting one's own values) "too much" homophily between participants, so it's at least something to keep in mind. This type of extreme niche specialization probably is dangerous in the human business, from an evolutionary point of view.
I know it's been a few weeks, but I guess I like to let things percolate in my mind before I write about them.
So anyway, a few weeks ago, my former employers at Pyramid asked me to help them at this year's GDC -- Game Developers' Conference --in San Francisco. It sounded fun, so I did it. And it was fun, and I enjoyed hanging out with my former colleagues. I also think I really helped them.
But I'll end my self-congratulation right here -- that's not what this post is all about. What I really want to talk about is some of the many very interesting things I saw there.
Several of the coolest things I saw were game-related peripherals. One was a tactile vest. The vest has several contact points, and when the game triggers the vest, it exerts pressure in the appropriate locations. The demostration booth had rigged the device to a first-person shooter. When I was shot in the shoulder, I first felt sudden pressure in the front and then in the back. The demonstrator told me that that sensation was designed so as to model both entry and exit sensations of the bullet. It wasn't painful, exactly -- but it was startling. It was... disconcerting. It felt like somebody was poking me in the back. I turned around a couple of times to see who the asshole was, but nobody was there. Still pretty cool.
If the tactile vest was cool, the Novint Falcon Haptic Feedback PC Controller (not a joystick!) was positively incredible. The demonstrators of this device had a really cool application in which you could virtually "feel" a sphere with a sandpapery surface, a bumpy surface, an "icy" surface (complete with slipperiness - I'm not kidding), a permeable, semi-viscous sphere, and more. There was also a demonstration with a working virtual slingshot, as well as a sling device. It was incredible. I can imagine some really cool games (as well as great non-game applications -- maybe remote surgery?) for this device. I'm sure there are many more. As a price tag of just under $200.00, I probably won't be buying this anytime soon. Still, this was easily the best peripheral on display at the conference. Cool.
One other peripheral of note is Neurosky's device. Basically, you affixed a small device to your head and "controlled" objects by thinking about them. The demonstration was another FPS-type of deal, but without the guns. Of course, the technology isn't sophisticated enough to understand "move the cursor over there," but it is sophisticated to move based on things like "concentrate" and "relax" -- "concentrate" to bring objects to the fore, "relax" to move them to the rear. There was also another dimension of emotion in which you could "lift" objects to levitate them. Furthermore, I guess there was enough emotive resolution in the device in that, for example, in a horror game it could detect whether or not a given dramatic element "scared" you or not. It would detect which elements were the most horrific for you, and turn them up (and disregard elements that you didn't find scary). Cool, but I didn't actually get a chance to work it myself. Still, it looks promising.
Finally, HP debuted something simple, but still pretty cool (no URL yet). The system hasn't been released yet (as far as I can see), but they'll be releasing a kit for mobile devices with geopositioning capability in which, when you entered (or exited) certain zones, you could trigger game events. The possibilities are pretty intriguing to me - especially the implications of the game existing simultaneously in the virtual world and the "real" world. Also, the commercial possibilities, I think, are pretty intriguing as well.
