Reflections

My video argument...

Well, it is up on YouTube, anyway. I am having problems with the iTunes thing.

Anyway, reflection.

I chose to showcase our writing center since I worked closely with the director this year. I know the kinds of services they offer, but I only see a few students take advantage of the services (and, ironically, they are often strong students). We have been working on ways to get our message out, and an infomercial seemed to be the perfect way.

Could I have written a brochure? Certainly. A flyer? We already have several. We also have instructors who encourage students to use our services, with some even offering extra credit. But even if I had put together a brochure of quotes, they would not have had the impact of the tutors. The tutors are normal-looking, and more important, normal sounding students. And that never would have come across in print.

Could I have accomplished the same thing with a research paper? Never. For one thing, the audience is different. First year students are simply not going to read a research paper arguing the benefits of the writing center. They might watch an embedded video. One additional problem that I ran into is that our writing center website was unwieldy http://www.uca.edu/cfac/writing/owl/. This is not an address that students can memorize and use. So I bought a domain name, and have redirected it, so that www.ucawriting.net now takes students to the writing center home page, where they can schedule an appointment.

Strengths and weaknesses... I love that the tutors (and director) got to express their thoughts in their own words. If I were quoting them in writing, it just would not be the same. I love that we get to see some of the tutors. We see two very friendly, welcoming young women, and a young African-American man. I think that helps students feel more connected.

The video is a bit short. I certainly had enough material to make it longer, but I was concerned about class time. I cut it short (8.5 minutes) because at one point in class, Dr. Gossett said that 10 minutes should be the outside time limit. Another weakness is the sound. My voiceover is so much louder than the interviews. The help files say there is a way to fix this, but Adobe really needs to hire better documentation people.

I can say, expect to see more videos on our writing center page, in the future. This is a media that we find to be an exciting way to reach students. (Well, at least a video is more likely to reach them than a brochure).

My video argument

The sound is a bit wonky, but otherwise I am pleased with my infomercial for our campus Writing Center, that only took four hours to render and upload. Now all I have to do is figure out how to upload a version on the iTunesU website.

Speaking of Twitter

A post came through the WPA listserv this morning about Twitter. Kathy Fitch posted:
...here are a few of the many available examples
of folks noting, interrogating, formulating, analyzing, resisting, and
attempting to influence Twitter patterns:

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Twitter%20Etiquette

http://hivetalk.info/2007/07/28/7-enterprise-uses-for-twitter/

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson ("social
proprioception"--perfect..)

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/twitter-style-guide.aspx

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/03/15/eight-ways-twitter-is-useful-profession
ally/

http://ubernoggin.com/archives/161

http://www.jangro.com/a/2007/01/18/why-i-hate-twitter/

http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com/2008/03/10-things-i-hate-about-twitter.htm

Twitter only for geeks?

Is Twitter only for geeks? So how much Web 2.0 is really filtering down to the average user? I find my daughter (who is 14) and my students are very engaged with Facebook, and YouTube (as viewers, not as creators) but really not so much with other Web 2.0 technologies. And really, they are not even that engaged with old internet technologies. Many of our students cannot manage an email attachment. (Or a Save As... to use an even older technology.

So Twitter is for geeks? I look at it as excluding me because I don't text message. I am "connected" enough with my email and the chat program that I occasionally use.

I also use Facebook, but I try to not be a resident of a "creepy treehouse"

So how critical is the use of Web 2.0? And how do we make students engage the media that they use instead of just consuming? Questions, questions. And no answers.

New Media... Readings?

Joyce Walker, Textural Textuality

Lev Manovich, Generation Flash

Cheryl Ball, Heading South

They Rule

The Ball and Walker articles are certainly fun to click through, almost like Living Books I am not sure, really, how to respond to those, though. The non-linear method of organization makes it hard for me to "read" and, yet, I am not sure how to "play" them. I didn't feel that the affordances for entering the text were clear. While I enjoyed exploring the sites in the context for this class, I would not explore them if I were looking for either entertainment or information. I am more comfortable with a left-menu or top-menu structure that makes clear where materials are. They actually remind me of really sophisticated Hypercard stacks.

The "They Rule" site on the other hand, I found very interesting and engaging. I only stumbled a tiny bit over the navigation. Once the initial stumble was over, I began tracking connections. Whoever would have guessed that Aramark (who has my university's catering contract) is only three people separated from AutoZone? I wonder if Kevin Bacon is actually listed on the site somewhere?

Will the Internet Fill Up?

Can the Internet fill up? A story in Digital Trends suggests that it might.

A new study by US company Nemertes Research has warned that increased demand for bandwidth could see the Internet running out of capacity by 2010.

With increased amounts of data being transmitted, that could mean severe slowdowns and possibly even Internet gridlock. The study estimates that $137 billion needs to be spent to upgrade networks to make them completely fit for purpose.

“It may take more than one attempt to confirm an online purchase or it may take longer to download the latest video from YouTube," the report stated.

That would cause problems, but the longer-term effect could be more drastic. The lack of bandwidth could well stifle the next generation of companies.

And what is causing this band width crisis? You guessed it: new media.

Is this science fiction? A panic attack? Perhaps, but AT&T has issued a similar statement:

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

They blame video and "user-generated content being uploaded." Now, did I miss something, but didn't the internet start out as "user-generate content"? Granted, the tools are much more accessible now than they used to be. Of course, this may all be a scam to justify "priortizing" content,

Although Cicconi's speech did not explicitly refer to the term "Net neutrality," some audience members tackled him on the issue in a question-and-answer session, asking whether the subtext of his speech was really around prioritizing some kinds of traffic. Cicconi responded by saying he believed government intervention in the Internet was fundamentally wrong.

Net neutrality is the idea that all content should distributed equally, without regard for who generates the content or who is searching for it. In reality, the case seems to be that network users tend to get priority on their own networks. For example, one reason my video for class does not always work, at least according to Bridge Control, is that my signal has to go through multiple vendors. And, say, ComCast gives priority to ComCast users rather than to the SBC/AT&T user waiting to get through.

So how might people priortize in the future? Perhaps according to whether I am shopping at JC Penny or Chico's? Kohl's or Ann Taylor? Maybe priorities are for sale.

Video Players

By opening up video codecs, so that people do not have to have expensive software like Flash really opens up the legit market. More open source choices are always going to be better for the web.

Sun Tackles Video Codec
By Paul Krill, InfoWorld
Saturday, April 12, 2008 1:00 PM PDT

Looking to boost the Web, Sun is working on a royalty-free and open video codec and media system, company officials said Thursday afternoon.

"The main benefit is that you don't have that now and there are markets, key markets like the Web, that are in need for the Web 2.0 experience a foundation of royalty-free for the media element," for audio and video, said Rob Glidden, global alliance manager for TV & Media at Sun.

Detailed at the Sun Labs Open House event in Menlo Park, Calif., the project is called Open Media Stack or the Open Media System. It was derived out of Sun's Open Media Commons initiative for development of royalty-free and open solutions for digital content.

Currently, proprietary solutions are relied on, such as Adobe's Flash or royalty-bearing specifications like H.264, Glidden said.

OMS is a recent project. Asked about the availability of OMS technologies, Glidden said, "Stay tuned. I have no announcements on any commercial implementations or time frame."

OMS video is to be based on H.26x technology.

What is Sun's catch? Granted they have a large number of products for sale including software, storage, systems, and services. But they also distribute StarOffice with documentation and support for a fee and OpenOffice for free. OpenOffice is open source and is compatible with MS Office. NeoOffice, the Open Office port for Mac even opens Office 2007 files. It is truly lovely.

My one minute video

Having no idea where to find a motif to create a visual of, I had decided to find shadows around my parents' home in the Ozarks. Somehow this morphed into filming shadows while my family worked (i.e., tagged and vaccinated) the cattle. Of course, by the time they got started (and I got out there) it was noon. At noon, there are no shadows. So I just started filming. About half way through my tape, I decided to focus on the tools that they used to move, contain, and work the cattle.

I used Adobe Premiere Elements, which provides an image of the material in the scene, so I used the scene view to organize the clips. Because this was so short, and all the material was similar, I am not sure how helpful more planning would have been except as an exercise in planning. For a longer piece, however, more categorizing would certainly be necessary.

I added an audio track, which was not really part of the assignment, but I thought was appropriate. One of the men in the film has a blue grass band. The music is Blackberry Blossom, performed by Big Creek Bluegrass.

Who owns what?

The guy who designed the original storm trooper costumes for Star Wars has been making and selling the costumes to enthusiasts. Lucasfilms is objecting and has filed a cease and desist. So who owns the costume design? As materials stay in the popular culture for longer and longer thanks to home video sales, this becomes more and more of an issue. Disney is usually the one who makes outrageous copyright demands, demanding exclusivity to images and stories they ripped off from the public domain for years past any kind of precedent. Now Lucasfilms is in the mix.

They should just be really, really happy that any fanboys survived the sequels. I know my Star Wars enthusiasm died in the wake of Jar Jar Binks (and was buried deeply after the pastoral ad nauseum romance of Anikin and Amidala).

But seriously, who should own the costume reproductions? The artist who created them or the movie that used them? I tend to favor the creator. I guess I come at this from a journalistic perspective, but it seems that Lucasfilms got first rights, and second serial rights, and even foreign first rights. But it seems as though the author ought to retain some reprint rights.

Makes me long for more Woody Guthries. People who played his music without permission were more likely to be seen as potential friends rather than people who must be stopped at all costs.

Wysocki (again)

Wysocki is making me appreciate Kress.

In "Seriously Visible" Wysocki takes on two chestnuts, two things that "everybody knows." The first is that "hypertextual documents are by their very structure supposed to encourage readers into more active and engaged relationships with texts and thus with each other" (37). The second is that "documents that give more weight to their visual rather than their verbal components ought not to be taken seriously or ought to be relegated to children and the illiterate" (37).

She describes & analyzes two multimedia texts, neither of which I am familiar with. I am not sure, really, what the intended audience or purpose was of the text. Possibly they are art "books" showcasing work by a particular audience? Their interface reminded me of the Living Books that were produced for children, not because they were visual, but because they were so interactive. Living Books make extensive use of sounds and animations when images are clicked. Leap Pad learning systems do something similar, with sounds only, though, not animation.

I wonder if adults typically click around electronic texts in the same way that children do. Perhaps if the goal of the piece is entertainment? Most adults I know typically use computers to seek information or play games, and even the games seem to be more goal driven than randomly exploratory. Children, however, seem more willing to explore. I don't know if that comes from being "digital natives" or if that behavior diminishes with age. That would be an interesting study-- I'll put it on my list.

More Kress and VanLeeuwen

To be fair, this is the first Kress and VanLeeuwen that we have read this semester. I am trying to think, though, if I have been in this program a semester without reading them? It seems as though they have been omnipresent in my phd work...

Multimodal Discourse, however, is by far my favorite. I don't know why. Perhaps this is actually easier to read, or perhaps I am finally getting used to the way they right.

Regardless, I will never see home dec magazines the same way again. I never thought about they way they shape the way we see our homes. I am sure that television programs do the same thing. We have a house that was built in the the early 20th century. It was certainly built before 1936 (a city directory lists an inhabitant here then). When we moved in, it had three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a tiny laundry room (that probably used to be a back porch), a living/dining room. We think the bathroom was likely carved out of the middle bedroom. The attic, which we use as storage, at one time was used as a bedroom, judging from the phone and cable hook-ups. We interpret this house differently from the previous inhabitants. And we chose an old house, in an old part of town, whereas most of my friends live in newer homes in "better" parts of town. When I moved in my house, it had carpet in the living room, bedrooms, and attic, with cheap lino in the kitchen, dining, laundry, and bath. Underneath the carpet was hardwood floors.

How do we decide what is important in a house? Or even where the television goes? A lot of magazines I see do not even show televisions in their living spaces, but I know most households in America have several. Where are their computers? We have a computer for each person, here. Those do not "fit" into a decorating scheme. At all.

I can compare this to my friend Cindy's house. Granted, her home is bigger. There are still fundamental ways that her house is different. Each bedroom has its own bathroom. These were purpose built and integrated into the home. The laundry room was intended to be there. You do not go through it to get to the back door. Different kinds of flooring are used for different functions of the house. She has ceramic tile in the kitchen/dining/breakfast/laundry area, carpet in the bedrooms, and hardwood in the living rooms.

I say all of this to say this: we participate in many ways of making meaning. And we are not even aware that we do this. Similar conceptualizations of making meaning exist in other contexts besides our homes. Clothing is another area. This year, I intentionally upgraded my wardrobe to see what would happen. (I wear mostly skirts now, instead of slacks). A thought experiment, if you will. Student treat me more professionally and with more distance. When I wore mostly "business casual" they told me more about their personal lives. There is a grammar, evidently, of how you talk to people based on how they dress. I don't think I am any less approachable, personally. The only thing that has really changed has been my clothing.

Life after Vista?

The next Windows operating system, the one that will ultimately replace Vista (assuming that IT departments eventually pry XP out of users' cold, dead hands), will be available in parts. While this has potential, if there is a price discount, for people who know what in the heck they are doing, I can imagine this in the hands of the people who really only understand their computer to the degree that they understand their microwave.

A singular yet highly modular OS could give Microsoft the best of all possible worlds: OSes that can be highly customized for deployment but developed monolithically. One modular OS to rule them all, let's say.

Why am I still using Microsoft? One reason is that the camera software that lets me take these nifty classes only works on Windows. Another is Adobe. If Adobe could manage a linux distribution, I think I could go without turning back. (And Gimp does not come close, I am sorry.)

Cyborgs and Goddesses

We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs (Haraway, 516).

I read a piece with my Comp II students last spring about cyborgs. I can't recall the man's name off the top of my head, but he has chosen to live a computer-mediated life. If effect, he is a cyborg. And cyborg is how he identifies himself. And when I look around campus and see students with blue-tooth devices in their ears, I want to look on the other side of their heads to see if the cybermen have taken over. They certainly do seem to be talking to people who aren't there...

Electric Media and Tribalization

The reading assignment for today was a bit confusing. We had readings scheduled for both 3/11 and 3/18, even though 3/18 is spring break.

So I have decided to pick and choose what to read. I am beginning with McLuhan. I was introduced to McLuhan nearly two years ago by Dr. Whithaus. And it was good. McLuhan resonates with me for some reason. Perhaps it is this:

In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message (203).

The idea that contemporary artifacts, not just art were worthy of study is important to me (as it is to many post-modern rhetoricians). And if McLuhan did not originate that idea with his "idea that advertisements have artistic merits" (193), he certainly contributed to its popularity.

I like McLuhan's term "electric" media. It does not invite the multiplicity of meanings that "new" media does (the most obvious, "new in relation to what?"). If the media uses electricity, it is electric. Thus television (and I suppose radio), digital media, second life, etc. are all in a single category. But where it has simplicity and elegance in the definition, can we really throw all those pieces together in one box? Is television really the same as an interactive game, where you buy accessories for your avatar with US dollars?

McLuhan, though, does see changes in society being based upon (or determined by) changes in technology. I.e., the printing press causes literacy, which caused societal changes, etc.

Raymond Williams, in "The Technology and Society" presents a different picture. As far as the television changing society, he says that the society and the social conditions of that society led to the invention of television (295). In a similar way, perhaps the growth of literacy allowed the printing press to become so integral. Without growing literacy rates, the invention of movable type could have come and gone without anyone noticing.

There are, of course, limits. Currently, I would hazard to guess, sufficient market exists for a Star Trek type transporter. We are a very mobile society. We would like, generally, to eliminate the "wasted" time at airports. So we could really buy into a teleportation device. But, as of now, the platform for that technology to be built does not exist (this is a vast oversimplification of Williams' argument, which he presents on pages 295-97).

Deleuze & Guattari-- Well, I liked the rhizome metaphor. I am not quite sure what it means, but it liked it. Which is more than I can say about the rest of the article.

Insert your own Windows pun here...

Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft

200 quid laptops? And the only "drawback" is that it runs linux and open office? I ran my home pc for a year with only open office. I only added office because I had to do some desktop publishing--- professional level stuff. Not what most home users need. Not even what I need 95% of the time. The vast majority of the time, I can survive with Google apps and a web browser. And openoffice is just a bonus. I don't do design work (usually) on a laptop, simply because it is cumbersome. (And my desktop is faster, with more memory, a bigger hard drive, and a dvd burner. And since I built it, I can upgrade it pretty easily.)

But a laptop the price of an ipod? And the size of a book? That I could use as a pda, ipod, _and_ a computer. I think I could get used to that.

My Audio Essay

I knew what I wanted to write about from the beginning of this assignment. I believe passionately that people should write and tell their stories. Or just tell their stories. I draw heavily on my past and on my cultural heritage to make meaning of my life and experiences. So it was very important for me to try to pull in someone from my hometown.

I have some video of my grandmother, who passed away in 2005. She was our next door neighbor, and was consequently very important in my life. She often talked about her past, but of course, she never considered herself to be a writer, and she never wrote. Rarely did she even write letters, as the telephone was so much more immediate. My video, however, would not import (after about eight hours of trying), so I did not get to use my grandmother's voice.

Something that I did have, though, was an interview that my daughter did for her history day project with Mrs. Marshall, a friend of my mother's. Mrs. Marshall and my mother ended up talking about the stories they knew from childhood, and how telling stories made it easier to cope with the death of loved ones. So after 14 hours of attempting, I finally re-imported Mrs. Marshall's interview into Adobe Premiere Elements, which allowed me to extract the audio.

My audio essay was originally a lecture that I gave to our Honors College freshmen class about writing memoir. It was based heavily on a piece by Patricia Hampl that we all read. So I removed most of what came from the reading, except one little piece that I quoted.

I also went looking to see if I could find Donald Murray talking about writing. He has been the most influential theorist on my teaching. And I love the way he approaches writing, especially if I trying to encourage someone to write. And I did find an audio interview with him by Chip Scanlon.

I used Mediaevel Baebes' Veni Veni as a background track.

I am really pleased with how this turned out, except for the fact that I was not able to edit the track with Mrs. Marshall as carefully as I would have liked as I was only finally able to pull it in just before class.

I was really surprised by how many problems that I had with the technology. I usually have way more problems with the concepts than with the tools, but this time the concept came pretty easily and the tools nearly killed me.

Edited to add: I was able to edit the file the way I wanted. I am afraid that the volume is not even throughout. That was hard to get right because the Murray clip was posted online, and he was on a telephone. The interview footage with Mrs. Marshall was from a video camera without a separate microphone. The difference in inputs makes it hard to get the volume right. If I only had a mixing board.

Audio Essay: Writing Your Self

Tech topic

From Wired. "Dear Hollywood Studios: Let My Video Go"

Access to instant audio and visual files continues to be an issue. With the proliferation of YouTube, we have come to expect video on demand. Many people are willing to pay rental fees to download movies instantly and watch on portable devices, but the restrictions that come with downloads to "prevent piracy" are burdensome for consumers. Who wants to have to go to multiple sites to download material for our different devices? Especially since I like to watch movies on, well, television.

Several of my posts have been about digital files and the best way to distribute them. But it continues to be a huge issue. With copyright laws getting so insane (really, how long does Snow White need to be under copyright? Walt Disney is dead).

Some kind of sane policy needs to be made, preferably informed by people who understand the issues, not just the record companies and the movie companies.

And really, I am all about sticking it to movie studies after reading about the creator of the Cheetah Girls. If these people can't figure out how to make a net profit on the Cheetah Girls, they don't deserve to survive. Downloads or no downloads

Bingo!

Here is the problem for me:

Richard Lanham, in The Electronic Word, makes the distinction between looking 'at' a text, versus looking 'through' a text. I've come to realize that traditionally visual artists have leaned towards the former, while writers have been more prone towards the later.

Joseph in Mind the Gap

I am an auditory learner. That has confused people who have tested me, when I can relate large chunks of information from texts that I read. The answer is that I look through texts. I don't visualize words. I look through the text to the words. And often I talk about what I am reading so that I understand it (much to the chagrin of my children. My eldest daughter came home from school telling me that they had finally got to rhetoric in her 9th grade class, and that they were working on the classical appeals. She also has more than a passing acquaintance with the idea of the social construction of reality.)

These new media texts, like Samuel Beckett's work, force the reader to slow down and acknowledge the visualness of the words. These kinds of texts prevent the invisibility of text. I cannot look through these texts to hear what the author is saying... I have to look at the texts and construct my own meaning.

I just saw the doll box assignment-- if I had seen that in an undergraduate class, I would have dropped the class. Dropped it. If it appeared in one of my graduate classes, I would of course, grit my teeth and do it, hoping that completion earned me something. I am pretty sure that my product would not manage to get me very far.

Not that I am above pushing my students. This semester, I made my comp students contribute to Wikipedia. I did this for a couple of reasons. One is that they are writing for a real audience. And for real editors. If their edits were rejected, I offered feedback that I thought would help them be successful with their editors. Several were successful on the first try. Others made it on the second. Several, of course, are still trying. Midterm grades are tomorrow, and I have warned them that if their article is not up on Wikipedia, it will be reflected in their midterm (unless of course, their editor is just unreasonable, in which case, they must write a narrative explaining why it didn't work, and the steps they took to try to work with the system). But in essence, this is a research assignment. They know the form, having read it all their school career. Only the delivery system is new for them.

Readings

As a digital immigrant, I hated the experience of reading Walker's Hyper:Acivity, although truthfully, that is probably more about my dyslexia than about the digitalness.

I rely on the structural cues that a page offers in order to read. In fact, I print everything that I read for all of my classes, always. New media texts, such as this one, can't really be printed. Which means that I have a hell of a time reading them. I can read individual words over and over again, but they don't fit together to make meaning for me. Really, other than pod casts (because, frankly, I am an auditory learner), I hate having to obtain information from mixed media texts. Even podcasts, and videos, though make information harder to get. I am skilled at using print texts. I understand the format. I know where the important information is supposed to be. I can skim and get a fairly decent understand of what is going on. I have no idea how to begin to skim a video. Or a podcast.

And I am not even sure how to read this piece. I am reading it one column at a time, but I feel like I am missing something. I keep thinking that the texts are supposed to relate to one another.

Ah! I found instructions. I am not sure how I feel about needing instructions to read a webpage. Or any page for that matter. I am so immersed in literacy (print literacy) that this is really, really hard.

And, as I read on, I see that the authors agree with me:

Where am I coming from?
1. Material Rhetoric: The concept that physical contexts affect the rhetorical power of a text and its ability to make meaning.
2. Activity Theory: The effort to understand human interactions with physical/spatial/cognitive/time components in the production of a specific text.
3. Multimodal Theory: The concept that meaning-making is altered and shaped both by the tools of composition (pen, computer, crayon, piano) and by the symbol systems that are used to produce a text (alphabetic text, images, movies, spoken words, music). (slide 5)

Well, not that this is very hard to read, but that the material conditions of the piece affect its "ability to make meaning."

Oh,and here I am again in slide 10:

The reader may experience a sense of alienation from the text.

I don't know what it is about my background (maybe the stint writing training material), but I tend to focus on making my writing clear and understandable for the audience. New media texts that explore new materialities are deliberately not audience centered. They want to force reaction/interaction from the audience in a different way from the one that a "typical" audience expects.

Remorseful Remix

My remix.

The theme was "remorse." As I was looking through my mp3 files (of which I have many), I picked up Jenny by Cross Canadian Ragweed, American Dream by Better than Ezra, Sixteen Tons by Johnny Cash (because I don't have the Tennessee Ernie Ford version, which is better). While I was doing a search to find Amy Winehouse, I saw Frank McCourt's Teacher Man, so I pulled in the first two tracks of that. (I never did find that Amy Winehouse, and did not feel like ripping it). Oh, and Arlo Guthrie's City of New Orleans.

I pulled some of the Irish music from the intro to Teacher man-- but it was only a few seconds, so I looped it, varying the volume and the fade. I cut up the McCourt file and picked out some bits. I juxtaposed that with American Dream to begin. To me, it seems that American Dream, about failed dreams, seemed to go with McCourt's "miserable childhood." I added Sixteen Tons, which is about working class failure to achieve. I liked the "Good morning, America" from City of New Orleans, because it provided a contrast to the other music. I ended up dropping Jenny, though.

Maybe I was naive, when I was younger, but I did buy into the idea that hard work and talent would get a person places. So for me, my remix represents my disappointment and remorse about a world that probably never existed.

Slashdotted (Tech entry)

Judge Rejects RIAA 'Making Available' Theory

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 25, @05:26PM
from the need-a-new-revenue-strategy dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA's 'making available' theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA's peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page opinion [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove 'actual distribution of copies', and cannot rely — as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas — upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant's computer and that they were 'available'. This is the same issue that has been the subject of extensive briefing in two contested cases in New York, Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Judge Arterton also held that the defendant had other possible defenses, such as the unconstitutionality of the RIAA's damages theory and possible copyright misuse flowing from the record companies' anticompetitive behavior."

What does music "piracy" mean, anyway? I am not sure. I like music, personally, and I don't mind buying music. However (and there is always a however here), I don't want to buy music music that I have already bought. I don't want to pay import prices for an album that downloads for 79p per song, if I happened to live in the UK. Here, the CD with that song sells for $26-- about double what I am willing to spend on a CD. I am not sure that in the situations I am describing that file sharing is a bad thing. I am just not sure. I think that to the point that I am taking revenue out of the hands of artists (and production staff), that sharing to avoid payment is bad, evil, despicable, etc. How much money do these people see per sale, anyway though? And how much money goes to the supply chain? And why if a single cost me a $1 when I physically bought a vinyl single, that had shelf space in WalMart, that was transported, do I still have to pay $1 for a lesser quality electronic download, that has no transport costs, no floor/shelf space, no nothing, except production costs. How much did the artist get paid then and how much does the artist get paid now?

The RIAA makes it hard for amateurs to use music. More barriers.

DJ Spooky

Miller, Paul. Rhythm Science.

Miller's work is very unusual. It plays with the expectations of "text" and "book" to create a fascinating account of DJ Spooky's remix capabilities sampled with Miller's autobiography. The layout of the text is unconventional, playing with layered images and text. On every other set of facing pages, is a pull quote fused with an image. Despite this making me sound a bit too much like a soccer mom, this word collage style is one I am familiar with though scrapbooking. This kind of layered text and illustrated quotes often appears on scrappers pages.

Sound as mix and remix is important to Miller. He sees himself as drawing on the past and on voices that he hears around him to create a new message. The medium is, of course, part of the message, but the message is the message. It is, as he says, (and I paraphrase) hard to play the same piece twice for the same audience. Thus, the remix.

To make myself sound a bit less like a dweeb, I'll confess to geek. I was feeling the William Gibson before I saw the quote on page100: "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed."

Even as Miller speaks of mix and sound, Comstock & Hocks discuss voice.

Also, like a fingerprint, each voice carries its own inflection, its own texture and grain. In writing, voice acts as a metaphor for how a persona created in the text "sounds," with elements of diction, tone, and style informing this written voice (Comstock & Hocks).

Back in the 70s, when Rich Little was on the variety show circuit, people were fascinated with the way that he could imitate voices or do impressions. Someone took "voiceprints" (and no, I do not know how that works) of Little and the celebrities that he was imitating. The "prints" were not at all similar, even though they sounded similar to an average listener. Of course, when I saw Little on The Muppet Show (season 2), I didn't think that he sounded much like anyone other than Rich Little. So it seems that voice is less quantifiable.

What makes me sound like me? My daughter sounds like me-- even close friends and relatives cannot always tell us apart on the phone. She has the ability, as I think I have talked about before, to speak without an regional accent. She chooses, though, usually, to adopt the "educated southern" that many people I know have. She and I are both influenced by Ozarks dialect (which is Appalachian dialect, transmitted west to the Ozarks). Our written "voices" are different, though. Voice is a complicated idea. And it is more complicated in terms of writing. I don't sound in writing at all like I do in person. Of course, we don't "sound" like anything in writing. Because there is no speech, no accent. No dialect unless I put it there on purpose (which, depending on my audience, I do occasionally).

Sound Remix

So here is my sound remix. It is way too techno for my tastes, but with what I had to work with, I think it sounds less than horrible.

I repeated all of the files more than once, and for some of them, I repeated parts of the files. I also inverted the short wave sound, and changed the pitch on some of the German speech. Oh, and I used the generate function to insert silence and white noise. My daughter loves Audacity-- she used it for her history day project.

Reading about bands I have never heard of...

Rickert, T & Salvo, M. "The distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, worlding, and new media culture"
McKee, H. "Sound matters: Notes toward the analysis and design of sound in multimodal webtexts"
Rickert, T. & Salvo, M. "And they had Pro Tools"

Technology is great, except when it isn't. The latest version of Firefox keeps becoming non-responsive on my mac (and of course it is the mac's own fault, I am sure. And my fault by extension for owning a mac). And some of the formatting functionality on blogger does not seem to work with Safari. (Edited to add: Different computer, now I can add formatting)

So,

Where to begin?

Let me start by saying that I am not culturally literate enough (or in the right literacy) to fully appreciate these articles. I have heard of Wagner, mostly from the lovely Bugs Bunny short. And Sonic Youth had a cover of a Carpenter's song on the Juno soundtrack. Flaming Lips, however, is far from my understanding.

I thought that Rickert and Salvo's discussion of Garage Band was interesting. In the past, no one expected mixing tools to be intuitive or easy. No one but a real geek could love a mixing board. Garage Band, though, by positioning itself as an instrument is now competing with a guitar rather than competing with the sound equipment.

One definition that Rickert and Salvo used that I have heard used differently is prosumer. They say that "Prosumer refers to the erosion of the difference between a consumer and a producer" (And They Had). I have heard that term, probably in terms of photography, meaning products that blur the line between consumer models and professional models (like a Canon Rebel or a low-end EOS). And Photoshop-- always Photoshop.

McKee's article about sound had a section on authority conveyed by voice. My 14 year old daughter participates in National History Day. Her area is group documentary. She always records the narration. The girls really cannot articulate why they have chosen Mea, though. I can. She sounds the most grown-up. Rather than soprano and breathy, she is alto and sustained. And, perhaps most importantly, she only has an accent when she wants to. She spent from the ages of six and ten in central Missouri, which is the American "non-accent." (Sounds almost just like Nebraska and Tom Brokaw).

To me, it is funny that people can "sound" more or less intelligent based not on the words they use, but on linguistic features over which they have little or no control.

Which is not at all what the author is getting at.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons, as a licensing program, has been around a while. Woody Gutherie used a version of it back in the 1930s (and he used the word "ourn" in a sentence, in print, which makes him one of my top favorite people, ever.)

Newer, though, is LiveContent 2.0 . According to the website: "the Creative Commons tech team has been working on an interesting content “autocuration” process for LiveContent 2.0, which automatically pulls down CC-licensed media for inclusion on the LiveDVD."

Licenses that allow people to reuse and remix digital content are vital for the expansion of new media (however one defines it). I am not, unfortunately, an artist. I wish I were. I have some small skill with PhotoShop, but not enough to get all excited about. Without open source materials available, I am limited in what I can produce. I cannot physically go and get pictures of everything I might want to use, and even if I could, I don't have the photographic equipment (or, to be honest, the skill) to create the same quality photos.

And I am less a musician than an artist.

So the creative commons project, pulling together material offered freely by people and pulling together older material that is is in public domain is one that I believe in. (So now to figure out how to make a LiveContent DVD...)

More on "spriting"

While I see potential in "spriting" for people of a dominant discourse community, I am not sure that it can do anything but further marginalize those of us who are not. I talk funny. There are sounds that I will never make "correctly" and I am comfortable with that. I generally have taught myself to mitigate my accent, at least when I am rested and calm. I love writing as a means of communication because it provides a screen, like a blind audition. I can be judged on the strength of my ideas and the way that I have communicated those rather than my accent.

Spriting

Shankar, T.R. Speaking on the Record: A theory of composition.
---. "Two Talkuments: Examples from 'Speaking on the Record'"
Shipka, J. Sound Engineering: Toward a theory of multimodal soundness.


Favorite quote:
"voices are constructions of self and meaning" Tara R. Shankar (381).

Coming from a background with more than a trace of primary orality, I find Shankar's theories appealing. As someone who deeply appreciates the writing process, though I find this problematic. I talk about ideas to think, just as I write about ideas to think. I suggest, in fact, that verbal students talk through ideas and even record those ideas (on a recorder) so they can develop an essay from that.

The children who were "spriting" in "Two Talkuments" appear to be cute and verbal. And they like to talk. But I am not sure how valuable that is? Or maybe this is really just renaming Ong's secondary orality?

Shipka's piece focuses on the value of fun and play in an assignment. This is a technique often used in K-12 education. William Glasser has written a great deal about meeting students' needs for social interaction and for fun. She has great projects, though, that her students have produced. For me, though, it belongs more in a communications class than in an English class...

My Write Up

"TV is chewing gum for the eyes." ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Meanings
For my Photoshop Remix assignment I chose the Frank Lloyd Wright quote. The idea of chewing gum is something that is slightly annoying to bystanders, enjoyable to the user, and generally innocuous. My collage, I believe supports this interpretation by showing television as being innocuous and fun, like bubble gum. By placing the figure of the boy inside a television, though, I am showing the unreality of it, which brings in some ambiguity, I suppose. By showing the unreality of the figure and reinforcing the idea of television being unreal, I may be showing that the quote is fictional as well, and the idea of television as innocuous pastime is equally fictitious.

Processes
The first thing I did was choose a quote. The Frank Lloyd Write quote appealed to me because of the lighthearted and irreverent nature of it. Chewing gum is, after all, flavorful, fun, and non-nutritive. So to begin, I started to sketch out a few ideas for the quote. The sketch I settled on featured the television as chewing gum, literally, by making the television a bubble being blown. So I stated looking for an image of a gum bubble on Google Images. I found one being blown by a young man, and used that. I also found a picture of an old-fashioned television on Google Images. I wanted an old-fashioned television because it is nostalgic and brings to mind more “innocent” times. These ideals seem to fit with a young man blowing a bubble as an iconic image of youth.

I extracted the young man from the image, and then I added the television to the image of the boy and warped it so that it covered over the original bubble. By now, I felt that the image was there, but needed some kind of context. I found images of living rooms and media rooms and put the figure into those to see if one had the right tone, but was not feeling that any of these were right. The television that became the background began as an element of a room. When I was trying to place it in the room, I imagined what the picture would look like if the television were the only context, and that seemed to work for me. After I had the boy blowing the television bubble, I felt I need a reference to the eye, so I used the CBS trademark eye. To place it on the screen, I erased the image that had been on the screen, and replace it with the stylized eye looking out. I warped the eye image slightly so that it would take up most of the screen. The image seemed complete, so I stopped.

This is completely different from my writing process. Nothing ever feels complete when I write. It is just due, so I have to let go. In fact, the whole process is different for me. When I write, I rarely plan ahead before I begin writing. Most of my planning takes place as I brainstorm. I write to explore, then I go through what I have done and pick out the parts that seem useful. Then I list the ideas that I think I should pursue. And then I write and revise and write some more.


Choices
I chose the images that I did because they fit into the idea that I had sketched. The exception was the background, which changed as I progressed. First, I had intended to put the youth in a contemporary home media room so that it would have a context. I ended up with the youth inside a television, which emphasizes the unreality of it, rather than in a living room that would have grounded as being more within the realm of normalcy.

I made several modifications to the images. I resized some of the images. I cut the boy out of the background that was in the original image. The vintage television was cropped slightly, and the image that was on the screen was erased and replaced with the eye logo.

I am not sure that I really considered that many alternatives. I was pleased with the concept that I had sketched. I did, however, tinker with the background to get something that I thought fit with the concept that I was trying to convey.

Connections
Bush, in his 1945 descriptions of all the many inventions that we can expect to see in the future, noted that "it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately" (39). By 1963, Sutherland’s description of Sketchapad seems to more closely anticipate Photoshop. The magnification of the image that I am working on is always vital when I do any image work. I cannot imagine trying to do this kind of collage work without digital equipment, although, people certainly made collages before Photoshop.

Wysocki's definition of “new media” from "Opening New Media to Writing" is one that immediately comes to mind as I work on this piece. Not because it was done in Photoshop, which is kind of the popular definition of new media, but because I believe that I am showing an awareness that the image does not “function independently of how it is made” (15). One way that I show how it is made is by the surreal-ness of the television set as a bubble being blown. Also surreal is the boy silhouetted against the clouds in the sky, which makes him look as though he is suspended in the air. Other than those elements, the collage could be realistic, and might not be considered new media under Wysocki’s definition.

Works Cited:

• Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think” (1945). The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Nick Montfort. MIT UP: Cambridge, MA, 2003. 35-48.
• Sutherland, Ivan. “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System” (1963). The New Media Reader. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Nick Montfort. MIT UP: Cambridge, MA, 2003. 35-48.
• Wysocki, Anne. “Opening New Media to Writing." Writing New Media. Ed. Anne Francis Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, & Geoffrey Sirc. Utah State UP: Logan, UT, 2004. 1-42.

Photo credits:

• Boy Chewing Gum from http://www.ecok.edu/centers_programs/tgu/students.htm
• Vintage Television from http://www.qualityinformationpublishers.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=137
• Sony Television from http://securitytags.biz/detachers/image/Sony-Plasma-television.jpg
• CBS Logo from http://www.basketballcity.com/images/medialeague/cbs_eye.jpg

Final Remix

Drafts

Version 2




Version 3

Images that I began with

These images come from:
boy with gum www.ecok.edu/centers_programs/tgu/students.htm

vintage tv http://www.qualityinformationpublishers.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=137

new tv http://securitytags.biz/detachers/image/Sony-Plasma-television.jpg

cbs logo http://www.basketballcity.com/images/medialeague/cbs_eye.jpg

New Media Issue: Week Four

Danish courts are causing problems for The Pirate Bay. Not that I use The Pirate Bay. Because that would be wrong. But still.

This is a new wrinkle in the intellectual property game. This is not a program, but a website that has a search engine, if I understand correctly (which I might not-- some of the file issues confuse me). How is this illegal?

Again, I believe in intellectual property. When I create something, I don't want it stolen (although it has happened). But it seems like if a person can be arrested for creating a search engine, then we will all have problems. The Anarchist's Cookbook can be used to make a bomb, which then can be used for illegal activities. Guns can be used to kill people, which is illegal. It seems like arresting someone because they created a search engine that allows a person to do something illegal is over the line.

New Media Issue: Week Three

I completely forgot about the new media issue. I should never be allowed a week off in an assignment game, because I get totally distracted.

My new media issue this week is touch-screen voting. Don't get me wrong, I love computers. We have more computers in my house than people, in fact. And if you add in gaming systems, computers outnumber us 2:1.

But one dark day last fall (on a weekend, of course), my university-issued laptop had a complete nervous breakdown. Refused to boot. I spent the better part of the weekend getting that darling (with my research paper) running again. Why do I have a certainty in the pit of my stomach that my vote could end up in a similar "blue screed" disaster?

To me, this is just one more example of technology companies promising more than they can deliver and consumers not being informed enough to say, "Disagreeing with you does not make me a Luddite; do not make your alpha test my future."

Happenings

Reading this week:
"'Happenings' in the New York scene"by Allan Kaprow
From Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Douglas Engelbart
"Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System" by Ivan Sutherland
"The Construction of Change" by Roy Ascott
"A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate" by Theodor Nelson

Happenings, according to Kaprow, have "no structured beginning, middle, or end. Their form is open-ended and fluid; nothing obvious is sought and therefore nothing is won... They exist for a single performance or only a few, and are gone forever as new ones take their place" (85). This, to me, is the essence of the Internet. I often sit down with my computer simply to do so. I go through the blogs I normally read, and check out a few message boards. These events are not really reconstructible, and even if they were, there is a good change that the conversation has moved on-- that the place where I was cannot be the place you will be.

I received, at work today, a huge, 10in thick file, that I had to find room for in my desk. As I sifted through my paper files, to make room, I through out papers that I knew that I had electronic copies of in my "memex" or rather in my aging iBook. Of all the electronic gadgets that I have, the one that I would have the hardest time functioning without is my laptop with my word processor. Almost everything that I need is stuffed in there somewhere. I can sort and files according to words in the title, or even words within the text. I don't need notecards, except as a transition to my laptop. In this way, my mind is "augmented." Without this, my productivity would be diminished due to the amount of time that I would need to spend filing.

I am struck by the idea of a drawing program being new (as Sketchpad was in 1963). I don't know what that strikes me as being odd. Of course the TRS-80 that I first used had nothing but ASCII text forming pictures (there was a missile shooting game, as I recall). But I was only 10 or 11 when TRON was released (1982), and I recall knowing that some of it was "done on computers," although I am sure that I had no real concept what that meant. I am, however, certain that the Bamboo Fun (with Photoshop Elements) that my father got for Christmas eclipses the capabilities of those early graphics packages.

As a result of cybernetic efficiency, he [man] finds himself becoming more and more predominantly a Controller and less an Effecter. The machine largely self-regulating and highly adaptive, stands between man and his world. (Roy Ascott, 1964)

As I look at what I have I have written today, about how I use my iBook/memex, about how the movies I have watched have been "done" on a computer, I am more and more afraid that Ascott is dead on. Where does this leave me when my "friendly" little computer turns on me? When it eats the data that I should have backed up? I am sure that I will scrambling through my haphazardly labeled paper files, hoping against hope that the paper I need did not subcomb to my frenzied space-making.

Nelson proposes an interesting idea about writing with computers, when he says, "Surely half the time spent in writing is spent physically rearranging words and paper and trying to find things already written; if 95% of this time could be saved, it would only take half as long to write something" (135). I am afraid this has not been my experience. At all. While I can freely admit that editing has become easier with computers, and I am less resistant to proofreading since recopying and retyping are not involved, I do not believe that my actual writing has been made more efficient. If anything, continued editing beguiles me into spending more and more time trying to achieved (impossible) perfection.

Photoshop assignment from 1/29/08

Photo: Kathie Gossett

I think I fulfilled the requirements of the assignment-- I cleared up the scratches and corrected the colors. I was trying to give the sky a bit of a blue cast though, and at that I utterly failed. But, since the photo was taken in the UK, I would lay odds that the sky was gray to begin with.

Turing & More

Reading: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" by Turing; "As We May Think" by Bush; and
"The Garden of Forking Paths" by Borges
from The New Media Reader

My first encounter with Turing was while reading Gibson's Neuromancer. I had picked up some of the references and (possibly with the help of a study guide) tried to identify more. I had picked up the idea somewhere of Neuromancer as post-modern and that one of the characteristics of a post-modern novel was intertextuality (like that wasn't a characteristic of a Renaissance piece, but I digress). So I looked up obscure references. Because I was the teacher. So I found out about Turing.

Oh. My. Gosh. He is an interesting man. He was so clever, but (oh, horror!) he was gay. So his government made him crazy. I still fail at wrapping my head around that.

Turing says "It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstance" (60). This caught my attention, because this inability to adequately catalog human behavior is what often trips up people with Asperger's Syndrome (like my son). Often bright, they can memorize all kinds of rules for behavior, but can never memorize all rules for behavior.

Enough about Turing.

Bush's article is interesting. In describing the future of information, he got many aspects right. Even if he missed on the actual methodology of the achievement, he identified many of the achievements that we have made in data storage and retrieval. And photography. "Often" he says, "it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately" (39). And it is very advantageous to look at the back of my digital camera to see whether the picture I hoped to see will appear. Or if I need to attempt to capture the image again.

In some ways, Bush's piece reads like 1950s Heinlein or Asimov-- the inventions are there, described in ways that fit with the current technology (punched cards seem awfully important, for example). But the concepts seem somehow right.

My favorite line from Bush, though, is that "truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential" (37). He was referring to the work of Gregor Mendel. My current research project (and this is related, promise) is on dual credit/concurrent enrollment and composition. There is a lot of information about education, and a lot of propaganda about concurrent enrollment. But most of it quotes the same studies, without showing the methodology. So instead of a lot of good information about a topic I am interested in, I get the same information channeled again and again. (I have found some good data, but the most cited data is not reported well).

The last article that I want to talk about is the Borges piece. It is actually a story. And in some ways, it reminds me of a videogame. A friend of mine teaches a class in interactive fiction, actually. Of course, the piece is not really interactive. The labyrinth by the narrator's ancestor is interactive, in that all possible choices continue to exist. In essence, I can "travel both" and "be one traveler" in this construct.

This does remind me of Sarte, though, in the randomness way the coincidences play out. The narrator obviously did not intend the fate of the man who validated his ancestor's work-- yet the fate still occurred.

What do the pieces have in common? They are all precursors to new media-- branched storytelling, information storage and retrieval (libraries on our desks!), and machines that can (or not) think.

Photoshop After

Photo by Kathie Gossett

Defining New Media

For class, this week, I read three pieces that attempt to define "new media." Silly me, I was unaware that the definition was not settled! Last week, had I been asked to define "new media" I would have said "media developed and delivered digitally."

The first piece I read was Anne Wysocki's "Opening New Media to Writing" from Writing New Media. Her definition of "new media" may be the hardest for me to wrap my head around. She argues that

we should call "new media texts" those texts those that have been made by composes who are aware of the range of materialities of texts that and who then highlight the materiality: such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text-- like its composers and readers-- doesn't function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody (15).

In other words, "new media texts do not have to be digital: instead, any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced can count as new media" (15).

I understand that, usually, writing is done in such a way as to create transparency. And generally, I find it frustrating when authors erase that transparency. When I took a class in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett a couple of years ago, I found reading those texts to be slow and tedious. We read Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. While the text was dense, and nothing much happened, the really frustrating part, for me at least, was Beckett's choice to not arrange the text into readable chunks. In other words, the sentences were long and dense and he did not use paragraphing as a way to organize the information. I go on about this because to me, Beckett was calling attention to the materiality of the medium by defying our conventions of how texts ought to be arranged.

This does call to mind Marshall McLuhan's declaration that "The Medium is the Message"

The other pieces that I read we presented as "Perspectives on New Media: Two Introductions" in Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort's The New Media Reader. The first, Janet Murray's "Inventing the Medium" seems to define "new media" as "digital." She says:

But the term "new media" is a sign of our current confusion about where these efforts are leading and our breathlessness at the pace of change, particularly in the last two decades of the 20th century. How long will it take bfore we see the gift for what it is-- a single new medium of representation, the digital medium (3).

Lee Manovich, though, in "New Media from Borges to HTML" explodes these definitions. Manovich lists eight definitions of "new media," each addressing different aspects, each with strengths and weaknesses. By the end of that piece, I concluded that "new media" like a lot of academic terms, is a slippery term. It is used in a number of ways. I am not sure that one, singular, "correct" definition exists. However, the usefulness of the term does not seem to be limited by this lack of agreement. This can be see by the number of people who use the term.

Week 1; New Media Issue

http://www.robotworldnews.com/100389.php

It bothers me more than a little bit that an AI can play Ms Pac Man better than I can. I felt slightly better after I read the whole article and realized that the researchers gave the AI a list of rules-- kind of like when one of my friends would share strategy for the games. Of course, when I played Ms Pac Man the most was in the days before home games systems (and the one we eventually got was an ATARI 2600, hardly a speed machine), so any strategy that I could get to make my quarter last longer was very welcome!

I completely do not understand the concept of "cross-entropy." For some reason, I though entropy had to do with stuff falling apart. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, entropy was what allowed the kipple to take over, wasn't it? Anyway, they article says:

As they explained, the basic idea of cross-entropy is that it selects the most successful actions, and modifies the distribution of actions to become more peaked around these selected actions.

So evidently entropy means something other than what I thought it meant. Attempting to understand what the term meant, I cruised over to wikipedia's entry. Wow, was that completely not helpful. Looks like I need to ask my programmer friend. Or my friend the physics prof. Because I cannot understand anything pertaining to a law of thermodynamics without an intermediary.

Since Ms Pac Man was never really a strength of mine, and since the AI has yet to figure out how to hang out next to a power pellet, lying in wait for the ghosts to close in, I should feel less bad? Maybe?

New Media Theory and Practice I

This is my class blog for Dr. Gossett's New Media Theory and Practice I. I am excited about taking this class; the material fascinates me. I am worried about doing creative work-- that is not my strong point. I don't, for example, do creative writing at all. I do sew, and scrapbook, and quilt. Those, I guess are ways of doing creative work that only require manipulation of items. So maybe digital production will be okay?