Monthly Archives: August 2005

So Devin Moore got the death penalty for killing three police officers in 2003, but his subsequent attempt to use GTA as an excuse isn’t faring well. With Rockstar off the hook, perhaps we can spend more time thinking about our society’s complete lack of personal responsibility the ways in which video games influence kids, newly important for this reason:

A study released by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which claims to be the first long-term study of this type, found that “robust exposure” to a violent game did not directly translate into real-world aggression. The key points:

Gamers played MMORPG Asheron’s Call 2 for an average of 56 hours over the course of a month, and researchers found “no strong effects associated with aggression caused by this violent game,” said lead author Dmitri Williams. Aggression was determined my measuring “argumentative behaviors” before and after gaming, which were then compared to a non-game playing control group.

Understandably, Williams is unwilling to make strong predictions based on the results of his study. Notably, the study did not look at teenagers, nor did its exposure of participants to fantasy-style violence mirror urban, GTA-style violence recently made famous by Moore. But Williams’ take-home message is noteworthy:

Games are about solving problems, and it should tell us something that kids race home from school where they are often bored to get on games and solve problems. Clearly we need to capture that lightning in a bottle.

[Cheers to Science Blog.]

Oh, you silly Japanese. Ladies and gentlemen, you can now add a goldfish-catching robot to your wishlist. Face the facts: Aibos are so passé and that mecha on eBay is just too pricey.

Researchers at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) have designed a robot they hope to enter into an annual goldfish catching competition for children, which takes place on August 20 in the nearby city of Yamatokoriyama.

Check out this page (in Japanese) with a link to the video. While the robot’s 3-minute haul of between 6 and 10 goldfish is paltry compared to kiddie experts, who can apparently hoist 60-plus fish, the mechanical arm/overhead camera/computer contraption is an interesting study on the ability of computers to potentially study moving cars or crowds.

Maybe I’m the only one who experienced this, but I can’t help but think of the time when my elementary school would stay open one night each year; teachers and kids would bring their families for food, prizes and games throughout the school, one of which involved goldfish. Now I’m picturing the event with a hulking robot, yards of cabling and a team of Japanese at the helm and, for some reason, it seems really weird.

[Courtesy New Scientist]

I’m a huge fan of blogging. I’ve been actively pro-blogs since the year 2000. When I hear about blogs in the news one eyebrow automatically goes up. The same thing happened when I heard about Mr. Trump’s blog. It’s not just his blog, though it’s named “The Trump Blog”. Don has an entourage of writers who help in his two-line-entry blogs. As I’m reading this blog I think to myself, “oh dear, Trump will be podcasting soon, and maybe vlogging.” Michael Gartenberg said it best: “If Donald Trump is blogging, then blogging is about as mainstream as it gets”, also my initial reaction.

Is this bad? Heck no. I look at this as a half step in the right direction. If we could only do something about fixing Trump’s hairdo, now that would be a step and a half in the right direction.

It just keeps getting better today. Wired news has a great article about aspiring interior decorator Jose Avila (including a great snap of his neon pink coiffure), a software developer who, apparently strapped for cash, decided to furnish his apartment in an ingenious way capable of making even the most earnest dumpster divers stand back and rethink their approaches: he’s making FedEx FurNiture.

He’s created a bed, a corner desk with shelves, a table, two chairs and a couch…and earned a cease-and-desist letter from the shipping giant, who claims his work violates the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. They asked him to take his site down the day after he put it up, in June.

I love this part:

Avila distributed cards and T-shirts featuring the website’s URL (but not the FedEx logo) at the recent Black Hat conference in Las Vegas…Avila tried to have more cards and T-shirts made, but FedEx Kinko’s refused to do the job.

Bolstered by Lawyers from Stanford Law School, Avila put the site back up, and they’re apparently gearing up for a legal tussle. Man, I love the internet.

This is a trip. Anything beginning with the sentence “How far can you push a processor without setting your room on fire?” has to be good, I say.

With a Pentium 4 670 Prescott rated at 3.8 GHz, an ASUS motherboard, 1 GB of memory, Windows Server 2003 and, most importantly, some sort of industrial-strength cooling device that looks like it could be used to make ice cream, this Japanese blog includes pictures (thankfully) of the process, and a final processor speed of…7133.5 MHz!

[Kudos to Softpedia and Engadget]

Given the media frenzy surrounding the recent shuttle mission and landing yesterday morning at Edwards Air Force Base in California, check out these cool NASA photos of the SCA (shuttle carrier aircraft) – i.e. an empty 747 with additional rear stabilizers to minimize turbulence caused by the brick shuttle on top.

Check out a decent Slate.com explainer on these flights. Some important details:

•Number of 747s NASA owns: 2
•Codenames: NASA 905, NASA 911
•How the shuttle-747 combination comes together: the shuttle mate-demate device, or MDD (sounds kinky)
•Cost of a cross-country trip: $230,000
•Distance the unwieldy contraption can fly without refueling: 1,000 nautical miles
•Number of previous trips: 51, including a trip to the Paris Air Show
•What they do most of the time: sit at Edwards, waiting for wayward shuttles

If you’re reading these words, this should come as no surprise to you.

On the heels of comScore’s recently-released Behaviors of the Blogosphere (PDF), which claims that nearly 50 million Americans spent some time on blogs during the first quarter of 2005, C|NET’s been hypothesizing about ways to study blogs. Interestingly (or perhaps not), comScore’s results coincide partly with Technorati’s, calculated by measuring links, but comScore obtained their data through some 1.5 million internet users who allowed the group to monitor their online behavior. According to Technorati engineer Kevin Marks, quoted by C|NET, the fact that two different methodologies resulting in very similar results is good news: links are mirroring readership, validating each approach. Welcome to the age of the blog.

One aspect of the Internet I’ve always found attractive is the chance for hobbyists to virtually leave their dens and garages and take their tinkering to the world.

For would-be writers, there’re blogs, fanfics and on-line ‘zines just like this one into which I’m typing.

Now a commercial venture, TotallyPhotos.com, offers pros, semi-pros and hobbyist photographers a potential new market for getting their pics seen and used.

As a “place for truly creative royalty-free photography,” the site will likely help the graphic hungry web provide more eye candy and be a resource for (as they say on the site) 100% royalty free, fresh new material from around the world.

(In the interest of full-disclosure, the thumbnail above is from my photo of the Grand Canyon. I truly think it’s a great Internet-based idea.)

On his .Mac homepage, Ian Meyer demonstrates an ingeniously simple way to use your iPod photo (and fourth generation ‘Pods) as a portable direction finder. Simply take screenshots of Google maps and download them to your iPod, and presto! Directions that doesn’t involve carrying a bulky atlas, crude drawings of the route (that’s me) or a long list of directions:

L on Downing
Go .75 miles, take the third left on Anderson
Go straight through the second major intersection after the Dairy Queen, but be sure to stay right…

What an elegant, simple, and new way to use the ever-so-ubiquitous iPod. Good job, Ian!

Props to The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Make: Blog for showing me the light.

Just saw this on BoingBoing:

A 28-year-old South Korean man died of heart failure after finishing a 50-hour first-person-shooter gaming session, according to Reuters. He was in an internet cafe, having apparently just completed his more than two day session (punctuated by breaks to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed). Upon failing to return home one day, his mother had asked the man’s former colleagues (he recently quit his job to devote more time to games) to find him. When they did, he told them he would finish the game and go home.

The cause of death was reported as heart failure.