Threading through the Tangle

The Editorial Truth behind High Dynamic Range Photography

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:59:00 -0500

The Washington Post has apparently caused some confusion and consternation regarding a photograph that it posted on their front page on Friday.

The photograph in question is a High Dynamic Range (HDR) photo. HDR photos are indeed composites as the WaPo credit indicated, but the way that all HDR photos are taken is to quickly snap several photos (ranging from 2 or 3 all the way up to something ridiculous like 10+), and then to merge these images.

HDR photography’s entire purpose is due to the fact that a camera’s sensor often can’t capture the full range of light bouncing off a scene in the world into the camera. To compensate for that, taking several images that are targeted at several different ranges within a scene allows one to capture the full range of light, definition and detail in a scene in a single photographic representation.

This allows one to take photographs like this composite of three images I took in Chepstow Castle in Wales:

A single image taken from this vantage point would never be able to capture all three of the dark stairwell, the soft reflection off of the wood, and bright sunlight illuminating the ruins outside. If one were to capture the dark stairwell, the brightly lit exterior would be washed out, and likewise, capturing the brightly lit exterior would leave the stairwell in total darkness.

Similarly, looking at the alternative non-HDR image that the WaPo considered running, you will note the bright reflection of the sun off the side of the bridge smack dab in the middle of the photograph. An HDR image of the same scene could minimize or avoid the eye-catching glare. I can see why they chose to go with the HDR image.

Unfortunately, HDR photography is most often associated with the poor artistic choices many novices will make when testing out their compositing tools, which has resulted in a generally negative sentiment towards the technique (poking around flickr will reveal many odd, questionable, or overly artistic uses of the tool).

In spite of that, there should be no editorial controversy about legitimate uses of HDR. A photograph is simply a representation of a slice in time, captured on a single piece of film or image sensor. That slice of time could be a fraction of a second, or it could be minutes or even hours. An HDR composite is no different. It is a technique that allows a single slice of time to be captured in separate data files and stitched back together.

So, what’s the source of the controversy? My opinion is the use of the word “composite”. “Composite” is an awfully broad term, and one that is fraught with difficulties ranging from intentional deception to more innocent misrepresentations. The vital detail that any editor, journalist, or reader should ask is whether the files being composited are contiguous in time and space (would this even be a controversy if we were discussing a composited panorama?). If the answer is yes, they are contiguous, then, in my opinion, there is little room for misrepresentation. They are parts of a single whole divided into constituent components.

Getting a PDF you've seen on DocumentCloud

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:06:59 -0500

Chris quotes Theodore Roosevelt, and with that, it occurs to me...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 06:45:00 -0500

Chris quotes Theodore Roosevelt, and with that, it occurs to me that everything Chris says is just as applicable to places like the news world as much as it is the world of Javascript.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

(via Chris Williams: An End to Negativity - JSConf.eu ☠ 2011)

Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 08:51:40 -0400

Emptyage: Generation X Doesn't Want to Hear It:

Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going…

Joining DocumentCloud/IRE

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:07:00 -0400

It brings me much excitement to announce that I’m joining Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE for short) as their primary developer on DocumentCloud in September. As it may be apparent to followers of my blog, I have spent the past couple months diving headlong into the world of journalism and tech, particularly through the Knight-Mozilla Journalism Challenge. Through that exploration, I have been astonished to find how rich and deep a technical world has grown to push forward the causes of journalism.

DocumentCloud has been in the vanguard of journalists and software developers constructing this world. It was conceived of by three news editors, Eric Umansky, senior editor at ProPublica, Scott Klein, news apps editor at ProPublica, and Aron Pilhofer, news apps editor of the New York Times, built by an small but amazing team consisting of Jeremy Ashkenas (of CoffeeScript fame), Sam Clay (of newsblur and Tastylabs) and Amanda Hickman (organizer and tech geek extraordinaire), and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s News Challenge.

Many web developers know of DocumentCloud’s prolific open source software development, through Backbone.js, underscore.js and a number of others. What most are less familiar with are the causes for which DocumentCloud has built all of their great contributions to free and open source software. And as excited as I am about joining an organization of DocumentCloud’s technical prowess, I am even more excited to join IRE and DocumentCloud for the civic and public goods they aim to serve.

DocumentCloud’s goal of building a public online repository of primary source documents used in journalism sits happily at the juncture of great software development, computationally interesting problems, and civic good. In creating a public repository for journalistic source documents, the public can connect directly with the information that journalists cite. Journalists and the public in turn can refer to and communicate over the documents that represent the products and currencies of power in our society.

Aside from day to day work on the platform, I will be working on DocumentCloud’s 2011 News Challenge grant to build user annotations on documents. Journalists can already mark up documents (as you can see in the Guardian’s deciphering of James Murdoch’s closure announcement for the News of the World), and we want to provide a way that the people formerly known as the audience can participate in the journalistic process. I have some particular twists I want to pursue on this idea, but I will leave that for another blog post. :)

I’m also really excited to be joining IRE. IRE is a membership organization for journalists, and focuses heavily on journalism training, particularly technical training in recent years. IRE hosts two conferences a year as well, NICAR and IRE. I view software as a means to other ends, and so I am happy to join an organization that sees the importance of better digital literacy amongst journalists, and is now, through their adoption of DocumentCloud directly invested in the effort to make software tools for journalists.

I’m excited to see what we can accomplish. Interesting times lay ahead, and it’s up to us to shape them. I can’t wait to get started.

(via Before and After Shots of Joggers - My Modern Metropolis)

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 04:22:16 -0400

(via Before and After Shots of Joggers - My Modern Metropolis)

MoJo Assignment #2: User Incentives

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:54:00 -0400

Week two of the Knight Mozilla News Lab featured lectures from Jesse James Garret, John Resig and Christian Heilmann.

@jeresig’s and @jjg’s lectures were especially interesting as they focused on what qualities make projects and products accessible to users. This is something that Aza Raskin has also contended with in his blogs regarding his new project Massive Health.

How can we incentivize, encourage or alter user behavior through application design?

There are a range of possible ways that users can use a particular application. One of the great parts of creating and on the flip side, hacking, is watching users figure out fun unintended uses for a piece of technology. That’s one of the cores of innovation. But there is a tension between providing tools that are powerful multi-function, and providing tools that users can actually understand.

The way that @jjg put this is that a lump of clay provides a much wider range of possibilities and creative choices, but creating with it requires some skill and perhaps training, while products like legos constrain the creative space but provide users an obvious place to start, and a coherent means to explore the creative space. Likewise, successful software provides users with an appropriate framework for exploring the conceptual space.

There are interesting subspaces within this domain. It is not always the case that when users have a range of behaviors available to them, they will choose beneficial or cooperative behaviors. Comment trolls are a perfect example of this. This is crucial for developers to consider, because any application where users have a range of opportunities to interact with others is a potential hole for bad behavior.

And the history of communication on the internet is basically a story of taking unrestricted messaging (email or AIM or ICQ) and adding constraints which hinder bad behavior without interfering with the majority of intended use. Spam filters, moderation systems, and facebook style walled gardens were all built with this in mind. None of these technologies have fundamentally changed the use of the systems they build upon. All of these technologies are systems designed to discourage behavior.

At the opposite end of the spectrum a variety of systems have sprung up to encourage a variety of behaviors from users. Whether they’re companies that pay for crowdsourced work, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, or Serv.io, or game companies like Zynga who’ve harnessed social pressure on facebook to drive user adoption of their games.

The world of journalism has explored this space some. Broadly speaking there’s been two efforts, gamification of the news, and crowdsourcing data challenges. the Guardian’s MP Expense app is one particularly interesting example of the latter. Unfortunately, the majority of the journalism related crowdsourcing apps don’t provide any reward or connection w/ the process of news production, or news consumption.

What I would like to see (and what i hope to address in one of my future projects) are better ways to provide leadership and encourage participation to users in the news making process.

Tim Harford — Article — Why social marketing doesn’t work

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:10:47 -0400

Tim Harford — Article — Why social marketing doesn’t work:

I don’t like the assumption that lays under Tim Harford’s analysis. Why should we presume that twitter cascades are anything but rare and tiny? Retweeting and mass attention is weighted as the rarity that it is. How often, in a world controlled and directed by users, do you think it is possible to sync up the attention of a large number of people all at one time?

I can also tell you that Harford is wrong qualitatively. There are people who i follow and who follow me with larger follower counts. When those uberusers retweet things i’ve said, i immediately notice an uptick in participation. How much is that participation worth to me? Depends on the subject and who retweets as to what the nature of the response is.

But therein lies the difference. I use twitter as a medium for interacting with others, not as a medium to broadcast to the largest group of people. The way that people like @acarvin have managed to build and more importantly sustain such a large following is by interacting w/ users, and keeping open that possibility of interaction.

Analogously there was a dustup recently over @planetmoney’s coverage of jonathancoulton questioning whether JoCo was just a gimmick or not. JoCo pointed out that the sadsack analysis of what it is that he does makes incorrect fundamental assumptions as to what success is in the age of the internet, and importantly, what the progress of success is.

What does reaching all users on the internet actually get you? Can you handle all of that attention at once? Do you have the capacity for either monetizing or otherwise capitalizing on that attention? Because that’s the difference between 1 hit wonders w/ 15 minutes of fame, and people like @acarvin. And if you can’t, you may be better off increasing the quality of interactions with your users, not the quantity.

MoJo Assignment #1: On the subject of Process

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:54:00 -0400

As I am auditing Mozilla News Lab, I’m going to deviate from the assignments a little bit. Later this week, or early next week I will explain why I am auditing instead of participating as a potential fellow, but for now I’d like to discuss two impressions that I have.

As an outsider, I’ve been quite frustrated at some of the opinions and debates that journalists have had about the way forward in the age of the internet. Because of that jaundiced perspective, the last month has been a bit of a revelation to me. My participation in MoJo has acted as a focusing lens for my interest in technology, investigation and journalism, and has provided the impetus for me to do something that I hadn’t cause to do much previously, that is, to talk to journalists interested in tech innovation.

I am currently more hopeful for the current progress and fate of journalism than I have been in a very long time. I have in the past followed along with some of the debates and opinions in journalism, but what was not apparent to me at the time was that there is a solid vanguard of tech-savvy journalists out there building tools to make journalism better. MoJo itself speaks to this point.

The first week of lectures for the Mozilla News Lab reinforced a common thread from my discussions. The first three lectures for me have really focused on the process of crafting a project, whether that means how to produce mockups to communicate your ideas (in Aza Raskin’s case), building an agile project (in Burt Herman’s case), or the importance of sketching ideas, and collaborating with others (in Amanda Cox’s case).

What is important to me about this is that news production is a parallel process. What has been impressed upon me over the past week by journalists such as Sarah Cohen and others is that news reporters aren’t conservative, or dismissive of new tools. Instead, their primary problem is that they are overworked, and uninterested in tools that will don’t help them accomplish their existing goals, e.g. producing news stories.

This is particularly relevant for people building new news tools with the goal of making Journalism better, because when someone tells you that they wish to make something better, the first question should always be “better for whom?” Journalism, as with any heterodox field has multiple constituencies, some of whom do not get along, and most of whom do not have the same motivations, objectives, or needs.

So, what I endeavor to do, and I hope that other MoJo participants do when developing their projects, in focusing on the process that they intend to use to develop their project, is ask specifically “what journalistic process am I trying to improve?” and just as importantly “am I making the process or lives of my users or participants more complicated?”

Recent experiences in Twitter spam

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 10:05:01 -0400

I’ve noticed an uptick in twitter spam recently, and knowing some people who work at twitter, i’ve been trying to keep an eye out for particularly egregious cases that i might be able to point their way. There’re a lot of spammers who are the equivalent of smash and grab artists. Spin up a new account, blast as many people as one can with links, as quickly as possible until you’re shut down. I’m sure you’ve seen lots of stuff like this:

These sorts of accounts almost always get banned after a couple hours, however, whatever process Twitter uses to ban these accounts takes painfully long. I’ve watched accounts continue to spam people for hours after i’ve hit the “report spam” button, blasting people with messages you could easily filter using a regular expression. I usually just use curl -I to figure out where they intend to redirect me

But what frustrates me more than the smash and grab @ replies, far more, are the spam account follows. I actually filter through all the people who follow me, partially out of curiosity, and to make sure that i’m not missing people of interest to me (not famous enough to warrant ignoring real people who follow me). So when I see patterns that again, one could catch with a fairly rudimentary filter, i usually take the 5 minutes it takes to suss out what the scam is.

So, when i noticed this in my inbox today, it was pretty easy to see which accounts were involved in the scam:

So what exactly is the scam? Oh… i see.

See, this is a particularly stupid scam, because in spite of what @SoaringVenture (no link, so no google juice) wants, tweets are all set so that search engines don’t follow their links.

So, all these jackasses are really succeeding at is annoying me (and presumably others), and demonstrating once again that not only is SEO bullshit, but SEO purveyors are idiots on top of it. If you want a higher pagerank, make content that people want and care about. There’s no dearth of interesting ways to improve the world. SEO is not one of them.

Ezra Klein's succinct description of failures to understand the financial crisis.

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 01:40:15 -0400

Ezra Klein's succinct description of failures to understand the financial crisis.

This is one for all the Open Data people. Mark Horvit is the...

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 19:53:32 -0400

This is one for all the Open Data people. Mark Horvit is the director for a non-profit called Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), and he gives a quick run down of making effective freedom of information requests to government. His advice is obviously intended for reporters, but is equally applicable to any civics hacker who wants to get some information from government to put together an app or do some quick analysis for a blog post.

Check it out. How to get public information that people don’t want to give you (by communityjournalism)

Making News with the Mozilla Journalism Challenge

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 11:28:00 -0400

Skip the history lesson and tell me what you want me to do

Sunday’s the last day to submit ideas to this year’s Mozilla Knight Journalism Challenges! The challenges (MoJo for short) are the start of a three year collaboration between the Knight Foundation and Mozilla’s Drumbeat project to foster the growing overlap between tech and journalism.

I’ve been really excited by MoJo as someone who’s spent the past 5 years working in tech and also has feet planted pretty firmly in non-entrepreneurial fields. Technology has changed the world a whole lot in the past 25 years, and while that’s made life a whole lot easier for a lot of people in a variety of ways, the adaptation and adoption of tech into different fields has varied tremendously, promoting some fields wonderfully (graphic design, animation and photograph for instance), and relegated other fields to digital backwaters (Art History, Library Science, Journalism).

Journalism’s case is especially interesting, due to it’s history as a successful business. What was unfortunate about the circumstance of Journalism is not it’s inability to adopt new technologies, but rather that it was stuck in a local maximum in terms of economics, and the shifts caused by interconnectivity and digital distribution basically tore the rug out from under the news business, without providing a path to a “new normal” which would allow Journalism as an industry to survive.

Instead, the news business has floundered, reacting to each new technology which changed the landscape in which journalists operated, whether that was RSS, mobile browsing, twitter, news aggregators, blogs or video games. But there’s been a marked change in the past couple years. Regardless of the furious but ultimately inconsequential debates about the legitimacy of blogging as a written form, or whether twitter makes you stupid, there are a core of journalists and tech people who have slowly and somewhat surreptitiously tilled the fields of news rooms and academic journalism so that seeds of future journalistic success could be planted.

Things like MoJo, to me, look like a culmination of these efforts. Mozilla, particularly through Drumbeat, is the sort of organization with a broad reach and appeal within developer communities, and a history of advocating for technological freedom, and actually pushing innovation. The Knight Foundation is obviously well-connected within the world of Journalism world, and has enough financial resources to provide some new opportunities to make cool new stuff. And the ecosystem, probably the most important indicator, that has shaped up around data journalism and journalism technologies is now bursting into flower.

What do we, the public, get out of this?

First, an opportunity to take all of the miserable crap that has made us unhappy about how Journalism has functioned as a field that expects us to be their audience, consumers, and users, and channel that into ideas on how to make using the news suck less. This is a chance for us to change how the news is made. To voice our opinions about what is wrong with the news, and how it could be fixed.

Second, we will (hopefully) get new leaders who can grow in the intersection of journalism and technology, who will represent the ideals that Mozillans and we citizens of the open web care about, and carry forth the mission of good investigation and reporting which everyone still applauds the news media for when done properly.

How do you want to change the news?

So, if you care about Journalism and technology, or if there are things that bug you about how the news operates, I encourage you to write up your ideas, and submit them to MoJo. From the challenge entries, MoJo (and it’s panel of judges) will pick 60 people to participate in an online seminar series that will culminate in a hack jam in Berlin, to do some rough tool prototyping. From those 60, 5 will be offered fellowships to operate for a year within the news rooms of the Boston Globe, the BBC, the Guardian, Der Zeit and Al Jazeera English.

The three challenges for this year are Unlocking Video, Beyond Comment Threads, Open Web’s Killer Apps.

I’ve put in a couple ideas myself, and I definitely think other people can and should do so as well. :)

For whatever reason, i forgot to share this on my blog when it...

Wed, 25 May 2011 22:46:22 -0400

For whatever reason, i forgot to share this on my blog when it came out two weeks ago! If you haven’t seen this, it’s definitely worth watching :)

My Water’s On Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song) (by davidmholmes)

What can Journalism learn from Text-based Adventures, my MoJo entry

Wed, 11 May 2011 08:13:00 -0400

Some of you may know that i’ve been quite interested in the Knight-Mozilla Journalism Challenges (MoJo for short). Journalism currently rests at an interesting point, where grass roots support and interest is coalescing around movements such as Open Data, and technologists are pursuing innovation not just for developer tools but as a means to change fields outside of the typical world of entrepreneurs and tech geeks.

In that context, i happened to have been thinking about games, interaction and journalism, and came up with an idea. A high school friend who works for Mozilla suggested i might be interested in MoJo. So what follows below is the result of that connection, and discussions i’ve had with friends and news people i happen to know.

If you’ve got thoughts i’d love to hear em :) You can also find the entry on the Drumbeat site here: https://drumbeat.org/en-US/challenges/beyond-comment-threads/submission/124/

Summary

Text-based Adventures for Journalism? Many have complained that print journalism has not substantively changed, regardless of distribution medium, and point to games as the engaging medium of the modern era. We can harken back to the original interactive game, text-based adventures, and gain inspiration for how Journalism can innovate.

Long form articles don’t provide users with any opportunity to interact. Interaction is left to comment threads and social media. If instead we implement articles as a container of paragraphs/facts/memes that represent a path through a topic, a user can direct themselves through a topic with an article as a touchstone or guide. Users control their experience but editorial control is still preserved.

Description

Text-based adventures (TbAs) are some of the most stripped down text based interactive systems that one can build. They’ve been around since the early 90s and continue to enjoy niche interest, including modern implementations in browser friendly languages.

At their core, the development of narratives as TbAs and journalistic writing share a similar level of granularity and attention to detail. TbAs require authors to build spaces and populate them with objects, descriptions, and behaviors players can perform on objects. Journalists and Editors, while unfettered by interaction, nonetheless pore over articles paragraph by paragraph, line by line, for the purpose of both verifying sourcing, upholding writing standards, keeping abreast of quickly moving events, and fitting within page/column length constraints. The peculiarity of the Journalistic process however, is that the level of granularity at which Journalists and Editors work is not exposed to users, who instead receive whole articles as monolithic chunks of content, a problem that TbAs do not suffer from.

However, TbAs in their original form may not be entirely suitable for direct adaptation to the journalistic process. Journalistic narratives are typically (though not exclusively) written in the 3rd person, and TbAs are operated by users in the direct 1st person (n.b. There are conceits which may bridge this gap, exploration of a world w/ an explicit narrator mediating and explaining the user’s interaction w/ the world, for instance).

The key narrative feature that both news pieces and TbAs share is an anticipation of what users know and wish to know. However, where Journalism simply attempts to target a safe lowest common denominator which presumes only what all users know in an attempt to cover the broadest swath of readership, TbAs offer users the ability to discover and investigate narrative elements in further depth, should they so choose.

Interactive News Pieces

While TbAs may not be directly adoptable as a technology, they point out elements that could be incorporated into the digital application version of an article. The most conceptually simple is the ability to make articles queryable systems. Instead of presenting users with articles as atomic objects, provide users with articles as a collection of content, statements, research/sources, which can either be consumed in a proscribed fashion, which retains the traditional editorial narrative we are used to when reading a newspaper, or, alternatively, allow the user to direct themselves through the topic of the article with whatever goals and interests the user may have.

Users could drill down a particular facet of an article’s subject they find interesting (particular sources for instance), or they could back-fill knowledge and context which they may be missing, by inquiring further about an individual or group mentioned in the article, or even ask questions which may be tangentially relevant to the current article, but may be the focus of another article.

See the quick mockup below for an idea of what this might look.

Text Based Adventures from the future!

Even TbAs have much to learn from technological advancement since their heyday, much of which is amenable to adoption within Journalism. The makers of the world’s most prevalent command line interface, Google, have built their business around monetizing what they can learn from cooperative interaction with their users via the services and information they have constructed and compiled.

In short, Google learns from their users’ input, via a humble text box, that magically takes their users to what they are seeking. Google uses this information both to make money, and to improve their systems, which in turn benefits their users. Interactive exploration of the contents of a news story opens similar possibilities. We can imagine iteratively improving an article based on recorded user journeys, much the way that Google records what search queries users submit. Perhaps there are questions which a majority of users wish to have answered regarding a particular subject. With an interactive system users can actively interrogate whether an author has directly answered their question, or failing that, get a next best approximation (perhaps via wikipedia, see the 4th mockup below).

Writers in turn get a record of questions asked, and can view aggregate information, or drill down to individual user journeys, to see whether or not their writing has been the springboard for particular questions on the subjects they are writing about, or whether users follow the path that the author has prescribed for them.

There have also been advancements in story telling systems since the Z-machine. Games like SleepIsDeath (intro slideshow) provide a two player mechanical turk (the original one, not the Amazon.com one) game play experience. Player 1 starts the game, perhaps naïve and unaware that player 2 controls the world and the elements which show up within player 1’s experience. From player 1’s perspective the game is a vastly expansive game, played in 30 second turns, able to react to any possible user input.

Thinking of SleepIsDeath as a mechanical turk system is useful for another reason. There are existing tools in the world of online journalism which have sought to bridge the gap between journalists and audiences such as CoverItLive, which serve as interactive Q&A apps between journalists, and users. These Q&As are preserved for later reference, but Q&As are subject to the same sorts of social overhead found in comment threads. They’re not news items that can stand on their own. Systems like SleepIsDeath bridge the gap between joint creation by users and authors. SleepIsDeath sessions are framed in such a way that the journey player 1 takes can be recorded and experienced by a 3rd party while preserving the narrative frame which player 2 has chosen, without focusing on the relationship between player 1 and player 2.

We can imagine, for instance, taking the queryable news object described above, and, instead of just providing the user with existing blocks of information, piping a user’s questions directly to a writer or subject matter expert to constructing answers which fit within the narrative frame of an article, and provide answers back to users, possibly in near-real time, to augment and complement the pre-prepared materials that are part of the article. In essence, turning analytics from TbA based news, into the news into a multi-player Q&A game about a news topic.

Conclusion

There’s a broad space to explore which aligns the interests and goals of users with the content creation process in a cooperative fashion. A lot has been made of the desire to have journalists further engage users during the writing process. However direct engagement with users on a social basis can have its own pitfalls, and while there are certainly benefits to doing so, systems like the ones described above may be able to help defuse some of the problems that journalists encounter when engaging directly with their userbase (which is something i still advocate and recommend they do). If we can find ways that everyone can cooperate to make the news better, it certainly is a worth while idea to pursue further.

Thanks for reading!

-Ted Han (twitter, my email is my first name at knowtheory.net.)

Mockup #1

(apologies for the notes which remain at the foot of the mockup pages. It has been suggested to me that a “like” feature for elements of the story would be a good feature too. Thanks Atul!)

These mockups excerpt content from the following NYTimes article viewed through their Google Chrome App: http://www.nytimes.com/chrome/#/Top+News//www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/business/economy/09insure.html

Sources and references

Parchment, an Open Source Javascript interface to the GNUsto Z-machine
GNUsto and Glulx, Virtual machines for interactive fiction
SleepIsDeath a 2 person interactive story telling game.
An article by Matt Waite on evolving at the core of the Journalistic process
An analysis of the technical issues arising from the use of articles as the basic unit of journalism
Don’t mistake your CMS for your development platform (or, the joys of loose coupling)

Hacker pwns police cruiser and lives to tell tale • The Register

Tue, 03 May 2011 15:10:55 -0400

Hacker pwns police cruiser and lives to tell tale • The Register:

See, i can’t decide which Science Fiction world we’re living in. Is this Ghost in the Shell? Or Megaman Battle Network? Something else? To be sure, technology being employed by people who don’t understand the consequences of what they’re using.

Hanna; a short review

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:30:00 -0400

There’s a textural quality to Hanna that stands out as its most prominent feature. Hanna is a film that was made to explore an idea, and that idea is a (barely) scifi, spy drama filmed as a fairy tale. It’s both grittier and more grounded than “Pan’s Labyrinth” but considerably more fantastical than the Bourne Identity.

Hanna’s extent, though, begins and ends with that textural exploration. The film is an extremely pleasant and engaging experience that carries its aesthetic naturally and completely from beginning to end. But unlike fairy tales or other sorts of hero stories, Hanna is missing a moral, message, or psychological treatment of Hanna’s (the character) development. In short, Hanna (both the film and the character) lacks closure.

Irrespective of Hanna’s narrative progression, Saoirse Ronan (as Hanna) does a great job of playing a teenage assassin exploring her world for the first time – in a neutral, german-tinged accent, no less. Cate Blanchett is a fantastic villain and southern belle, with all of the demur faux-kindness you could possibly want out of a heartless control-freak with a drawl.

The soundtrack also bears mentioning, having been scored by the Chemical Brothers. Interviews about the film have noted how well integrated the tracks are with the sound design for the film, and that’s certainly true, weaving the Chemical Brothers’ distinctive sound in and out of scenes quite seamlessly. But more than that, i was pleased with the Chemical Brothers ability to do two distinct things. They produced tracks that are enjoyable both as a film score and as an album, but they did the film score justice in building tracks that smoothly connect both the fantastical fairytale aesthetic of the film, and the upbeat electronic pacing you’d expect out of a spy caper.

All in all, it was definitely an enjoyable experience. I’d be interested in seeing it again and probably getting the dvd.

25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they're from the Future | Crack Two

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:29:00 -0400

25 Abandoned Yugoslavia Monuments that look like they're from the Future | Crack Two:

Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.”

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:23:30 -0400

Never say “no,” but rarely say “yes.”:

More succinctly: make all your refusals contingent. When approached w/ an opportunity you have reservations about, recast/renegotiate the opportunity until you have no reservations (like raising your hourly rate from $25/hr to $100/hr).

(via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 10:45:20 -0400

(via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)