Jay Leno demonstrates 3D "fabbing" for antique cars

This is very cool. Jay Leno, the comedian and car collector, has written an article for Popular Mechanics about the practical use of 3D scanning and printing.

I wrote about 3D rapid prototyping back in 2007, but the interesting thing about Leno's article -- and the accompanying video -- is he shows an actual use-case scenario that could potentially help out the many thousands of classic car owners who can't run their vehicles because they're missing a part that's no longer manufactured:

"It's a classic example of high tech melding with old tech. There are cars sitting in garages around the country, and they haven’t moved in years for lack of some unobtainable part. Now they can hit the road once more, thanks to this technology."

Leno brings up the case of a deteriorating part for a 100-year old car. While it would be possible to get a machinist to attempt to replace the part, it would be expensive and could potentially take lots of trial and error, if the replacement part is too thick or doesn't quite fit. With 3D "fabbing" technologies, you can not only create a very precise model of the part (according to Leno, "50,000 points per second at a density of 160,000 dots per inch"), you can "print" it plastic. If the part needs to be made into metal, like Jay's old car parts, the plastic models can either be turned into a mold or the 3D data file can be used with a special type of machine that makes metal parts based on 3D models.

Check out the video below, which shows Leno explaining the technology. One of the neatest things about this technology which I wasn't aware of previously is it can actually be used to make working plastic models that have moving parts -- no assembly required! Leno demonstrates a wrench and some sort of steam-engine component made with the 3D printer, and both actually work:

As for cost, Leno admits the 3D scanner and printer are expensive (he says the NextEngine scanner costs about $3000 and the Dimension uPrint Personal 3D printer is under $15,000, which is actually a sharp drop from just two years ago, when printers cost $40,000 and up). That's too expensive for mass production of parts, but most car collectors or owners of old machinery just need single parts or pieces. There's probably potential for an online marketplace to spring up, that lets people trade 3D modeling data files and order parts from 3D print shops onine.

Link and discussion: Hacker News

An academic gets a rise from "breaching experiments" in City of Heroes/City of Villains

(Update at bottom) This is interesting. A university professor has released a sociology study (which will soon be made into a book) using players in the MMORPG City of Heroes/City of Villains as research subjects (see video at the bottom of this article which shows gameplay). I saw it discussed on Hacker News, and read the article on nola.com that prompted the debate. After reading the 2008 research paper ("Play and Punishment: The sad and curious case of Twixt") I thought that I would give some analysis here on my blog, and add some of my own thoughts regarding academic ethics.

From a high-level examination, the study seems harmless. In it, Loyola professor David Myers exploited differences between the online game's official rules (mostly governing gameplay and competition) and unofficial rules (mostly player-created social norms) to study group behavior. Starting in late 2006, he used his player to build specific scenarios and observed the reactions of other participants.

But drilling down to his methodology, the study veers into uncomfortable territory. Myers didn't just play the game, he actually used his hero character "Twixt" to sabotage other people's enjoyment by violating the game's unofficial social norms. In other words, he took the role of an antisocial griefer to an extreme in order to drive social and emotional reactions, which he then used to support his thesis.

Here's how Myers describes his methodology:

These three sets of behaviors – rigidly competitive pvp tactics (e. g., droning), steadfastly uncooperative social play outside the game context (e. g., refusing to cooperate with zone farmers), and steadfastly uncooperative social play within the game context (e. g., playing solo and refusing team invitations) – marked Twixt’s play from the play of all others within RV.

Translation: He killed other players in situations that were allowed by the game's creators but frowned upon by the majority of real-life participants. For instance, "villains" and "heroes" aren't supposed to fraternize, but they do anyway. When "Twixt" happened upon these and other situations -- such as players building points by taking on easy missions against computer-generated enemies -- he would ruin them, often by "teleporting" players into unwinnable killzones. The other players would either die or have their social relations disrupted. Further, "Twixt" would rub it in by posting messages like:

"Yay, heroes. Go good team. Vills lose again."

The reaction was overwhelmingly negative. People used message boards and in-game chat to tell Twixt how much he was hated, what a terrible player he was, and worse. While Myers was technically following the rules of permitted gameplay, he was violating the rules of conduct to such a degree that even heroes were begging for villains to kill Twixt in the game.

There were also some extremely disturbing reactions to the experiment. Myers received at least one threat to kill him in real life, although it's not certain if the player who said this was being serious, as Myers' real identity was not known to other players at the time. This video interview with Myers discusses the incident:

Computer Game Threat

All in the name of science, right? Anyway, here is how Myers' summed up the implications of his experiments:

In real-world environments, "natural" laws governing social relationships, if they exist at all, are part of the same social system in which they operate and, for that reason, are difficult to isolate, measure, and confirm. In Twixt’s case, however, two unique sets of rules – one governing the game system, one governing the game society -- offered an opportunity to observe how social rules adapt to system rules (or, more speculatively, how social laws might reproduce natural laws.) And, the clearest answer, based on Twixt’s experience, is that they don’t. Rather, if game rules pose some threat to social order, these rules are simply ignored. And further, if some player -- like Twixt -- decides to explore those rules fully, then that player is shunned, silenced, and, if at all possible, expelled.

I had a couple of additional thoughts about Myers' study. When I was in grad school, we devoted some time during the required proseminar to academic ethics. As I recall, experiments in which subjects were not made aware they were taking part in an experiment were to be treated very cautiously. The example that was brought up in class was a 60s-era study that involved a researcher monitoring the activities of men having sex in a public restroom that was known as a pickup spot for anonymous rendezvous. Such a study could not happen now without raising red flags, owing to privacy and consent issues. While Myers' research did not infringe upon players' intimate lives, he apparently did not get their consent and he did not reveal that he was an academic conducting research.

There is also the emotional element to consider. He was manipulating people's feelings for the sake of an experiment. That seems questionable, despite the suggestion in the nola.com article that he was surprised people reacted the way they did.

I believe Myers anticipated he would draw an overwhelmingly negative emotional reaction before he even started his "breaching experiments." It's not just that people hate to lose. Myers has studied video games since the 1980s, and played City of Heroes/City of Villains for thousands of hours before he started his research. Surely he knew that killing other players in such a fashion went beyond griefing -- these virtual characters are representations of the people who play them, and the advanced characters have taken huge chunks of personal time to build. The article on nola.com notes that "Myers was stunned by the reaction, since he obeyed the game's rules." This seems a bit hollow. After all, he acknowledged that his methodology employed "steadfastly uncooperative" tactics -- what was he expecting, a medal? The social rules may not be explicit as the official game rules, but he must have expected negative consequences for violating them in such a manner, just as employing uncooperative behavior in a real-world situation would prompt negative or even angry reactions from others.

Update 7/7/2009: I found Professor Myers' blog, and a post in which he addresses the academic ethics involved in his research. First, he suggests that this is not technically an "experiment":

... this study is not really an experiment. I label it as a “breaching experiment” in reference to analogous methods of Garfinkel, but, in fact, neither his nor my methods are experimental in any truly scientific sense. This should be obvious in that experimental methods require some sort of control group and there was none in this case. Likewise, experimental methods are characterized by the manipulation of a treatment variable and, likewise, there was none in this case.

He goes on to claim that the lack of consent from the people in his research does not constitute an ethical breach:

The matter of informed consent in this case, because of the reasons above, is really more of a legal than an ethical issue. You will note that I reveal no real-life identities. Nor do I use player globals. The names of toons I do include in the paper are entirely immaterial to the paper’s content and could easily be changed – which I am quite willing to do, though I think it will make little practical difference to the players involved. Most of them, I think, would rather have the names in rather than out. None of them, after all, despite the claims of some, were “treated” or “manipulated” or “harmed” in any way. They were simply observed in how they played within the zone, similar, perhaps, to observing how people shop inside a shopping mall.

This is a false comparison. The players were not "simply observed," they were subjected to what he calls "steadfastly uncooperative" behavior. If he were to employ corresponding behaviors in a shopping mall, the result would almost certainly be verbal abuse from mall patrons and ejection from the property for harassment.

Finally, he refers to a Terra Nova discussion on informed consent, which is a great read. However, he did not follow the same rules of engagement as Terra Nova author Constance Steinkuehler, who says:

My general MO to date has been to keep the lines between my professional identity and my Lineage identity transparent to whoever is interested, treating in-game disclosure of information about my 'academic' life the same way I treat academic disclosure of details about my 'game' life, based on the notion that I am bound to both communities to be generally forthright about what I do.

Feel free to add your thoughts below about these issues.

More I, Lamont blog posts about massively multiplayer online games:

• MMORPGs training "Generation G" for corner-office suites
• The open-ended first-person shooter: A template for 21st century storytelling?
• The real-life toll of virtual gaming
• State of Play V recap

A video of the gameplay in City of Heroes/City of Villains:

Simplicity sells, or why user interface matters

I just read a great quote by David Pogue in his New York Times review of a D-Link home router/backup storage device:

Isn’t it amazing that, after all these years, it still hasn’t dawned on companies like D-Link that simplicity sells? They still don’t get it: spending a little money up front —on hardware design, streamlined software, better manuals -- would save a fortune in tech-support calls and store returns. ...

... In short, D-Link has gone to the considerable expense of inventing, designing and marketing a smart machine that could save a lot of people a lot of cost and complexity — and then hobbled it by making it much too cryptic and technical for 90 percent of its potential audience.

This reminded me of an incident earlier in the week when a relative came to me with his nearly brand-new BlackBerry Curve 8900 and complained that he couldn't get back to the old home menu. When I looked at the home screen, sure enough it had changed to about 40 minuscule icons on a pure white background, instead of the carrier home page, which has a blue graphic and five icons showing the most-used features. He had accidentally changed the home screen some days before and had tried every conceivable way to switch it back. Tech support at work wasn't helpful -- while they support email on the device, they don't handle anything else, because he bought it on his own. He called his employer's CIO, who was sympathetic, but could only advise him to call the carrier tech support. They told him to change the setting in the options screen, but he couldn't find that.

So I gave it a shot. The interface designed by Research in Motion is maddeningly complicated -- many options are only available from specific applications, or are buried in submenus. Changing options often requires multiple clicks to select the menu item, change to another setting, and then saving that setting. I hunted around in various places, including the most obvious place -- the home page icon for display/keyboard -- but could not find what I was looking for. I told him his best option was to go to AT&T store where he had bought the device and have them find the option, but he was afraid they would shrug or be unable to help him.

So I gave it one more try. And lo and behold, one of the last icons on the home menu was labeled "options" (separate from display/keyboard). I found the setting and changed it. He was overjoyed.

But it made me wonder. The BlackBerry UI is so unintuitive that it took five people -- including the CIO of a large organization -- to diagnose what was wrong. We collectively spent an hour or two on the issue.

And he's not the only one. I remember when I got my first BlackBerry several years ago. It was simply placed on my desk by someone in IT without any tutorial or manual. I'm a pretty tech-savvy individual, but I couldn't figure out how to turn it off -- I had to ask another user how to do it. Ditto for changing the phone volume or the position of icons on the screen -- I had to Google the solutions.

If even 10% of BlackBerry owners have similar problems, that represents a lot of frustration and millions of wasted hours every year. Research in Motion surely knows about these problems (the first BlackBerry came out eight or nine years ago) yet it is still shipping products that confound users with their complexity.

Besides D-Link and RIM, what other technology companies (or specific products) can't get a handle on the user experience?

Weather maps for Boston

On my browser toolbar I have bookmarks for about 10 really important sites that I visit multiple times throughout the day: Yahoo mail, Twitter, Techmeme, Y Combinator/Hacker News, the Industry Standard, etc.

But there's only one map-related site, and it's not Google Maps. It's the National Weather Service radar map for Boston, which includes all of southern New England (see screenshot, above). It lets me know in near real-time where the clouds and thunder cells are, and plan outings accordingly.

On my iPod Touch, I also use the free Weather.com app. It has a Google maps mashup which shows a cloud overlay over the user-chosen locations, but the graphics aren't as good and there is a lag on some of the data -- and I suspect some innaccuracies about the location of storms, based on visually comparing the NWS map and the mobile mashup from Weather.com.

Nevertheless, the data available to ordinary users via Web and mobile apps is amazing. TV weathermen used to be the gatekeepers for such data, but no longer. That doesn't mean TV weathermen will be disappearing -- they are still valuable for giving context and forecasting -- but for here-and-now reports they have been made obsolete by technology.

Learning BASIC again

I'm trying to relearn BASIC. Beginning Programming For Dummies and the Liberty Basic CD that comes with it are guiding me through many of the functions and concepts that I learned (and forgot) in the 1980s, and I am happy to say that it's coming back to me without too many hiccups. For instance, the following program worked the first time, without any bugs, despite the fact that it has a bunch of interlocked subprograms although I later had to update it when I found some loop situations that had to be eliminated:

REM Testing a function that calculates the user's age in any given year
REM And also tests to make sure that users use real numbers and future years, not past years
REM I found out that you can call subprograms from within subprograms
REM
NOMAINWIN
NOTICE "Enter the year you were born, and a year in the future."
NOTICE "This program will calculate how old you will turn in that year."
REM
REM The subprogram to ask the year you were born
GOSUB [yearBorn]
REM
REM The subprogram to ask the future year
GOSUB [futureYear]
REM
REM The function that calculates the difference
REM
NOTICE "This is how old you will be in the future: "; CALCULATEAGE(FUTUREYEAR,YEARBORN)
END

[yearBorn]
PROMPT "What year were you born?"; YEARBORN
REM
REM Another subprogram that checks YEARBORN is a real number
REM
GOSUB [checkYearBorn]
RETURN

[checkYearBorn]
WHILE YEARBORN < 1
NOTICE "You need to enter a year from sometime in the last two millenia. Numbers only."
PROMPT "What year were you born?"; YEARBORN
WEND
RETURN

[futureYear]
PROMPT "Type a year in the future."; FUTUREYEAR
REM
REM Test to make sure a real number is used, via a subprogram
REM
GOSUB [checkFutureYear]
REM
REM Another test, to make sure that the future year is after the birth year
GOSUB [checkFutureYearFuture]
RETURN

[checkFutureYear]
WHILE FUTUREYEAR < 1
NOTICE "You need to enter a year from sometime in the last two millenia. Numbers only."
PROMPT "Type a year in the future."; FUTUREYEAR
WEND
RETURN

[checkFutureYearFuture]
WHILE FUTUREYEAR <= YEARBORN
NOTICE "The year you entered is before the year you were born. Enter a year after you were born."
PROMPT "Type a year in the future."; FUTUREYEAR
WEND
RETURN


FUNCTION CALCULATEAGE(FUTUREYEAR,YEARBORN)
CALCULATEAGE = FUTUREYEAR-YEARBORN
END FUNCTION

The program asks a user's age, and then a year in the future, and calculates how old he or she will be in the future year. It also checks for bad data -- letters and inconsistent years.

Maybe I can port it to the Web, but that would require me dusting off my old javascript skills, which I haven't tapped in about five years.

A robot teacher?

File under dead-end educational technologies. It's cute, but there's no way that robots like this one will be an effective way to teach kids anytime soon. Check the video below, which shows the robot "Saya" reading a prerecorded text (why not show them a video?) right before the kids come up and poke and fiddle with its face.

The SFGate article claims Saya will have some ability to scold misbehaving kids and take roll call. Regardless, I can only imagine the mischief that would result if this were tried in most normal classrooms.

For the past two or three decades, there's been a regular stream of stories about prototype Japanese robots delivering the mail, bringing medicines to sick people, serving as pets, etc.. Despite the breathless pronouncements from journalists about such robots becoming commonplace in a few years, Nothing ever seems to come from the experiments -- they're too expensive, the AI is limited, and certain technologies (especially visual and speech recognition) aren't ready for prime time.

IDG layoffs

There was some tough news for IDG this week. Folio has the story:

Boston-based technology publisher IDG has restructured its b-to-b media division, grouping brands like CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Network World, CSO, IT World and Industry Standard into one business unit.

As a result of the consolidation, 8 percent of IDG’s U.S. staff has been eliminated. An IDG spokesperson declined to say exactly how many employees were let go.

I can't say how many people lost their jobs either, but the list includes a lot of extremely talented people and good friends.

The media industry has been in a state of ongoing disruption for years, thanks to Internet-driven advertising and audience trends. But the recession has been absolutely brutal on publications and the people who work for them. Many advertisers are cutting spending, and there're just not enough marketing dollars or paying subscribers to go around. Newspapers are reeling, and even specialist publications (such as Portfolio) are closing.

I believe the situation will turn around within a year, as the economy comes out of the recession and advertising dollars return. There will certainly be opportunities for publishers to rebuild and new ventures to rise out of the ashes, and for new jobs to open up. In other words, I am optimistic about the long-term prospects ... but getting over the short-term pain will be hard.

Back from Denver SABEW gathering

Last night I returned from Denver, which was the site of this year's SABEW conference. It was good, and not just because of the Best in Business awards ceremony (we won three SABEW BiB awards). Everyone was talking about the crisis in the media business, but it was interesting to note that the business media has fared a bit better than the mainstream media. Organizers repeatedly mentioned the fact that this year's American Society of Newspaper Editors convention was canceled, but the SABEW conference had a healthy attendance. One of the speakers, Ray Shaw (a former WSJ reporter and editor who is now chair of American City Business Journals) said his company's revenue sources -- subscriptions and ad bookings -- were actually looking up this year.

However, layoffs have affected the business media, especially at daily metro newspapers. There were more than a few people who had recently lost their jobs or taken buyouts, and one of the sessions I attended on entrepreneurship had a large audience. In the absence of jobs at established media outlets, people are clearly considering how to strike out on their own.

If you're interested in seeing what else was discussed at the conference, the best place to start is SABEW-related tweets.

The open-ended first-person shooter: A template for 21st century storytelling?

I've been playing videogames since the 1970s. I didn't try out a first-person shooter until 1996, when I happened upon a copy of Doom on a used ThinkPad I purchased in a Hong Kong computer bazaar. The 3D environments, the challenges, the puzzles, and the action were addictive, and I was hooked. Since then, I've played about a dozen or more FPS titles on various hardware platforms. My favorites: Return to Castle Wolfenstein (for the Mac) and Half Life 2 (for the original Xbox).

That is, they were my favorites until I tried Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360, created by Bethesda (see interview below, which includes some clips of gameplay -- note that it is extremely violent, and not suitable for children or the sqeamish). This FPS is similar to the titles mentioned above in that users play a character that has to use wits, exploration, and shooting skills to win the game. However, there are two additional elements that really set it apart:

• Characters become good or evil depending on their actions in the game


• The 3D environment is an open world instead of a fixed channel

While I'd heard of other games that had different outcomes depending on how you played the game or whether you were nice or mean, and had seen how cooperative/antagonistic behavior impacted massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, Fallout 3 was the first such FPS with this feature that I had a chance to play.

It was intriguing to see how non-player characters (computer-generated "people", animals, and robots) interacted with or reacted to my character, based on how he behaved. It totally changed the gameplay -- in some instances, getting "bad karma" resulted in being attacked and killed, or potentially losing the assistance of certain NPCs.

For example, an NPC named Paladin Cross came to my aid at one point and basically helped me survive several major combat situations. But, because she is associated with an honorable group that is out to save the world, the paladin is programmed to leave if the player steals from or hurts allied or innocent people. In other words, being bad in her proximity makes the game more difficult.

In other instances, being nice to strangers opened up new missions within the game (usually to deliver something, find an object in a difficult place, or locate someone.) I generally tried to play "nice" throughout the game, and gathered mostly good karma, but I wondered what would happen if I was bad throughout.

The second major change was the world of Fallout 3 – the "Capital Wasteland" around a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C., was an open-ended world. This is not typical of the FPS titles I've played in the past, where the player is channeled through specific locations in order to advance to the next level, and exploration is limited to that channel. In Fallout 3, buildings, subways, and cave systems usually have fixed channels that control the player's path, but outside it's possible to wander anywhere in the world (kind of like an MMOG), have random interactions with the beings encountered there, and enter buildings and do missions out of order. This adds a random, almost serendipity feel to the game, and is great for "explorer" personalities like me (see Richard Bartle's list of virtual world player taxonomy).

Along with the good/evil element described earlier, the open-ended nature of the game guarantees that no two games will be exactly alike. This is different than the models established by Doom, Half Life 2, and the popular WWII FPS titles I've played in the past, in which there is only one real path to take, and only one outcome to the game (or two, if you include the death of your character). In Fallout 3, the player is given a plot framework and has a lot of leeway to take the story in new directions.

This aspect of Fallout 3 -– along with the beautiful environment created by Bethesda's artists and various unexpected twists and characters -– made me wonder if these types of open-ended games are the template for 21st-century storytelling. I've alluded to the possibility of user-customized machinima in earlier writings (see Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web and Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution) but Fallout 3 involved active play within the story world, instead of passive consumption of a customized, linear plot.

The immersive experience of moving about this desolate, beautiful 3D world (unbelievably gorgeous and detailed in HD), and interacting with a wide range of characters, creatures, and subplots reminded me of some of the rich fantasy worlds created by storytellers such as Ridley Scott's team (Blade Runner) and Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun). Of course, those stories centered around violent, loner characters on a futuristic mission. This dovetails with the FPS genre, but other types of stories – romance, comedy, drama – may find their 21st century voice in customizable machinima.

Video interview with Fallout 3 designers (Note: Very graphic violence depicted in some gameplay clips. If you cringed watching the introductory scene in "Saving Private Ryan," don't watch this):

Boston Globe relaunches forums, but they're doing it all wrong

Like everyone else in this town, I've been following self-inflicted death throes of the paper-based Boston Globe for the past week. But for much longer I've been following its cautious exploration of the online world. 2008 was a watershed year for the company -- that's when they finally enabled article comments, got rolling on some cool and innovative products, and apparently began to get serious about online sales, judging by the vendors that I now see advertising on boston.com.

But this morning's announcement that it had reworked its forums was a step in the wrong direction. If it looks vaguely familiar, that's because you probably saw similar forums used by other publishers back in the 1990s. You know the type -- a giant list of top-level categories, many of them not touched for weeks or months, which lead to a list of threads. Most publishers stopped using such forums years ago, but the Globe has kept the same model and updated it with a few basic tools (how could they not have search until now?).

After browsing the new forums, I felt motivated enough to write to the Globe, but am reprinting it here, in case Director of Community Publishing Teresa M. Hanafin and her team miss the message:

Globe, you're doing some things right online (the photo blog and the local news aggregator come to mind) but your approach to forums is all wrong. The 1999/central menu/everything-under-the-sun approach is doomed to fail -- there are way too many topic areas to browse, and most of them will be inactive for long stretches or will have only a few participants, which will be a cue for new users to decamp for other climes.

The way you should be doing it is a niche approach -- a community or two with just a single theme (Boston Sports Nuts or MassPols -- geddit?) and let those grow, perhaps with the gentle nudging of a blogger. There is certainly enough fodder to go on (you could reference articles or article comments that are particularly strong) and if the community shows signs of branching out into other areas, that's when you create the new topic area within the community or split it off.

Or, if you are particularly motivated, get some developer that can figure out Facebook Connect and try to create a new product that straddles FB and the Globe. People are spending more and more time on FB anyway, why not leverage that community in new and exciting ways? It will take care of the logon issue, and will also avoid the anonymous trolling problem you've had with article comments.

Good luck

Ian Lamont

Screenshot of the Globe forum's front page:

Three SABEW awards

It's been a very difficult week at work, but on Tuesday morning I got some news that really made my day: The Industry Standard received three awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

SABEW was founded in the 1960s and is headquartered at the University of Missouri's journalism school. Its members consist of thousands of business journalists, mostly from the U.S.. The annual "Best in Business" contest is judged by a SABEW committee, and highlights some of the outstanding business journalism each year. Traditionally, the awards have concentrated on print publications (daily newspapers and business magazines) but in recent years online publishers have made inroads, and there is now an "online excellence" component to the BiB contest.

For the 2008 contest, the Standard was recognized in three online categories for small websites: Where Are They Now? (Project) "10 'Net services that will succeed (and 10 that will probably fail)" (Creative Use of Online) and four of my own blog posts on The Standard (Blog):

• Microsoft's unrealized online dreams (February 3, 2008)
• What's missing from the Twitter funding announcement: Revenue (June 24, 2008)
• Why podcasting is failing, part II: Lessons from PodTech (July 18, 2008)
• Randy Pausch dies, and the world loses a true hero (July 25, 2008)

Here's what the judge said about my work:

“The Twitter post was spot-on. Then the follow-up on Twitter and podcasting advanced the issue further and was a longer piece, but still interesting. His voice could be stronger. Still, he is a fine writer who keeps his readers’ interest.

It's a nice comment, and the advice is welcome: I do need to improve my voice. That's something I'll try to work on in the coming months.

In addition, while we may be small, these awards demonstrate that the TIS staff and contributors can really do some special work. A lot of credit needs to go to the many folks who wrote and produced the two special features that won the Project and Creative Use of Online awards, including contributing writers Bill Snyder, Kristen Nicole, David Cotriss, and Mark Henricks, as well as the Standard's Eric Hill, Chris Tompkins, and Baldwin Louie. This was a great honor for all of us and you can see by looking at the complete list of Best in Business winners that we're in very good company.

More lego models ...

A few weeks back, I wrote about my son and I modeling objects using legos. Now the girl is getting into it, too. A few of our latest creations:

Lego people -- totally my daughter's idea:



My son made a stairway/table for his mini plastic racoon:



A ship, which I made using longer lego crossbeams and plastic planking:



A mutant dinosaur that I created (I didn't like it, but my son did):



I'm pretty encouraged by how well both kids are taking to coming up with ideas and modeling them in plastic. The girl is already an experienced Webkinz user; maybe it's time for her to start modeling using 3D graphics tools? What should I start her on -- Sketchup, or something else?

I'm on the BBC ... in Vietnamese!

Late last year, I was approached by the BBC World Service for an unusual project. The 30th anniversary of China's invasion of Vietnam was to take place at the beginning of 2009, and they wanted some commentary about the events -- for their Vietnamese-language service. A producer happened upon my grad school blog and emailed me after seeing that my thesis research covered bilateral relations between China and Vietnam in the late 1970s.

Last week, the translation of my essay was published on the BBC's website. You can read it on the BBC website, or see the screenshot:


Here's the preamble in English:

China’s state news agency provides a window into its Vietnam policies from 1979 to 1989

Many factors contributed to the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese conflict and the decade-long period of poor relations that followed. One way to analyze the relative importance of these factors from China’s point of view is to examine the media coverage from the English-language service of China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency. It is commonly believed that Beijing’s overriding goal was to outflank Moscow’s growing influence in Indochina. However, a computer content analysis of Xinhua articles during this period indicates that China was increasingly preoccupied with Vietnam’s regional ambitions, especially after 1980.

What makes China’s news agency such a useful window into the thoughts of Chinese leaders? It’s not just the access Xinhua employees had to senior officials. The news agency’s English-language service actually served as the official conduit of policy-related information from the central government to the outside world. During the 1970s and 1980s, Xinhua reported to the Chinese Communist Party Department of Propaganda, which gave it a direct connection to Beijing’s leading nucleus. The English-language articles never contradicted the official line, and are recognized as a reliable authority on how China viewed key foreign relationships – including the contentious relationship with Vietnam.

Beyond examining individual articles or pronouncements for clues into China’s attitudes toward Vietnam, it is also possible to analyze the articles in aggregate to discern broad trends. Computer software can measure the volume of coverage about specific topics as well as the positive and negative tone assigned to those topics. Clear patterns are apparent in the data, and they give very interesting insights into the thinking of China’s top leaders.

I am not going to post the entire English version of the essay here, but if you're interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend checking out my thesis here.

A giant step for ALM thesis research

The search engine is the new card catalog at universities. And if you're completing or considering one of the graduate programs at the Harvard Extension School, I have some good news: The ALM office now has an arrangement with UMI/ProQuest to electronically archive completed theses, and make them available via ProQuest's widely used online service.

This is a big deal for graduate students and recent alumni. ALM theses are guided by Harvard faculty and take years to complete, but until now the printed findings have seldom reached beyond a very small population of students and faculty who have access to Harvard's Grossman Library. Placing the theses in an online, searchable database bypasses the limitations of physical libraries, and makes information available to a much larger scholarly community. Now, any student, professor or associate whose university library system has a UMI/ProQuest subscription can find the Harvard Extension School theses by browsing topic areas or searching for certain keywords. HES students can also have their theses published on PQDT Open, a service which places theses and dissertations on an open Web server for anyone to download for free.

Of course, there are many other options for sharing scholarly work online, using hosted Web services or publishing on Scribd. However, such online services have a significant trust issue, as I noted on Harvard Extended several years back:

Nearly two years ago, I petitioned the Extension School to archive masters theses in the same electronic database used for doctoral dissertations at Harvard, ProQuest UMI. While this is a closed database that can only be accessed through university library systems, it is restricted to vetted, accepted research from university masters and doctoral programs. It is widely used in academic circles -- in fact, the literature review in my thesis referenced several dissertations that I had located in the ProQuest UMI database. I hope that someday my own thesis might also be useful to future scholars of modern Chinese history, Cold War history, and Chinese media studies, if Harvard decides to extend this resource to ALM theses from the Extension School.

Other academic units at Harvard already used the service for dissertations, and the ALM office saw the value in extending it to the Extension School as well. I really believe it greatly increases the likelihood that HES graduate research reaches a much wider scholarly audience and contributes to the understanding of the world around us.

My own thesis ("Making a case for quantitative research in the study of modern Chinese history: The New China News Agency and Chinese policy views of Vietnam, 1977--1993") was actually the guinea pig for the ProQuest arrangement. I've been nagging the school for some time about this, and the ALM office unexpectedly approached me last year to let me know about the electronic archiving option and also to ask if I was interested in trying out the ProQuest interface to upload my thesis. I experienced a couple of hiccups owing to a minor problem with the thesis PDF, but eventually I successfully uploaded my thesis and had it approved by the ALM office.

Note that there was a fee attached to UMI/ProQuest's service. In my case, I had to pay the most expensive rate -- around $150 -- because I chose the "open" publishing option, which places the abstract and thesis PDF on an open Web server, where anyone can download it (otherwise, it can only be seen by subscribers to the ProQuest service, such as university library systems). This extra charge for making information free and the long delay in publishing the thesis online (it took about four months) are my only complaints about the service.

If you're interested in reading my thesis abstract and downloading the PDF, it's available here. If you are an Extension School student or recent alumnus and want to find out more about the electronic archiving option, contact the ALM office.

Follow-up: My online education experience

Last September, I signed up for Michael Sandel's online "Justice" class through the Harvard Alumni Association. I was not as interested in the topic as much as I was interested in sampling Internet-based learning, which was the subject of a post on my graduate school blog last autumn ("Distance education at Harvard: I'm not convinced") and a response from a friend who is getting his undergraduate degree through the Harvard Extension School's distance education offerings (see ClueHQ, "Is Distance Education a Problem at Harvard?").

I should note right off the bat that Sandel's online class is not currently part of the Extension School's online offerings, although it was at one point in the past. I did not sit through all of the sessions, nor did I complete any of the assignments that the in-class students had to deal with. Nevertheless, after taking part in Justice, I am able to offer a basic evaluation of Web-based distance education based on prerecorded video and asynchronous communications tools, the same format used for most of the Extension School's online classes.

I found that many of the concerns that I raised last year about online education were validated. While the video of Sandel's prerecorded Harvard College lectures were wonderful to watch on a lazy Sunday morning, I felt very isolated by the experience of having to sit on my hands while he fielded questions from the in-person group and debated various philosophical and legal concepts with them. The class blog set up for alumni had some interesting discussions that popped up after the videos were aired, and Sandel had "online office hours" to discuss the class with participants (apparently following the format his class used when it was offered through the Extension School), but it just wasn't the same. The quick give-and-take and the ability to steer a classroom debate in a different direction with a spontaneous question or example was entirely absent, as was the experience of turning to the person sitting next to you to talk about the class. And while it was nice to be able to stop the video to take a break, or replay certain sections, I also found that it was very easy to be distracted by IM, the phone, and other browser sessions.

Harvard seems to be aware of the limitations of this type of distance learning, and indeed only the Extension School has embraced asynchronous online learning as a substitute for in-class instruction for credit at the university. It's worth noting that one of the few other entities on campus that actively experiments with online education -- the Berkman Center for Internet and Society -- has concentrated on real-time class sessions using Web technologies and virtual worlds like Second Life.

Of course, these technologies have their own drawbacks -- they may require extra staff and a steep learning curve to effectively employ. Nevertheless, they at least allow the spontaneous group discussions and other forms of conversational learning that I believe are still central to a modern university education.

Update: I heard from another HES student who took a Java programming class that was offered as a distance ed class in the ALM in IT program. He says that there was nearly "0%" interaction with the instructor and distance TA, zero feedback on assignments, and all of the assignments were from the previous semester. Of course, not all distance ed classes are like this, but this would never be tolerated in an actual classroom.

Disclosure: I am a board member of the nonprofit Immersive Education initiative, which seeks to develop best practices and standards for education in virtual worlds.