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June 11, 2009

Researchers at SETI Hope to Make a Good First Impression, With Your Help

When the SETI Institute announced a new phase of its search for intelligent life in space, its researchers were faced with a question they’ve never had to answer: What would they say if they actually made contact with an extraterrestrial civilization?

The institute’s search of 10 billion frequencies with radio telescopes at the Allen Telescope Array, located about 300 miles north of San Francisco, is much more powerful than previous searches, said Douglas A. Vakoch, director of interstellar-message composition at the SETI Institute and a professor of clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

SETI researchers at the institute now have the ability to search millions of stars, Mr. Vakoch said. Since that increases the probability of scientists finding another civilization, the stakes are higher for figuring out how to communicate.

Now, the institute, whose acronym stands for “search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” has started the Web tool Earth Speaks, which allows people from around the world to submit messages, pictures, and sounds they would want to send to other worlds. It’s also linked to a Twitter account, @SETIEarthSpeaks.

“We’re exploring a new territory in engaging the public because we want to know whatever people think is most important to communicate,” Mr. Vakoch said. “ We’re trying to grapple in a serious way with how should we go about conducting a conversation that would last generations.”

Scientists related to SETI have been searching space for signs of life for about 50 years. The SETI@home online project, which began in 1999 through the University of California at Berkeley, allowed people across the country to install a screensaver that used the Internet to scan radio frequencies and send data back to SETI researchers.

Since the Earth Speaks site opened to the public on May 15, more than 300 messages have been submitted from 33 countries, reflecting a broad array of topics and emotions. Recent suggestions from users include “It’s about time!,” “No Vacancy,” and “Hello! Please come pick me up, I’m a librarian, artist, and I prepare great Earth dishes.”

The site is also a study, tracking the age, gender, and nationality of those who submit messages, and identifying the major themes of those messages through a tagging system, which allows users to place their messages into categories. At a later stage of the project, users will be surveyed about their attitudes toward extraterrestrial life and interstellar communication.

Traditional scientists as well as social scientists, like anthropologists, linguists, sociologists, and psychologists, will analyze the messages. In the future, Mr. Vakoch said, users of the site will also be able to help analyze the data by adding category tags to messages they find interesting.

Mr. Vakoch said the Earth Speaks project would continue to broaden the discussion about extraterrestrial life.

“We want to represent a full range of ideologies and views,” Mr. Vakoch said. “The question about what we should do is too important to be decided by a handful of scientists.” —Erica R. Hendry

Posted on Thursday June 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [3]

June 10, 2009

'The Computer Ate My Homework': How to Detect Fake Techno-Excuses

Forget about making up stories about sick relatives. There’s a new way to get around homework deadlines by sending professors corrupted documents, buying a student extra time because the professor will likely blame computer errors and take hours or days to ask for a new version. There are, however, ways to identify the frauds.

Corrupted-Files.com, a Web site developed in December as a joke, its owner says, offers unreadable Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files that appear, at first glance, to be legitimate. Students can submit them via e-mail to professors in place of real papers to get a deadline extension without late penalties. For $3.95, the site promises a “completed” assignment file will be sent to the buyer within 12 hours, to be renamed and submitted by the new owner. By the time a professor gives up on the bogus file, in theory, a student will have been able to complete the actual assignment.

“I made CF in 3 hours while watching old episodes of Seinfeld, so if any inspiration, it was George Costanza, the sad king of excuses,” the site’s owner, who didn’t want his name used, said in an e-mail message. “The site was really all just one big goof.”

He added that he didn’t believe his Web site promoted cheating, since its users are not plagiarizing others or using an essay mill, but just buying some extra time.

The corrupted-file idea could work, said T. Mills Kelly, an associate dean at George Mason University, because faculty members are often busy with work and grading, and used to getting an occasional corrupted file. But Mr. Kelly says it would not work with him.

“Every time a student e-mails me a paper, I open the file to make sure that it will open so I know that the paper is turned in, and if it doesn’t work, I write them on the spot: ‘You have to send me a new copy,’” he said. “If they don’t send it right away, my brain starts ticking over.”

Mr. Kelly said that by checking a document’s properties, anyone can see what computer the file was created on and on what date, as well as how many times the file has been edited.

“What are the odds that you wrote a 10-page paper 10 minutes before you e-mailed it to me, without an edit?” he asked, adding that circumventing the system by intentionally using a corrupted file was cheating. “I always recommend failure for the course.”

It seems a corrupted file purchased by The Chronicle — which had a glitch and arrived several hours late — would pass some of Mr. Kelly’s tests, but not all of them: The file’s original author was hidden, but the creation and edit dates and times were marked for the time the document was downloaded from the Web site.

After the owner of the Web site was contacted by reporters, it changed slightly. Now the comments section reads: “If you need an extension, just be honest and ask your professor before you use a corrupted file.” —Marc Beja

Posted on Wednesday June 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [24]

June 4, 2009

18th-Century Literature Gets a Makeover on the Web

Eighteenth-century literature was limited to one medium – but modern research of the period no longer has to be.

Digital Defoe, an online, interactive, peer-reviewed journal, launched earlier this week to share scholarly research from the period, which until now has been largely confined to print journals and newsletters.

The site was created by the Defoe Society, an international group that studies the work of Daniel Defoe, an 18th-century English writer most famous for his story of Robinson Crusoe, a man shipwrecked on an island. Defoe is considered by some to be the founder of the English novel.

The first issue of the journal, published Monday, is titled “Defoe 2.0,” to reflect “the ways in which digital journals and even Defoe’s own work inhabits an uncanny liminal space between material and virtual realms,” Katherine Ellison and Holly Faith Nelson, the journal’s co-editors, wrote in the introduction.

Both Mrs. Ellison, an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University, and Ms. Nelson, an associate professor of English at Trinity Western University, saw a need to create a central resource to share research about Defoe and his 18th-century contemporaries. And since Defoe himself helped popularize new several print forms, like the novel and the pamphlet, Mrs. Ellison said it made sense for the society itself to explore video and audio on the Internet.

“Some 18th-century scholars are doing the most interesting online work, but nothing is really bringing everything together,” Mrs. Ellison said. “I wanted to be able to bring together more voices, to be able to showcase some really great student works with what some of the experts in the field are doing.”

The first issue includes several pieces of research and commentary, as well as a foray into multimedia: a piece by Christopher Flynn, an associate professor at St. Edwards University, titled “Defoe’s Review: Textual Editing and New Media,” which he presented through a narrated timeline that includes video and pictures.

Mrs. Ellison said she and other professors across the country could use the site to interest more students in 18th-century literature. Though some people in her field have resisted using online publications or multimedia, she said, she thinks it can move research, and interest, forward.

“I’ve heard scholars at conferences who say we’re not ready for that yet, print is still the way to go,” Mrs. Ellison said. But “some research can be better shared through video, or audio, or with pictures. I want to show people this is a multifaceted field.” —Erica R. Hendry

Posted on Thursday June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [2]

May 20, 2009

Google Chief Tells Graduates to Turn Off Computers

In his commencement address at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and chief executive, had words of wisdom for graduates: Use live search.

Not Microsoft Live Search, of course. Mr. Schmidt meant a different competitor—the real world.

“Turn off your computer,” he told the Class of 2009. “You’re actually going to have to turn off your phone and discover all that is human around us. Nothing beats holding the hand of your grandchild as he walks his first steps.”

The complete speech is available on YouTube. But Mr. Schmidt, whose company owns the video site, would probably recommend that you don’t waste a lot of time watching it. —Josh Fischman

Posted on Wednesday May 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [29]

April 29, 2009

Anti-Obama Rant Misattributed to Naval War College Professor

In the era of anonymous Internet publishing, it can be difficult to determine who said what — and who didn’t. Just ask David Kaiser, a history professor at the Naval War College, who has struggled to dispel rumors that he authored a tempestuous anti-Obama rant (including, in the tradition of all political rants, a Hitler comparison) that went viral last week.

Mr. Kaiser clarified the attribution error on his blog this week, but has had little luck finding out who is responsible for propagating the rumor that he wrote the diatribe. He said another David Kaiser in academe — a scientist for an unnamed “well-known university” — has also received mail about the rant. “I have queried at least half a dozen of his and my ‘fans’ asking them who sent the article to them, in an effort to start tracing the fraud back to its source,” he wrote Monday, “but that seems to be a fruitless endeavor — only a couple have replied, and in both cases the trail immediately went cold.”

Mr. Kaiser wrote that he has been more amused than anything over the matter. “I suppose it’s another indication of the world that we are living in that, after a remarkably steady readership of about 800 readers a week for the last few years, the hits could have increased by about 40 percent thanks to my association with right-wing paranoia. … Crisis eras bring crazies out of the woodwork.” –Steve Kolowich

Posted on Wednesday April 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [11]

April 2, 2009

Vanderbilt U. Advises TV-Character Applicant on Twitter

This week’s sign that the Twitter revolution is upon us: campus officials’ tweeting financial-aid advice to television characters.

Lyla Garrity, a cheerleader turned Christian youth leader on Friday Night Lights, a series about small-town life in Texas, dreams of Vanderbilt University. But — conflict! — her father loses her college savings in a bad business deal. As it stands, Lyla may have to follow her boyfriend, Tim, to the fictional San Antonio State University (he tells her she’s too good for that).

Melanie Moran, associate director of Vanderbilt’s news service, recently discovered that “LylaGarrity” is following the university’s Twitter feed. Also, the character’s own feed, created as a marketing ploy for the show, mentions her dream college.

“Vanderbilt is a wonderful school and I still have faith I’ll be able to go there someday,” Lyla wrote on March 23. A week later, she was less optimistic: “Vanderbilt’s always been a dream but I’m not sure if it’s realistic anymore. At least at SASU I’ll have Tim…”

But wait, Ms. Moran thought, what about Vanderbilt’s new expanded-aid program, which replaces need-based loans with scholarships and grants to meet demonstrated need? She’s not in the habit of advising fictional applicants, but, she figured, why not?

“Be sure to see Vanderbilt’s new Expanded Financial Aid program – more help, no need-based loans: http://tinyurl.com/crajl5,” she wrote to Lyla on Vanderbilt’s Twitter feed. “Thank you!” Lyla tweeted back. “The Financial Aid program looks exactly like what I need right now.”

Will the show’s writers now give Lyla a good financial-aid package from Vanderbilt? That wasn’t Ms. Moran’s goal. “It was and it is an experiment,” she says. “It was, ‘Why not get the word out?’”

Still, Ms. Moran is eager to see what happens to Lyla: “I probably will be tuning in a little bit more.” —Sara Lipka

Posted on Thursday April 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comment

March 31, 2009

'BrainWave Chick' Digitally Performs Mind Music

Paras Kaul wants you to listen to her brainwaves.

Ms. Kaul, director of Web communications at George Mason University, is better known as the “BrainWave Chick.” With electrodes and digital technology, she has devised increasingly sophisticated ways to perform the music of her mind. (It’s got an eerie, ethereal sound, something like Brian Eno’s ambient compositions.)

To project her brainwaves, Ms. Kaul wears a headband that presses three electrodes against her brain’s frontal lobe. A Bluetooth adapter transmits data to a laptop, where software converts brainwaves to a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and synthesizers play it.

“All I have to do is be on stage and meditate,” Ms. Kaul says. She doesn’t like that word — meditate — but says that low-frequency brainwaves, those we produce when we quiet our minds, make the nicest music.

Audience members, she hopes, will recognize that. “I refer to it as a neurological learning process,” she says in her calm, soothing voice. “If we could exist less in an agitated brainwave state or a heightened anxiety state … we can have more clarity in our thought and make better decisions.”

Ms. Kaul has presented her cerebral melodies at the International Joint Conferences on Computer, Information, and Systems Science and Engineering, as the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Using actors’ brainwaves, she just produced a musical score for an independent film, Caller ID, due out this spring. —Sara Lipka

Posted on Tuesday March 31, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [5]

March 26, 2009

Some Students Swear Off Facebook for Lent

Students nonplussed by the absence of certain friends from their Facebook news feeds in the last month may have the church calendar to blame. During the season of Lent—a 40-day Christian holiday during which celebrants traditionally abstain from selected indulgences as a gesture of piety—some students at Texas Tech and elsewhere have reportedly sworn off social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The Lenten season began in late February and ends on Easter, which is April 12. The pope has lauded such Web sites in the past for helping to strengthen friendship and understanding, but many students acknowledge that they offer hazardously convenient ways to waste time. –Steve Kolowich

Posted on Thursday March 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [10]

March 18, 2009

Dartmouth Professor Creates Recession-Inspired Video Game

Some academics may deride video games as mindless escapism, but Mary Flanagan and her collaborators are trying to push the medium into service as a tool to educate gamers on pressing social issues.

Ms. Flanagan—who is a digital humanities professor at Dartmouth College—and her colleagues with the Values at Play research project design video games that seek to engage players with the real world, rather than distract them from it. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Microsoft, the project aspires to “harness the power of video games in the service of humanistic principles, or human values, knowing that their work can have a tremendous and wide-ranging impact on our world,” according to its Web site.

Ms. Flanagan’s latest creation, called Layoff, is a puzzle-style game (similar to Solitaire or MineSweeper) aimed at exposing the outrages of the financial crisis and subsequent bailout. The gamer is presented with an 11-by-8-inch grid populated by tiny workers—some wearing hard hats, some wearing glasses, some reading books, and some holding spare tires. The objective is to shuffle these characters into groups of three of a kind, at which point they can be banished to mill aimlessly about the unemployment line (a pen that resembles a prison yard below the grid).

Players who want to learn more about the workers they’re firing can hover their cursors over a character and get a brief character sketch. In addition to names, ages, and job titles, those descriptions include humanizing facts about the workers—their dreams, their fears, their custody arrangements, and more. Of course, this pathos is merely incidental; players are to fire as many workers as possible.

Ms. Flanagan told The Chronicle that one of her objectives with the game is to remind people of the human cost of the financial crisis—something that tends to be obscured by the scope of the figures released each month by the U.S. Department of Labor. She also said the game provides non-executives the chance to sample the burden of the bosses doing the layoffs.

The fired workers are replaced by new ones, including suit-wearing bankers and financiers, who cannot be laid off. (When a player hovers over those characters, they spout self-justifying platitudes or blithe appraisals of their company’s outlook.) As those well-heeled Masters of the Universe take over more and more spots on the grid, the gamer’s task becomes more challenging. All the while, unflattering facts about how certain companies have behaved after receiving emergency subsidies scroll in a large font on a ticker beneath the game board.

Although she admits that her game vilifies bankers and financiers, Ms. Flanagan insisted that her only agenda was to raise consciousness and encourage people to “take a stand.” It’s up to them to decide what that stand entails, she said.

Ms. Flanagan is just one of the professors who are building video games about social issues. –Steve Kolowich

Posted on Wednesday March 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [8]

March 11, 2009

Universities Join a Contest to Power Down Computers

A handful of universities are gearing up for a contest to reduce power use among computer users on campus, and there is still time to join the contest if you are interested in participating. The contest, called Power Down for the Planet, is sponsored by the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a nonprofit group devoted to reducing energy use in computing.

Pat Tiernan, executive director of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, says that information-technology devices consume up to 3 percent of the power generated in the United States. Personal computers make up some 40 percent of the total power draw from technology. There are a billion personal computers on the market today, and that number may grow to 2.5 billion within six years. “The need to focus on the problem now is immense,” Mr. Tiernan says.

Through the contest, universities will try to get students, faculty members, and staff members to pledge to use power-management tools on their computers — the winning university will be the one that gets the highest percentage of the campus to take the pledge. There is also a video contest, in which students can illustrate the problem of energy use in computing. There is a $10,000 prize at stake, along with various other prizes, like laptops and bicycles. But Mr. Tiernan says the real reward would come through the efficiencies, which can add up to millions on big campuses that have tens of thousands of computers running.

The deadline to enter the contest is March 13, but Mr. Tiernan suggested he would take some stragglers. The pledge drive will begin on March 23. Winners will be announced on Earth Day. Institutions that have already signed up for the contest include California State University at Chico, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, and the University of Maine at Farmington. —Scott Carlson

Posted on Wednesday March 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [5]

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