Computers, Society, and Nature

A lesson in evolution and a great beer. Watch and learn.

The Associated Press is reporting that Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has opened up the first detox center for video game addicts. Video games are said to be potentially as addictive as gambling and drugs. This essentially renders excessive gaming a disease, linked to endorphin production and withdrawl symptoms.

The article, of course, ignores the private clinics that have been operating in the US (don’t know about Canada) for some time where parents of means can send their kids to kick the horse (or is it the hedgehog?).

I should be more sympathetic since people can turn any number of activities (e.g., food, television, even exercise) into addictions. But it’s hard to take this seriously when the article throws in the “gateway drug” scenario:

It can start with a Game Boy, perhaps given by parents hoping to keep their children occupied but away from the television. From there it can progress to multilevel games that aren’t made to be won.

So, that initial pecking on the keyboard leads to obsessive playing of Worlds of Warcraft? The rest of the article is fairly reflective on the reasons for addictive behaviour. The perpetual temptation, however, is to embellish this into something frightening because it’s relatively new and therefore unknown. This leads to sensational media coverage (Danger, danger, Will Robinson, your child could be addicted to that PSP!) and the periodic re-surfacing of the meme of innovation as a horrific social/political condition. Here’s the latest edition in which the mainstream media and political structure create a discourse of hysteria instead of reflecting on root causes.

But back to gaming. Here’s a Wired article from 5 years ago on exactly the same subject.

I came across the name of an old (relatively speaking I suppose) friend on the internet recently. As is standard procedure for me these days, I proceeded to put their name into Google, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that they had not only numerous hits in various communities, but a small personal webpage that they controlled.

People whose personal web pages come up while searching for their real name are typically what I would deem first class citizens of the internet: there are links to their contributions in online discussions or work, and you can both contact them easily, and with some work and a decent amount of background knowledge, get a good idea of their presence on the internet. For certain groups of people, the academic and tech communities come to mind, having insignificant-to-no results on a Google search immediately generates skepticism: where are the journal articles, the mailing list postings, the bug reports? You do not see such people being able to take part effectively in the discussions on most respected forums or blogs, RealClimate being one example.
If Google can’t find anything they’ve done, the question begs itself, have they done anything? While clearly the answer is generally yes, and the fault lies in the information not being available on the internet for search engines to find, there are generally few reasons for someone to allow themselves to be completely invisible on the internet. If you do not project a presence on the internet in a mildly significant and traceable way, it is difficult to contribute meaningfully to online projects: with no ‘credentials’, it’s tough to be taken seriously.

For a few years now, there have been options for those who didn’t have the technical wherewithal or time to bother setting up their own webspace, Geocities and Angelfire come to mind. Even with these tools, it wasn’t necessarily a fun or trivial task to put up a mildly decent website, and accordingly, only a small percentage did. With the bubble inflating once more, myspace and facebook (now the 4th and 28th most popular English language websites in the world respectively) would seem to vault millions of users into this first class citizenship. Now minor internet celebrities have links to their facebook or myspace profiles, and I have even seen such links proferred as evidence in defending online personas from accusations of ‘sockpuppetry’. Presumably the mild amount of time invested in the profiles of social networks websites provides a reasonable way to ensure that a unique legitimate person is behind each account.

It will be interesting to see where online communities go, greater dependance on the verifiability of participants, something that governments and those with an interest in monitoring activity on the internet would love, or a turn back towards near anonymity and its associated benefits and pitfalls.

See the beta version of my new content management system, which contains information about my and my team’s research.

Sorry for the site being down. I’m having my servers reconfigured. The site is likely to go down again as the database servers and the virtual machines get set up.

Now onto posting while we can!

If you’ve ever wanted to know how vulcanology works, visit the virtual Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO). Here you can see a history of the seismology, look at the web cams (even inside the volcano), and receive weekly reports on volcano conditions. You also can get information on how to collect an ash sample for AVO. This is a great use of the web for lay scientists and anyone who wants a user friendly introduction to the workings of a volcano.

Scientists are devising technology to remote control sharks on the high seas (seen in New Scientist). The plan is to use sonar to manipulate the shark’s brain signals, controlling its movements and possibly decoding its feelings. This technology is cited as being useful for understanding shark behaviours as well as having potential use for treating paralysis in humans. However, it is also mentioned that the research is being funded by the us military, who have designs for using the sharks as undetectable spies across the oceans…which seems to me to be severely ethically problematic. The pentagon’s ideas for sharks as “stealth spies” are a little more emphasised in the BBC article covering the topic (interestingly, the BBC also just posted an article discussing the problem of the media’s sensationalising of scientific stories…)

An underappreciated life form, microbes have recently been being exploited by scientists to create ethanol as an alternative fuel source. Using microbes rather than corn or other plant products could solve the concern that vegetation is being diverted from tables into gas tanks. Scientists are also mining termite guts for microbes that could help turn woodchips into ethanol, which seems somewhat less sustainable.

As an aside – ever wonder how accurately you are interpreting the emails you read? A study shows that most people actually have a 50-50 chance that they will interpret the tone of an email (ie sarcasm) correctly, a problem that apparently leads to major problems in the workplace.

Ever wonder how people did research before the internet? I hate to date myself, but really…the internet provides seemingly endless information to anyone peeking in the door…or taking the lid off the box, so to speak. While the Internet has become essential for many day to day activities, when one goes to exploit it for its intended scientific transparency and information sharing purposes, the mind is blown…google scholar, put simply, provides me with knowledge I would not otherwise have. As I contemplated this, a link to a very well written article (read it!) arrived in my inbox (of my new gmail account, incidentally), which gives one some pause. Google has admitted that their goal is to collect all global knowledge and store it in an organised and useful manner (or something along those lines). The nerd in me thinks that is incredibly cool, but not without some (significant) trepidation, and leads to the question, is it possible to “not be evil” …?