Search Results for software

Open, New, Experimental, Aspirational

The rhetoric of "The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age"

The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age is a new document authored and signed by twelve scholars, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Duke professor and author Cathy Davidson, organizational technologist John Seely Brown, and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. It’s been making the rounds among those of us interested in such topics, also receiving coverage at The… read more

The Microethics of Informal University-Corporate Partnerships

What are universities giving away when we host hackathons, game jams, and the like?

Everyone knows that creativity and productivity are increasingly given away for free these days, particularly when it comes to technology products and services. For example: we contribute to the business of companies like Google and Facebook by giving them our data to resell, and we contribute to the business of companies like Apple by providing speculative, often free apps to… read more

A Machine That Makes Cameras: The Aesthetics of the Lytro

An image taken with a Lytro camera is not really an image, but a machine capable of producing many possible renditions.

The Lytro Light Field Camera Let's think about photography as people live it. A posed family picture might be taken once, then again, and again until the right combination of open eyes, smiles, and light and shadow produce an acceptable portrait. An action, performance, or sports shot that could speed by too fast for human judgement partakes of a surrogate: the… read more

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1)); : GOTO 10

A whole book about a single line of code. By ten authors.

This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.The authors of this collaboratively written book… read more

The Broken Beyond: How Space Turned Into an Office Park

All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich.

All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich. The Shuttle, its escort, and traffic (Reuters). I am a Space Shuttle child. I ogled big exploded view posters of the spaceship in classrooms. I built models of it out of plastic and… read more

The Great Pretender

Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation

It’s hard to overestimate Alan Turing’s contributions to contemporary civilization. To mathematics, he contributed one of two nearly simultaneous proofs about the limits of first-order logic. In cryptography he devised an electromechanical device that decoded German Enigma machine’s signals during World War II, an accomplishment that should also be counted as a contribution to twentieth century warfare and politics. In… read more

Academia.edu Finders Fees

Is this ethical?

Yesterday I received the following email from Academia.edu, a social network for academics to share research papers. Hi Ian, We noticed that you are following the Computer Science research interest on Academia.edu. We wanted to mention that we are hiring software engineers at Academia.edu, and if you know any current or former students who might be interested, we offer a… read more

Process Intensity and Social Experimentation

On the surprising design features of Johan Sebastian Joust. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

In 1987, game designer Chris Crawford introduced the concept of process intensity, “the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data.” Process, Crawford explains, involves “algorithms, equations, and branches,” while data refers to “tables, images, sounds, and texts.” A process-intensive program “spends a lot of time crunching numbers; a data-intensive program spends a lot of time moving bytes… read more

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10

A new book in software studies

My next book is even stranger than my last. It’s an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book’s title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. And if that isn’t strange enough, I wrote the book with nine other collaborators (Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C.… read more

Plenoptic Photography

First image out of my Lytro

I just received my Lytro lightfield camera. It’s the first commercialized plenoptic camera, which is an optical device with an array of lenses to capture a scene at multiple focal points. There’s a lot of terrible rhetoric in the tech and electronics communities about this camera, claiming that it will allow you to take a photograph and “worry about focusing… read more