Comments on: Virtual Peace

I think it is an interesting idea to use simulation technology to teach cooperation to resolve conflicts. However, I am skeptical of how useful Virtual Peace is/will be. For one, while Virtual Peace does have a fair degree of immersion due to voice chat, emotion animations, and real-time MMO style collaboration, as I said before in an earlier post, the game-like graphics to detract from Virtual Peace's goal. I think this tool does a great job simulating the difficulties in resolving large scale conflicts among multiple parties, all with different motives, but it may fall short in the teaching aspect becuase at the end of the simulation, many users may just remember it as "a game" due to the video game graphics and style of play. Another reason I have for being skeptical of this technology is becuase its creators, Virtual Heroes, are very hypocritical. They are, of course, brilliant for developing this technology, but another one of their simulation games they created, "America's Army," serves to do the exact opposite of creating peace. I think this fact will give users of Virtual Peace a harder time taking what they get out of the simulation seriously, knowing the simulation's creators also made a war game. I do think the idea is a good one, but we need to develop technology, and our motives, more before simulations like this can be fully appreciated.

Comments on: Google Earth

Google Earth helps fulfill the version of the Metaverse becuase it provides a 2-D view of the entire globe, and presents various types of other information on many, many places. Some other types of information are 3-D views of buildings and terrain, labels of countries, regions, cities, buildings, businesses, and terrain formations, and wikipedia-esce information on many, many points of interest. Not only does it provide this information, but it lets you search the globe, moving forward or backward, left or right, zooming in or out, or panning your view up or down, left and right. It even has a search tool that lets you search for businesses, points of interest, and specific addresses. You can even get directions using Google Earth.

By combining this with Second Life, we could create a virtue universe (metaverse) the directly reflects the real one. In other words, people who own a building in real life would own the building in Second Life. For example, every store in the real world could have a second life account that owns their store in Second Life. In the Second Life store, they could advertise for the goods and services they sell in real life. While this is a cool idea, I don't think it will play out. As I said in my last post, 3D navigation of information is harder and slower than 2D navigation (the current internet). For example, it may be cool to fly through Google Earth to the pyramids and read information on them, you could get more information faster using the Internet. Also, becuase of its game-like graphics, I don't really take any current businesses on Second Life, that either sell virtual goods or advertise for a real life company, seriuosly becuase their structures and avatars look like they are from video games for kids, not professional.

Comments on: Second Life/Metaverse Readings and Lecture

I thought the readings, and especially the guest lecture, about second life and the metaverse were very interesting. I really like the speaker's overview of how GUIs have evolved over the last 40 years, and his introduction on how they will evolve in the future. The Cobalt/Croquet 3-D Internet project he showed us a video of was really cool, although I don't know how important/applicable it really is. While a peer-to-peer version of the Internet would be more efficient and would stay connected and updated better, I just don't see the need for a 3-D interface when a 2-D one can do all the same things. The 3D interface where more than one person occupy a "world" at the same time adds a lot of needless information, clutter, and removes anonymity. Also, it is much harder to navigate to the information you want in 3-D than in 2-D -- there's a whole 'nother dimension to navigate. This is plainly visible in Second Life, which has tons of needless information and clutter (much of it adult oriented). And as for the argument that 3-D Internet would be good for group collaboration becuase you can discuss in a 3-D environment when "everyone" (everyone's avatars) are present, I just don't see why 3-D makes this any better. You can already have these collaborative efforts or virtual classrooms over chat rooms in the current 2-D Internet. You can even make them more face to face than with avatars by using webcams.

As for companies that "have investigated the potential and started to develop virtual landscapes that promote their compan[ies]," I have visited some of these landscapes in Second Life, and don't feel very inclined to buy their products. I feel that people who were interested in buying these products would either go to the real-life location, or view its easily-navigated, 2-D website if they wanted more information on them. This may just be me, but it seems like virtual worlds, especially Second Life, are predominately inhabited by people who aren't sociable in real life and just want the anonymity so they can feel more sociable, or they want to engage in the gigantic adult industry market on Second Life, which to me seems to be the equivalent of a giant, anonymous, nerd orgy. These people arn't interested in learning about your products, they just want virtual friendship and/or virtual sex. If you think I'm wrong in assuming Second Life is dominated by sex, read this article. Quote: "Of the 19 popular destination icons on my map, 9 of them were virtual pornography accounting for more 51% of the total population listed for popular locations in Second Life."

Second Life: Initial Exploration

After making an account and entering the metaverse, the first place I went was the ISIS 100 Oasis. The Oasis is filled with weird and interesting objects, such as 6 big flamingos and one giant flamingo. There is also a "Welcome To China" sign. Some of the areas that I want to explore, like a basketball court with a giant pumpkin in the middle, I can't access, however. They say "No entry" around them. Upon getting to the oasis, I met the avatar of Nitin Gupta (DukeNG Bouscario), I friended him, and we explored the oasis. We learned to use the gesture commands and messed around with them.

After that, I went to "The U'Bar," a "bar" where people relax, dance and listen to music. They had live radio playing. Many people were there dancing, and the dance floor was covered with bright laser lights and advertisements for guiness. Someone offered to "animate" me. I agreed and this made my avatar dance. I could not figure out how to stop dancing, but when I teleported I lost the urge to boogie. The SLURL for The U'Bar is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lusiana/117/197/3001

I also went to "Fiat Latino America," the official Second Life island of the Fiat car company. The island has many cool rooms, a virtual attendant, and a showcase room for all the cars it sells in real life. In the showcase room, each car model has a 3D representation of it that looks very similar, as well as a description of the car. This is a large island meant to advertise for the Fiat car-manufacturing company. Fiat Latino America's SLURL is http://slurl.com/secondlife/FIAT%20LATINO%20AMERICA/128/128/27

Lastly, I visited PlantPets. The plant pets project is a project within Second Life to create interactive, growing plants. PlantPets grow and express happiness the more you take care of them. The place was a store that sold these plants, but I won a prize and received a free one. I don't know where/have a place to plant it though! The SLURL for the PlantPets store is http://slurl.com/secondlife/Plush%20Kappa/84/228/22

My Wikipedia Entry

I edited the article on Greek and Social Life on the Duke University page on Wikipedia. I added the section in the first paragraph on Selective Living Groups.

Here's the link.

Comments on Paolo Mangiofico's Presentation

I enjoyed Mangiofico's presentation today on the social life of information. His lecture shared many parallels with Shirky's article, "Ontology is Overrated." Both talked about direct contribution from users to share and gain information over the web, and how user generated information is better than categorization by the owners of the website. For example, Mangiofico mentioned that many university catalogs pay LibraryThing money to have their records linked to LibraryThing's records. This allows the university catalogs to have better dynamic social data about their books. One example of this is that while on the university catalog books typically only have a few subjects, LibraryThing's users provide much more informative tags on the many topics of each book. Linking to LibraryThing's content allows the university catalog to take advantage of this information.

I particularly enjoyed that Mangiofico showed us some of the technologies he was speaking about, Delicious, CiteULike, WorldCat, and LibraryThing. These websites are all based on user added content to enact their purpose. However, each sight has its own purpose. Delicious is used to share/bookmark/tag websites the user finds interesting. CiteULike is like Delicious, but for research papers rather than websites. WorldCat is an online category of libraries' information, and LibraryThing is the Delicious of books. One nifty thing Mangiofico showed us about WorldCat was that WorldCat's search sorted by "relevance" rates books depending on which books, journals, etc. are owned by the most libraries, and therefore are the most valued. He compared this with Duke Library's own catalog search system, which returned far less relevant results.

Comments on: Ontology is Overrated by Clay Shirky

I found Shirky's article on classification and categorization very interesting. In particular, however, I enjoyed reading about non-classification, as well as user-classification and tag relation. It makes sense that uses would rather use Google's search engine than Yahoo's structured framework for browsing. Many obsucre things, like, as Shirky points out, "obstreperous Minnesota," would be hard to find and classify in a rigid categorized system, but would be easy to find on a search engine that works on keywords and what websites other people interested in "obstreperous Minnesota" visited. Also, people like to be free to create their own categorizations, they don't want to be constrained to how Yahoo categorizes reality.

This leads into the second part of the article that really interests me, user tags to classify information. Instead of Yahoo's system of building the categorization system and then adding websites where they fit, tagging is dynamic. When a user tags a website they visited with certain keywords specific to that exact webpage, those keywords can be any (and any amount of) word(s) in the dictionary. This breaks free of the rigid classification system and allows for an ever changing dynamic system where pages are linked by these tags. Another part of this I found interesting is how sites like del.ico.us link keywords that may be synonyms based if many users gave websites the same tags. As Shirky puts it, "A lot of users tagging things foobar are also tagging them frobnitz. I'll tell the user foobar and frobnitz are related." In doing so, these sites are categorizing based off their users', rather than their own, views of reality.

Comments on: Video Games as Community Building Tool by Omar Gallaga (NPR)

This story is about how video games are becoming less "hardcore"and more of a social activity. The article cites Nintendo, whose casual games have created a "living room Renaissance of social gaming" by lowering the learning curve and creating games that require less time of the players to get in to, and less effort to enjoy. This makes the games more accessible, easier to pick up and play when you have less time, or more friends, on your hands. For example, instead of beating bosses or solving complex puzzles, you simply have to swing your arms to hit a baseball (or pitch a baseball to your friend) in Wii Sports. These games focus more on beating your opponents at simple tasks rather than at using complex button sequences, making them more fun to play as a group.

The article also cites social interaction through games online. If you don't have any friends around one day, you can always sign into these games online (more so on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 than Nintendo's Wii), where you can compete against other human players anywhere in the world. You can even communicate over headsets to talk in real time to your opponents and team mates.

Reading similar articles provides even more information on the topic. Article 1 looks at how the industry is currently shifting from creating games that appeal to a "small cadre of tech-savvy youngsters" to the broad public, similar to the style of the Nintendo Wii. Through creating games for families, adults, and women rather than only for young males, almost all people can find something they like, creating a much larger social network for gaming in general. As more of these social games are created, there will be more temptation to play these games in groups rather than solo.

Article 2 discusses how Massively Multiplayer Online games promote "sociability" and the adaptation to "new world views." By creating a social bridge between different peoples around the world, each individual is exposed to a diversity of world views. With an MMO network 9 million people strong, and the average user spending 20 hours a week playing an MMO, players are able to meet, interact, and learn the views of countless other players. And, unlike the real world, geographic locations in MMOs don't de facto contain individuals of mostly the same views. D.C. is overwhelmingly democratic, Texas is overwhelming republican, but "Freeport" in Everquest contains people with diverse views becuase it can be accessed from any real world geographical location over the net.

Click here to listen to the original story.

Similar articles:
Article 1) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/arts/television/28game.html
Article 2) http://news.illinois.edu/NEWS/06/0816videogames.html

Comments on: The Polarization of Extremes by Cass R. Sunstein

I found this article to be much more objective and informative than the Facebook article. The author does a great job of showing how the Web pushes people to become more extreme in their views. The author states that people tend to read articles or join communities on the Web that reinforce their current liberal/conservative views on certain issues. However, this polarization is not unique to the Internet. The Web only acts as a catalyst for this type of interaction. For example, off the computer, people tend to choose friends who have similar views to them (like they choose to read websites with similar views to them). By doing so, people surround themselves with friends who have the same views, some with even more extreme views. Just as the net leads to polarization to extremes, so do these groups of friends. The more they talk about their shared views, the more they believe their views are correct. This polarization is the same as the Web's, but the Web allows people to find these "friends," which in this case are websites and online communities, quicker and easier.

Comments on: How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook by Cory Doctorow

While I found this article interesting, I disagree with a few points. Facebook is a valuable tool that allows friends physically separated to easily communicate. The article characterizes Facebook as "pimping" us, but much evidence is to the contrary. Facebook doesn't force the user to display information, upload pictures, join groups, or be friends with anyone. It doesn't even force you to show your profile to people in your specified network. If Facebook is a 'pimp,' its the most lienient pimp I've ever seen. The only policing Facebook does is limit the uploading of copyright information and making users remove inappropriate pictures.

The articles information isn't even accurate. Doctorow states, "The clue is in the steady stream of e-mails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling—you have to visit Facebook to find out, generat[ing] a banner impression." This is not the case. Facebook's emails not only tell you a friend has written to you, but also display the actual message in the email. There no need to visit the site.

The author goes on to complain about his friend requests from "a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade" and "the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad." The solution is simple. If you don't want them to be able to interact with you, don't friend them. This equates to blaming a high school reunion for allowing a past schoolmate to say hi to you. Facebook doesn't create akward situations, they occur in real life and so will exist on Facebook too. "It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list—but removing someone from your friends list is practically a declaration of war." If you don't want them as a friend, why do you care what they think anyway?

To conclude, the author says, "As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increase. Once that happens, poof, away you go—and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster, and their pals on the scrapheap of Net.history." Or, you could just not friend them. It's ridiculous to blame a social network for allowing a social contact to find you. That's its purpose.

About Me

Hey guys, my name is Joe Levy and I'm in Duke's ISIS 100 class. I was born in Boston, but moved to Washington D.C. when I was four years old. I hope to major in Computer Science and get certificates in ISIS and Markets and Management. My interest in computers and information technology probably comes from my father, who is an IT consultant. From a young age, he taught me many interesting things that computer can do. Eventually, I started exploring computers on my own.

I'm not just interested in computers though. I'm also very into sports. In high school, I wrestled for 4 years, and I'm a huge fan of Duke Basketball. I'm in a tent in K-Ville most nights of the week. Stop by and say hi!