Social scientist and engineer Noshir Contractor of Northwestern University conducted a curious study on the social dynamics of virtual reality using the popular game EverQuest II. Using 60 terabytes of game data and a survey of 7,000 players, Contractor found several “structural signatures”, particular kinds of social network configurations:

Many players underestimate the time they spend playing the game
The amount of players who admit to being depressed is disproportionately high
Women don’t like to play with other women
The average player is not a teenager, the mean age being 25-26
Most people play with others from the same general geographic area

Virtual Games Players Stick Close To Home, ScienceDaily.com

DD now has a splinter blog, Amusementality, an entertainment blog, which will cover tv, music, anime, art and sexy stuff that I can’t post on this here respectable publication. Go there now, go there repeatedly, and if you’re interested in becoming a contributing author, drop me a comment.

amusementality.wordpress.com

According to a new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, internet addiction is a common disorder that should be included in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (DSM-V). The disorder consists of excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, excessive email/text messaging, and variants typically include 1) a loss of sense of time and neglect of basic drives, 2) internet withdrawal when a computer is not available, 3) a tolerance, which leads to a search for better equipment, faster connection, and more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including lying, fatigue and social isolation. This comes after a series of studies published in South Korea, which had 10 cardiopulmonary deaths in internet cafes, as well as a game-related murder. According to government estimates from 2006, 210,000 South Korean children 6-19, 2,1% of the population are addicted and require treatment, with 80% deemed to need medication, and 20-24% requiring hospitalization. So if you spend more than 23 hours/week on the internets, you may have a problem. Seek help immediately! And I don’t mean on Google!!

Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction, PsychiatryOnline.org

The new version of the free, open internet browser Firefox is out today, and it’s trying to set the world record for the most downloads ever. Some of the 15,000 improvements made in Firefox 3 include a smart location bar, faster performance, one-click bookmarking, and full zoom for any part of a web page. So go be part of something big, kinda, and download yours now.

Firefox 3

The Motion Picture Association of America has admited that the study they commissioned in 2005, which claimed that college students are responsible for 44% of illegal film downloading, was wrong. This study was used to pressure schools to enforce stronger limits on file-sharing, as well as to back legislation now before the House of Representatives that would require them do so. The MPAA blames "human error" for the false statistic and now only blames college students for 15% of illegal downloads.

MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study, AP.Google.com

In a follow-up to the earlier story about the bittorrent site PirateBay trying to buy the micronation of Sealand, it seems that self-declared Prince Michael Bates, owner of the gunnery platform located in international waters, has refused the pirates, opting instead to offer asylum to Gary McKinnon, a British hacker facing extradition to the US. Concerning PirateBay, Bates’ said that "its theft of proprietary rights, it doesn’t suit us at all… I’ve written a book and Hollywood is making a movie out of it, so it would go right against the grain to go into the filesharing thing," so his reasons for choosing hackers over pirates are not all that altruistic.

McKinnon, a.k.a. Solo, is allegedly responsible for hacking 97 US Army, Navy, Air Force, DoD and NASA computers in 2001-02, which has been dubbed "the biggest military computer hack of all time." The way he got into the military networks was with a simple Perl script that searched for blank passwords, finding stations where the defaults were never changed. "When I scanned thousands of machines on one particular military network, there were always a few hundred with blank passwords, and once you’re on one, you use ‘trust’ to speak to another." Thus, the biggest hack involved little actual hacking, mostly just looking for the open doors.

McKinnon claims that his reason for hacking was his belief in UFOs. He even said that he discovered names and ranks of extra-terrestrial officers, "all very human-like," but does not remember the details as his computer was seized by the authorities. If sent to the US, he could face up to 60 years in prison on ten charges, the most serious being ‘bringing down the entire military network of Washington’. "Hearing that the New Jersey Authorities want to see me ‘fry’ was like having a 17-tonne hammer waiting to hit me on the head."  Currently, McKinnon’s last hope is a hearing at the House of Lords, if denied, he will be extradited within four weeks, and New Jersey will eat his soul. So, perhaps it’s best that Solo get his asylum, after all, PirateBay can find other islands, even actual islands instead of rusty metal and concrete contraptions, but the lone hacker’s options for a haven within fleeing distance from the UK are much fewer. May everyone get what they want.

This much I know: Gary McKinnon, hacker, 41, Observer.Guardian.co.uk
Sealand prefers hacker to The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak.com
Free Gary McKinnon - or at least try him in the UK, FreeGary.org.uk

There’s an interesting map project that plots real-time disasters around the world through radio distress signals from the National Association of Radio-Distress Signaling and Info-communications. Disaster.net (Lt. for bad star) has everything: nuclear hazards, airplane crashes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tropical storms, epidemics, each with a little icon designating type and magnitude. The world map with little blinking icons recalls a Civilization game screen, you can click to see a description of the disaster, its recent history and what is being done to relieve it. Through a kind of God’s-eye view, you can also monitor the location, growth and movement of certain disasters, e.g. the spread of epidemics, movement of hurricanes. You can even identify the fault-lines from it, as they are lined with volcanic activity. Speeking of which, Antarctica’s Mr. Erebus, named after Greek god of Darkness, son of Chaos, has been showing some activity. The project also offers RSS feeds so you can keep track of your disasters around the clock.

Disaster.net

The Principality of Sealand is an old WWII gunnery platform, formely called HM Fort Roughs, a man-made tower similar to an oil rig, located at 51°53′40″N, 1°28′57″E, six miles off the coast of Suffolk. In 1965, Roy Bates, a former British Army Major turned radio pirate, decided to take control of the fort, by force. This happened after he was found guilty of illegal broadcasting from his other HM Fort Knock John, which was within the 3 mile territorial limit. Having removed the fort’s residents, the staff of Radio City station, Bates continued his pirate broadcast to the UK mainland (reminds me of Salman Rushdie’s "The Ground Beneath Her Feet"). In late 1968, the Royal Navy tried to remove Bates, but as soon as they entered international waters, Sealand opened fire in warning and the ships backed off. Summarily, Bates was summoned to court, but it was ruled the case was beyond UK’s authority, having no jurisdiction outside British territory. This gave Sealand de jure legitimacy, as its independece from UK has been upheld by the country’s courts. Later rulings in the United States and Germany denied Sealand’s legal status, but those very interactions with other countries in turn lend Sealand some de facto legitimacy.

Anyway, Sealand has recently been put up for sale and the BitTorrent site PirateBay.org is hoping to buy it. As we speak, BuySealand.com is negotiating and collecting donations to to turn the fort into a safe haven for internet pirates, away from international copyright laws. "With the help of all the kopimists [from ‘copy me’, permission to copy] on Internets [not a typo], we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizen." They even set up a forum to discuss how the country will function. So far, BuySealand has raised a little over $15,000, a little shy of Sealand’s $200 million price-tag. However, it is still early in the game, and it is possible that with increased media coverage PirateBay may be able to raise the funds needed to carry out its vision. Besides, the principality of Sealand was founded by a media pirate, one who wasn’t afraid to open fire in defence of his liberty, it would only be fitting that the historic gunnery-platform be passed on to the pirates of tomorrow.

SealandGov.com, official site
BuySealand.com, ThePirateBay.org’s compaign

WikiLeaks.org, is developing an uncensorable, untraceable Wikipedia designed for the leaking of sensitive documents. The aim is to provide an outlet for people in oppressive regimes (the Middle East, former Soviet republics, Asia and the Sub-Saharan Africa) who risk much more in calling attention to injustice, as well as those trying to uncover corruption in their own governments and corporations. As with Wikipedia, people can interpret and explain posted documents, thereby providing a secure (?) forum for discussion and dissension. According to their website, they have over a million documents already. The idea behind WikiLeaks is that close scrutiny makes government function better, people are more honest when they think they are being watched. Of course, while it wants to facilitate ethical leaking, as with Wikipedia on whose engine it runs, there is no way other than consensus to tell if a document is legitimate. But then again, what we call history, we call so by consensus. For security, WikiLeaks will be using an anonymous protocol known as The Onion Router (Tor), which uses cryptography and rerouting through a network of servers to hide the origin of a message. According to experts, there are still security risks, ones that could have terrifying consequences should the site be hacked, entire groups compromised. For better or worse, WikiLeaks could be a powerful tool for freedom of speech worldwide. It is scheduled to launch in February. [From their homepage:] "Three things can not hide for long: the Moon, the Sun and the Truth" – Siddhartha

WikiLeaks.org
How to leak a secret and not get caught, NewScientist.com 

Forget individual artificial intelligence programs for a moment, because a whole artificial society has just opened up. New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary, and Social Learning or the NEW TIES project is deveping an artificial computer simulated society composed of agent programs (adaptive, artificial beings that have independent behaviors). The aim is to create an artificial society capable of exploring and understanding its environment through cooperation and interaction. The agent programs are complex enough to develop a communication system and learn to work together.

At first, the world will be running across a grid of 60 computers and contain about 1,000 agents (one day to grow into the millions). Each agent will have its own characteristics (gender, life expectancy, fertility, size, and metabolism), some of which they will pass to their offspring. They will be able to learn from experience as well as from others. NEW TIES is the first to create such a complex large-scale artificial society. The results may have curious implications for evolutionary computing systems, artifical intelligence and linguistics.

New Ties Portal
Artificial Personalities to Populate Virtual World, ScienceaGoGo.com

It’s no secret that most of our media is owned by a handful of huge diversified companies or conglomerates. Though these giants come and go, their presence influences the integrity of journalism and the free exchange of information. Here are the Big Ten, their revenues and media interests.

AOL/Time Warner: $36.2 billion (Time, Life and People magazines; Atlantic, Elektra and Rhino Records music labels; HBO, Cinimax, CNN, Cartoon Network)
AT&T Corporation: $66 billion (Largest cable provider; New Line Cinema)
General Electric: $129.9 billion (NBC; Aircraft engines; 14 communication satellites)
News Corporation: $11.6 billion (Fox, National Geographics, +26 TV stations; HarperCollins; NY Post, UK’s Sun, Times; 20th Century Fox; NY Knicks, NY Rangers, Madison Square Garden)
Viavom, Inc: $20 billion (CBS, UPN, MTV, VH1, Showtime, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, +39 TV stations; Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster; 184 Infinity radio stations)
Bertelsmann: $16.5 billion (Publishes 80 magazine worldwide; Random House, Knopf, Bantam Doubleday books; Arista, BMG, RCA record labels)
Walt Disney Company: $25.4 billion (ABC, ESPN, A&E, History and Biography channels; 50 radio stations; Mighty Ducks, Anaheim Angels teams; Beuna Vista, Touchstone picture companies; Hyperion books)
Vivendi Universal: $37.2 billion (USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel; Universal Studios, StudioCanal, Gramercy Pictures; Houghton Mifflin publisher; 27% US music sales, Interscope, Geffen, Island, Def Jam, MCA, Mercury)
Liberty Media Corporation: $42 billion (Ticketmaster; 21 US and 49 Canadia radio stations; 14 TV stations; largest cable provide in Japan)
Sony: $53.8 (Columbia Pictures; Playstation)

For a more comprehensive list: Big Ten

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), unrelated to W., was an American engineer, science administrator, and advisor to President F. D. Roosevelt, mostly known for his role in the creation of the atomic bomb. In the 1930’s he developed the concept of what he called the memex (portmanteau of "memory extender"), a microfilm-based "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility… It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." The memex is considered by many to be the precursor of the internet, hypertext and general intellect augmenting computer systems. He understood the difficulty involved in predicting the technology of the future, in the July 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly ‘As We May Think’ Bush wrote: "It is a far cry from the abacus to the modern keyboard accounting machine, it will be an equal step to the arithmetical machine of the future." There, he also predicted Wikipedia, saying that "wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified." Moreover, he foretold the development of speech-recognition in the same article. Despite this, Bush earned an unfair eponym: a vannevar is a bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept. This may have been largely because of his strong opposition to sending people into space, which he considered too expensive and risky. When the Apollo Program and the two before went off without problem, Bush was labelled a bad prophet, and by the time of the Shuttle Challenger and Shuttle Columbia disasters, his warning have been forgotten. Note also that NASA has long since realized it is far more frugal to send robots into space.

As We May Think, TheAtlantic.com
Vannevar Bush, Wikipedia.org
MemexSim, SourceForge.net

The free-content multilingual online encyclopedia, Wiki, has launched two new portals: the mind and brain portal started by Lacatosias (Italian philosopher Francesco Franco), the psychology portal started by Zelifg (New York philosophy/psychology student). In addition to the usual reference entries, these portals feature psychology and neuroscience news, as well as recent research. Wikipedia has many other portals, including religion (from Baha’i to Zoroastrianism), history (incl. egyptology, war), arts and culture (anime and manga, fictional countries and worlds), science, sports, and technology. There are also geographically specific portals for a good number of countries around the world.

Mind and brain portal, Wiki
Psychology portal, Wiki

Investigation on the part of Wikipedia revealed 1,000+ edits to the open source encyclopedia traced to IP addresses reserved for the Senate and the House of Representatives. According to Wiki, these edits contained libelous statements, childish insults, or removed content with malice. The investigation was prompted when on January 27, Lowell Sun of Massachusetts published "Rewriting history under the dome", in which Matt Vogel, the chief of staff for Congressman Marty Meehan, said he authorized an intern to replace the Wiki entry for the congressman with a staff-written one, which omitted the references to Meehan’s broken term-limits pledge and massive compaing war chest. Some of the sillier ones uncovered during Wiki’s investigation included listing White House press secretary Scott McClellan under the entry for "douche". Thus far only one IP address has been blocked (one tied to Meehan) and a "request for comments" page has been opened.

Rewriting history under the dome, Lowell Sun
Congress caught making false entries in Wikipedia, News.com

A survey by US-based Pew Internet think-tank found that the internet has played a vital role in the decisions of 60 million Americans.

21 million Americans use it to get additional career training
17 million for dealing with major illness
17 million for choosing a school for a child
16 million to buy a car
16 million for a major financial decision
10 million for finding new place to live
8 million when changing job
7 million to cope with family illness

Co-author of the report, sociologist Barry Wellman, sees this as evidence of what he calls networked individualism - where internet users are less bound to local groups and increasingly part of more geographically scattered networks. Moreover, the research suggests that email tends to solidify real friendships, rather than replace them.

Tha Strength of Internet Ties, Pew Internet [PDF]
Internet serves as ’social glue’, BBCNews.co.uk

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a psychological treatment which believes that thoughts are the causes of emotions (not vice versa) and that mental disorders stem from irrational thoughts which can be replaced by more realistic substitutes. Still, therapy takes time, effort and money, meanwhile cognitive therapist are few and far between. Fortunately, now you can be treated for depression over the internet from the comfort of your own home, and the British Journal of Psychiatry will vouch for it. One of the examples of online treatment is Australian National University’s open-access MoodGym, free to use, confidential and backed by several studies. Though it’s recommended that such treatments be used as supplements to normal therapy, people have showed improvement from the internet versions alone.

MoodGym, ANU.edu
Internet-based self-help for depression: randomized controlled trial, British Journal of Psychiatry

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT, in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) is developing an innovative Human Area Networking (HAN) technology called RedTacton (touch + action = tacton) that safely turns the surface of the human body into a data transmission path at speeds up to 10 Mbps between any two points on the body, giving peer-2-peer a whole new meaning. Using a novel electro-optic sensor (that bounces a laser beam off of an electro-optionc crystal and measures the reflected beam), NTT has already developed a small PCMCIA card-sized prototype RedTacton transceiver. RedTacton enables the first practical Human Area Network between body-centered electronic devices and PCs or other network devices embedded in the environment through a new generation of user interface based on natural human actions such as touching, walking, or stepping on a particular spot. RedTacton can be used for intuitive operation of computer-based systems in daily life, temporary one-to-one private networks based on personal handshaking, device personalization, security, and a host of other applications based on new behavior patterns enabled by RedTacton.

NTT News Release 050218, NTT.
RedTacton.com

There’s a neat timeline on Nathan.com tracing the development of communication through history, starting with the first paleolithic "writings" in the 36th century BC (though I suspect he may be using the word loosely, with liberal dating). The chronology is broken up by age: Nomadic, Agricultural, AD, [Scientific Revolution], Industrial, Steam, Electricity, Atomic, Data, Service, and Light Age, leaving off in 1998 with Motorola’s Iridium global sattelite system beginning operation, termed the Eleventh Information Revolution. The history can also be broken down by area of communication: Language, Mathematics, Writing/Print, Broadcasting, or Computing. Still a work in progress, but worth a gander.

The History of Communications Timeline, Nathan.com

Folksonomy is the practice of collaborative cateforization using freely chosen keywords. As an internet feature it was developed in 2004 with advances in social software. Some examples: del.icio.us, social bookmarking; Flickr, photo sharing; 43 Things, goal sharing; GenieLab, music recommendations/associations. Folksonomy stems from "folk classifications", how average people (non-experts) classify the world around them, which have long been studied in sociology and anthropology. The term is a portmanteau or frankenword (like brunch, smog, or infomercial), mixing folk and taxonomy (taxis=classification, nomos=management), hence people’s classigication management, coined by Thomas Vander Wal (wonderwall , an information architext working for the INDUS Corporation in Bethesda, Maryland. As with most things, the fastest way to learn is to do.

To use del.icio.us, type in del.icio.us/tag/(instert subject here) in the url. You’ll get a list of recent tags with that subject, as well as a list of related tags. Click on the tagger’s name to see of what else they’ve tagged. You can also subscribe to tags of interest, by clicking subscribe towards the top. If you have Firefox, here is an extension called Feedview that manages newsfeeds (you can have your tags fed through RSS [Really Simple Syndication]). If you use a different browser, but deep down feel unsatisfied with it, download Firefox.