WRT: Writer Response Theory

The Colloquium on Conversational Systems, a botmaster get-together I’ve mentioned before has been run. The powerpoints of the presentations have been put online by the Digital World Research Centre, University of Surrey.

The Party at the Center of the Universe is an attempt at using data generated by the public to generate a spatial construct on the internet. This spatial construct takes into consideration the user’s position in space, orientation in space and identity. Each of these factors will affect the way a person is represented in […]

The flipside of Critical Code Studies (“more of us should read code!”) are initiatives like Microsoft Developer Network’s new Coding4Fun section (“more of us should write code!”) - although the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is hard to close. A picture of a child beaming at a laptop keyboard helps with the hard […]

Interactor: How do you ask an Iraqi where the warlord is so you can meet with him to chat?
Iraqibot: Very politely.

“Tactical Iraqi,” W. Lewis Johnson’s language instruction program, offers soldiers the opportunity to learn Iraqi through interaction with characters through a video game-like interface. Johnson is current director of the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California.

According to Johnson, the response from Iraq War veterans has been outstanding to the effect of “I wish I had used that program BEFORE I went over there.” Their site reports, “Learners at Grafenwoehr who had previously been deployed to Iraq stated that they learned more Arabic in one day working with Tactical Iraqi than they learned in their entire tours of duty in Iraq.”

The system, as a teaching tool, is impressive. Dr. Johnson was polite (and generous) enough to share it with me on a recent visit to his lab in Marina Del Rey. The voice recognition was strong and the interaction compelling. (Nonetheless, I don???t think it will count as my military service.)A: Very carefully.

“Tactical Iraqi,” W. Lewis Johnson’s language instruction program, offers soldiers the opportunity to learn Iraqi through interaction with characters through a video game-like interface. Johnson is current director of the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California.

According to Johnson, the response from Iraq War veterans has been outstanding to the effect of “I wish I had used that program BEFORE I went over there.” Their site reports, “Learners at Grafenwoehr who had previously been deployed to Iraq stated that they learned more Arabic in one day working with Tactical Iraqi than they learned in their entire tours of duty in Iraq.”

The system, as a teaching tool, is impressive. Dr. Johnson was polite (and generous) enough to share it with me on a recent visit to his lab in Marina Del Rey. The voice recognition was strong and the interaction compelling. Nonetheless, I don???t think it will count as my military service.

While reading the blog of the code-artist mez (Mary-anne Breeze, a.k.a. net_wurker), I encountered her Web Statistics Poem Generator v.1, a blog entry which specifies a process resulting in a poem.
_Input:_ 3/9/05 key word entries
1 + 3 + 5 + 7
4 + 8 + 10
11 + 13 + 15
16 + 17 + 20
21 + […]