I don't even know what the advice for the average consumer is here. With ATMs, you can recommend that people use machines they are familiar with and pay attention to if they appear to have been changed. But with these skimmers being internal to the gas pumps, there is nothing to see and the only advice is to watch your credit card/bank statements closely. There is also a hint that you might be slightly better off at pumps within easy sight of the cashier instead of pumps that are out of sight.

I wonder where the next variation on this is going to pop up...

"The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology" covers the creation of an exhaustive geological map of England and, along with it, a shift in the culture of geological research. The trend moved away from geology as the collection of fossils and generally being a hobby for the upper class, towards what, from the outside, seems like the birth of geology as a science. While the book looks at the very data-driven processes that Smith uses to begin to assemble his exhaustive maps it also explores who these new geologists are and how their background and their funding sources put them in conflict with the tradition of geology in place in England in the early 1800s. Smith's work is largely funded by piggy backing on his paid work as a surveyer, primarily for planning England's growing canal system. A combination of financial mismanagement on his part and hostility from the British Geological Society led Smith into debtor's prison and it was only later in his life that his contributions to the field were recognized.

"The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom" has some similiar themes. It follows the life of Joseph Needham as he moves from being an accomplished biological researcher to traveling throughout China in the early 1940s, officially as a scientific liason between Britain and China but personally to collect information for a book about the science and technology of China. His goal, which he sticks to for decades, is to collect evidence of the array of scientific and technological discoveries that actually originated in China, to restore China's deserved intellectual respect for these accomplishments, and to ultimately explain why, after being ahead of the rest of the world for so long, it seemed that China had stopped moving forward at the same time that the Renaissance pushed the western world forward in leaps and bounds. The end result is a set of over twenty-four volumes that is still being expanded based on his research. Along the way, Needham's socialist convictions and political naivite pull him out of favor in most circles but, like Smith, his awesome academic achievement ultimately brings him back into his former prominence.

If you like Winchester's style, you'll like these books - there is a reasonable coverage of the content of the research but the main focus is on the people performing that research and the various pressures on them as they attempt to accomplish unimaginably complex works. Out of these two books, Needham is the more colorful character, with his extensive travels and his multitude of affairs. One also feels less sorry for his hardships since it seems that they might have been avoided if he didn't think quite so well of himself and assume that others would do the same. Smith falls on the other side of the spectrum, being equally passionate about his project but less assured he will be granted the opportunity to succeed.

Ultimately, Winchester's books celebrate people with a vision so immense and world-changing that their success required a life-long commitment and, ultimately, the ability to convince at least one or two other people to make the project their life's work as well. If you have ever balked at the daunting task of organizing a semester (or year, or five's...) worth of research into a paper or article or book, these accounts will make you feel chagrined at the relative ease of your task to the hurdles before Smith and Needham. In a significant part these stories can also be read as accounts of people who were faced with immense amounts of information and an intuition that there must be a pattern hidden in there that they could draw out which would make sense of each of the individual facts - in one case a map of our geological history and in the other a cataloging of a lost piece of our global history of science.

I liked this weblog post about recent research into the correlation between videogames and violence not just for the links to some current research, but because of the critiquing of the papers and the general conversation about video game violence going on right now. While I'm not entirely on board with the post's undercurrent of sceptibility about any psychological research, there are some really interesting points about the lack of consistency in what is being considered "aggression" when assessing children's behavior and particularly the question of whether one should distinguish between slight aggression versus actual violent actions. I also like the idea that if violent video games are harmful, they are not harmful equally and in the same way for all children, but that the degree of harm is relative to certain other psychological characteristics of the child.

If you are interested in gaming, you might be interested to know that a book I've heard mentioned a few places, but not read myself yet, is now available online: This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities by Jim Rossignol. It is about gaming culture, and with an international perspective. I'll probably read this at some point this summer.

I can't write about recent discussions of videogames without referencing Roger Ebert's statement earlier in the spring that video games can never be art, his subsequent article saying that he does not have personal experience playing video games and so while he continues to hold the same opinion he grants that he is not coming from a place of educated knowledge, and his most recent article discussing the results of his "completely unscientific survey" of whether people would prefer a great video game over Huckleberry Finn, which ultimately becomes a discussion of the value of reading well and loving reading - a discussion I particularly appreciate from someone so strongly associated in the world's mind with film.

Being a bit of a novice there, I thought the book was quite good. As someone with quantitative leanings, it was compelling to have design principles interspersed with heat maps or gaze charts illustrating the data they used to derive their principles. Much of it was common sense; I was not shocked to learn that most of us don't even notice banner ads or aspects of design that look like banner ads anymore. But seeing how dramatically we ignore them was fascinating. The short section of the book about differences in what men and women attend to in images was also quite fun - as was the fact that everyone likes looking at dog genitals!

There were a few places where I felt that the authors were stressing their assumption of the purpose of a website or the intended audience too strongly, and critiquing sites for not maximizing their usability for the specific tasks being tested. Particularly when measuring how quickly a fact can be found on a fact-filled page, not everything can be the most prominent piece of information. But if the examples are taken as illustrations of what you should or should not do in presenting what the site authors perceive as the most important information, the principles are valuable.

One thing I am curious about is the focus throughout the book on not making users read - to the extent that textual precision should be sacrificed in some cases in order to save the user reading a single extra word. The specific example I am thinking of involved a webpage with a variety of bolded headings, one of which was a two word phrase. The contention was that the adjective within the phrase should be omitted since users might reach that adjective, not have it be specifically the word they were looking for, and move on before seeing that the second word of the phrase matched their goal.

Now, partially this goes back to my previous point about the intended users of the site, and their expected goals and familiarity with the language of the site. But as an educator, it troubles me to see evidence that if the information someone is looking for is not apparently within the first word of a heading, the instinct to move on instead of continuing to read is so strong. I can concede that the web is filled with so many competing information sources that sites must design themselves for easy perusal and navigation. But I had no idea that the pressures against reading text were so strong. It is distressing.

The idea here is the same - take the data that has already been maintained by Google or other search engines to find patterns in queries that correlate with ecological decline. Then, monitor ongoing queries to get early alerts of problems when it may still be early enough to address the situation.

A very cool idea if it could work. But it is also worth asking what other problems you might want to detect in this way. Criminal or terrorist activity are obvious targets. If that seems abstract and distant from you, what about schools mining the queries of their students for evidence that they are likely plagiarists and ought to have their work more closely scrutinized. It is possible to bring these technologies quite close to home.

Why do people still care? Because the Bayer Facts of Science Education survey out this month of women and underrepresented minorities in the sciences (particularly chemistry fields) says that 66% felt that stereotypes that women and/or minorities do not do math and science contribute to their underrepresentation. School science classes was overwhelmingly the most important factor in pursuing science, and it is logical to conclude that this should be a vector for countering stereotypes about who does math and science as well. Yet the survey also showed that about a third of the participants reported women and minorities being encouraged less than boys and/or non-minorities in their science classes. 40% reported being discouraged from pursuing math or science at some point, with 60% of that discouragement coming while they were in college and 44% of the time the source of the discouragement being a college professor.

Not shockingly, we need mentors and role models. We need to battle the sense of isolation that women and minorities in math and science feel. We need to battle the stereotypes. For me, a source of optimism is that Bayer was able to find 17,527 female and minority members of the American Chemical Society to survey. And over 1800 people have pledged to weblog about women in science today, with enough people interested in the project to have taken down their website for a few hours this morning. The demographics are changing and the mentors and role models are out there. Probably the best way to celebrate today is to promise yourself to talk enthusastically to a young girl or woman about math or science the next chance you get.

• Develop magazine recounts the stories of the ten biggest flops as games in the past decade - the reasons behind the failures are the most interesting part
• MSNBC reports that the size of certain portions of your brain predicts your ability at playing video games - an odd claim given that "video game" is a very broad category and I don't tend to think that there is a single set of skills that lead to success in all games, which is consistent with some of the details buried later in the article
• In good news for my students, learning how to create computer games can improve other student skills and can be effective in broadening interest in computing
• On the down side, they may find themselves at reduced risk for rickets if they play too much
• One game player muses on how to compute the value of a game based on a combination of cost, enjoyment and time spent playing it - seems to me there might need to be an exponential in there somewhere
• Besides describing a neat Project Natal game, 2 Finger Heroes, that is on the scrap heap, this article alludes to the problem of localization in games, in this case that gestures do not always translate across cultures
• Finally, if you think the life of a game developer seems like fun and games, take a look at this open letter from wives of Rockstar employees protesting their work situation - though be aware this is just one person's presentation of the situation; there is also an interesting implied gender to the developers at Rockstar in the letter

There actually seem to be a set of patent applications that the articles I have seen are talking about and merging the discussion of - one that automatically finds ads in images and one that manages auctions of advertising space. The image-processing patent (application number 20100004995) is quite long so I've only skimmed it, but I would be very interested if this were pursued on how exactly an advertisement was defined and if there was an intention to include a person in the loop to ensure that only actual advertising space was being treated as such. Near me there are giant "Welcome To Pennsylvania" (or West Virginia...) signs that could look like ads but which convey map information that ought not to be lost. Simply finding large rectangular details won't do it.

This also seems to raise the possibility that billboard advertisers will start acting like spammers, carefully crafting ads that both advertise and yet are missed by Google's algorithm. Google's online actions might end up changing the way our real-world advertising looks.

As always with this type of study, there are things to poke at - would other strongly themed decors have the same result? What about a non-neutral room with lots of academic science posters and pictures? Or does a decor with any geeky content correlate with negative attitudes? Is the negative impact due to association with the geeky culture and the types of people the women think of as doing those jobs, so the issue is it being Star Trek, which triggers all sorts of stereotypes? Or is there a disinclination to associate so strongly with science that it defines one's whole life including the decor of one's space, and it doesn't matter what the nature of that geeky decor is?

I obviously have ulterior motives for wondering - I inevitably end up decorating my spaces. And I'm a bit of a geek. I might even have a *very* *tiny* Enterprise model in my office that someone gave me, as well as the obligatory Escher calendar, conference posters, etc. Is this subtly hostile to female students, and do the quilts and curtains that I've hung help counteract that? Should I take down the XKCD cartoons I've hung on my lab door? I don't want to - I like that students read them and will tell me "oh, now that I've taken your AI class I actually understand that!". But I can also see how that type of imagery projects the message that you are either in the group and get it, or outside the group and don't. I would be really curious if one gets the same effect with, say, physics or math.

So I'm thinking about it.... It adds to the oddness for me that I am the only female professor in my department, and I'm definitely the one with the strongest inclination towards geeky decor. Probably with the strongest inclination towards decor in general. I would have thought personalizing a space would show an appealing warmth and personality, which one might think would have a positive impact on attracting and retaining underrepresented minorities. But maybe I ought to think about bringing my Hermione wand home...