Via Hilde: an extended version of politics explained through the owning of cows. Two Cows. I grew up literally next door to a lab, at which cow milk, cow tits, cow blood and cow bacteria were examined. There were cow pictures everywhere, and my father (who ran the lab) had an extensive collection of cows in a variety of different materials and sizes. Basically, I can't help it: I'm bred to have cows on my mind.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:10 (0) comments

On the website of Danish Internet Media (FDIM), they keep a weekly Top 80 list of the most visited websites in Denmark. If, for instance, you want to know how many people read the big newspaper websites, it is the place to go. Note, however, that the website which is most read, is Microsofts DK website. [Update: read the first comment to the post to get some relevant information about the background of the figures].
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:41 (3) comments

Late yesterday, I got a mail from a "Romanian Cast Iron Machinery Production & Export" compagny who wants me as an industry partner in Denmark. They specialise in "exporting machine parts and completed mechanical processed pieces(welding /casting/forging) using cast iron, mid-hard/hard steel, aluminum and fonts on a small-medium and large scale basis". This business opportunity opens completely new doors for me: I could set up my own font-shop - or start selling speciality iron gates for the wealthy people up north. Or, in my lunchbreaks, I could go down on the Danish Broadcasting Compagny's construction site just outside our doors and see if I could push some advanced aluminium to them.

Or I could get a better spam-mail filter.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:28 (1) comments

I'm up for immediate execution by the local ph.d. studyboard if I don't get my act together and do the final proofreading of my ph.d. thesis. The last part of the writing process was very hurried because I was running out of money, which is painfully obvious in the version presented to the committee, which therefore strongly recommended that I proofread it before publication (For instance, all the titles I had italised disappeared due to a weird Word-function and I only had time to re-italise some of them. Bad style.) Of course, I had the best intentions of doing it right away, but then...I was immediately hired as assistant professor, launching the game center, teaching, then I did the book and then I became Head of Department. Just haven't been able to find the time for it, but nevertheless I simply have to. So for those of you in a similar situation as me, some nice little helpers:

Writing Numbers in English (when and when not write numbers as words)

Online Thesaurus

Wordweb (install it, and call it up anytime to check a word and it's meaning by pressing ctrl-alt-w - brilliant little tool)
# posted by Lisbeth at: 15:09 (0) comments

A nice little community site, I just came across: Gamers With Jobs . It includes a blog-like subsite called Infinite Lives and an amusing comics gallery to go with it. I especially like this one ;).
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:06 (1) comments

I've been waiting for this to happen (or at least for someone who would write about it) and here goes. An informative BBC article on Ads in computer games: Ads in video games set to rise
# posted by Lisbeth at: 23:06 (0) comments

In a near future, if you have a good quote to go on one of these boxes, viewable from most of the center of the IT University, you can visit an input-website where you can type in text to be displayed on John Maeda's artwork for ITU, the screens you see above. All in all there are seven screens, "clued" to the front of our meeting-boxes, and all eventually "programmable" with text via the net (so far only one is receiving input, the one with the green "s" on the picture). The box displays the text submitted but in random order and with random frequency (as far as I have seen, still need to find the documentation somewhere).

So far the website is kinda secret, but I know the address and have started writing to it. You get a strange kick out of seing your own words displayed in such a context. I think this is an interesting example of net-connected art, which might turn out to have some real potential. I'm looking forward to see it getting up and running for real, so you can also contribute. I'll keep you posted.

PS. Maeda doesn't have a blog. But he has a clog...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:17 (0) comments

A group of Danish researchers are behind the new Journal of Music and Meaning - the second issue is just out. Definitely a research areas on the margins of what I do, but extremely interesting as research field. And something you have to keep an eye on if you want to work with for instance students who want to do real multimedia stuff on the web, or who want to think about the meaning of sound in for computer games or digital stories. I.e. as digital researcher I believe you need to know a little bit of this and that about several "signifying systems".
# posted by Lisbeth at: 22:38 (0) comments

I'm not afraid to admit, that I never read anything by recent Nobel Price in Literature winner, Elfriede Jelinek. However, I will soon be able to make up for my ignorance, since the Danish production compagny Lone Star is staging one of her pieces, "One Moment, Stay put" [my trans.], in Danish Øjebik, bliv stående! just across the water channel from ITU, in the old buildings of the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Humanities. Sounds like a intriguing production judging from the website description.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:52 (0) comments

Over at Buzzcut, found this summary of an interesting exchange between two MMOG designers on the importance of story in online gameworlds "Ludology versus Narratology at the Austin Conference.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:05 (0) comments

There are so many ways you can prepare for an 80's theme party: 1980s - first cultural references
# posted by Lisbeth at: 19:41 (0) comments

Preparing yesterday's 2005 budget negotiations has really had the best of me. I had to write a long document trying to argue why my department needed money, and then I had to sort out a fairly chaotic 2004 budget to see what we have so far been using our money for. I wasn't created to make shrewd Excel sheet calculations, so it has really felt like hard manual labour doing this exercise which, including salaries, amounts to some million kroner (Danish currency). Knowing that I'm actually also negotiating on behalf on someone else (the new head - it has all along been the idea that I should "hold the fort" as interim HoD just until the end of this year) hasn't made the process easier; but it is at least a comfort that it will be a very long time, if ever again, before I have to go through a similar exercise. Apart from the fact that being a modern researcher do require the ability to outline budgets, everytime you want to apply for external funding. People who believe that academics are people sitting isolated in their offices, doing nothing while idly spending "state money" haven't got a clue.

I miss my research. But at least today I got to talk to Troels' students. Here are this year's slides on The Aesthetics of Interactivity.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 22:03 (2) comments

Derrida is dead, but not surprisingly if you go to Danish newspapers to read about it, all you get to know is that Superman is dead [NYT]as well. Perhaps Derrida would have appreciated this mortal coincidence.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:28 (1) comments

And while I was busy doing something else, the Danish National Radio's Tech Sci program Harddisken did a lenghty piece on Kommunikation på weblogs (Communication in Weblogs).

The piece centers around an interview with Bonnie Nardi (her interview bits in English), an American anthropologist who has done a field study of weblogs for around a year. Her conclusion apparently being that the blog is a tool to think and reflect with, that the comment-box isn't the main source of social interaction between bloggers and readers, they use a lot of other interaction sources (mail, messenger etc) and that there are six main reasons why people blog. Would be interesting to get hold of a paper by her on it, none linked from her website, but one coming up in a journal.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:38 (0) comments

Filmen skal kunne spilles is an interesting article in Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende about the symbiotic relationship between film and games. The journalist has done quite a bit of research in the field and the piece includes an interesting interview with a producer from Electronic Arts.

Actually, the journalist's research also included a lengthyish phone interview with me, and I'm quite sure that at least one of the examples mentioned in the article comes from me as well as an indirect pointer to a featured colleague. But I'm not mentioned, and I'm pretty convinced it is because I refused to come up with a juicy tidbit in favour of the "bad" influence of games on film. The journalist also outright refused to let me see a draft of the article, (even if he had quoted me). And gave me a date of publication which was 3 weeks ahead of the real publication date. Oh, well. Yet another lesson learned regarding how to handle the press.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 02:28 (0) comments

Another ironic joke on how many of x people of a special kind it takes to change a light bulb.
Hvor mange nyhedsgruppe-abonnenter skal der til at skifte en pære? [How many newsgroup-subscribers does it take to change a light bulb?]
# posted by Lisbeth at: 11:00 (0) comments

note to self: remember to keep track of the: Serious Games Summit 2004.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:14 (2) comments

According to this article in Politiken (referring to an UK study which I havent been able to track down), women are better at organising their mail (deleting it in their inbox) and are more happy about using email as a form of communication than their male counterparts which would rather use the phone (59%). I'm not quite sure what this says about communication patterns, brain use and other topics which frequently pop up in gender conversations. I'd like to see some comparisons on how much time you spend sorting out practical details via mail compared to sorting them out on the phone. And how much "chat-mail" which is not work-related do men send compared to women? How many "look at this URL with pictures of women exploiting men, ha ha" mails do men send compared to women? Now see stats on that would be really interesting!

The survey was made by Xerox and actually builds on interviews with 508 managers. From the scientific point of validity, I wonder how many of these are actually women?

The most interesting thing about the Politiken article is that they have a little onsite survey asking people how many mails they have in their inbox. Today, the stats look like this (I hope Politiken is not going to sue me for quoting this):
0 12%
1 - 50 36%
51 - 100 11%
101 - 250 10%
251 - 500 9%
501 - 1.000 7%
More than 1.001 14%
(3170 people had done the poll at the time of writing)

I find the fact that 14% have more than 1001 mails in their inbox comforting.
I've started to feel like a very disorganised woman - I read all my mails but I havent found the time to sort them since august, so I've currently reached a peek of 1626 mails in the inbox. How many mails do you have in yours? Do you feel disorganised?

# posted by Lisbeth at: 17:26 (4) comments

Via Tinka of Distant Sun: Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions - good list for a world-design class, I think.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 21:07 (0) comments

Wauw - a couple of former students at Comparative Literature & the IT University have written a book about new media for high school students. It contains lot of visual examples and discussions about digital literature, interfaces, games and narrative. Many of their sources are linked from the book's website and is a good pointer to the state of the art of Danish literature and games online. Thorkild Hanghøjr og Nicolai Knudsen: Når Nye Medier Fortæller .
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:43 (0) comments

Look to the right
# posted by Lisbeth at: 18:23 (2) comments

at Neverwinter Nights Vault. According to Laust, who gave me the URL, their persistent worlds can host up to 96 players (60 in practice??), some of them connects 4 servers. So not massive worlds, I guess, but big worlds nevertheless.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 13:51 (0) comments