Student Loan Blog : Microsoft

Can’t Find Your Friends? Check the Library

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 08:26:00 GMT

Libraries aren’t what they used to be.

No more stuffy, hair-bun-bearing librarians, no more thumbing through cumbersome card catalogs, and no more getting lost in aisles of endless Encyclopedia Britannicas.

Libraries are now high-tech, high-speed information portals that offer a wealth of resources: free, online and easy to access.

Sure, libraries still have books too … tons and tons of books. But it’s not the stacks that are drawing the visitors. It’s the Internet.

And who are these visitors?

Generation Y. The 18-to-29-year-old crowd has become, almost counterintuitively, the age group that most commonly frequents public libraries, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Libraries Change Face to Save Face

Whether they’re updating their Facebook accounts, Stumbling their favorite websites, doing research for a term paper, or just socializing online with their friends, the young adults of Gen Y are increasingly making a trip to the library to tune in to the Internet, particularly when their own Internet connections are slow or limited.

Libraries across the country have received virtual facelifts over the past few years in an effort to appeal to a younger crowd and to offer services the public craves. Local municipalities and non-profit organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have devoted resources and millions of dollars to technological renovations at libraries.

The result? 62 percent of Gen Y respondents in the Pew survey reported having visited public libraries within the past year. And out of 53 percent of total respondents who spent time in libraries last year, 65 percent of them said they used the Internet while they were there.

Bookworms Make Way for Surfers

Considering that over ten years ago, a survey by the Benton Foundation showed that this same age group felt libraries would eventually become less relevant, Julie Vorman of Reuters reports that the Pew survey results are surprising and exciting (“Generation Y Biggest User of U.S. Libraries, Survey Finds,” Dec. 30, 2007).

“Internet use seems to create an information hunger, and it is information-savvy young people who are most likely to visit libraries,” says Leigh Estabrook, co-author of the Pew report, in Vorman’s article.

That hunger for information is being quenched — 99 percent of libraries now have Internet access for their Web-surfing patrons, according to a USA Today piece by Anick Jesdanun (“Young Use Library Most Despite the Net,” Jan. 1, 2008).

But high-tech advancements at libraries are not the only draw for frequenting teens and young adults. As rows of shelves give way to computer desks, libraries now act as social gathering sites, offering virtual homework help, gaming software programs, and even access to virtual librarians, the online avatars of real-world librarians in the virtual-reality game Second Life, Vorman reports.

“We’re seeing a lot of conversion of what may have been stack areas, warehouse areas,” says Loriene Roy, president of the American Library Association, in Jesdanun’s USA Today article. “Libraries are creating social spaces.”

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Could Google Go Obsolete?

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 05:29:00 GMT

The programmers and executives at San Francisco–based startup Powerset are hoping that the answer to this question will be “yes” once they debut their search engine that operates on natural-language technology.

Powerset finally offered its first public preview on September 17, reports Associated Press writer Michael Liedtke, at a conference hosted by TechCrunch, “a blog widely read by venture capitalists and other high-tech luminaries” (“Search Startup Ready to Challenge Google,” Sep. 17, 2007).

Powerset’s natural-language search engine would give Internet users a platform to conduct their searches in plain English—in other words, in the kinds of sentences people speak in real life—as opposed to by typing in an assortment of keywords.

Right now, all the major search engines—Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—use the traditional keyword-based model, with Google cornering more than half of all search engine traffic.

The difference between the two types of searching technologies has to do with how the search engine processes the search terms you type in when you want to find something on the Internet.

A keyword-based engine, like Google, basically disregards “minor” words like articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (in, by, about, etc.), and hones in on what it considers to be the most important terms. Natural-language engines take into account a string of words as a whole rather than looking at them as individual pieces.

For example, if you wanted to find information on student loans, in a natural-language search, you would type your request in the same way you would ask a person: “How much money can I get as an undergrad?” In a Google search, on the other hand, you would search by keywords like “undergrad money college” and hope to get results with information on maximum loan amounts. Change the order of your keywords—“money college undergrad”—and get different search results.

This distinction, writes Liedtke, means “Web surfers will theoretically be able to get more meaningful results by typing more precise search requests in the form of straightforward questions.”

Searches Going Au Naturel

Perhaps more buzzworthy than the natural-language engine itself is the fact that Powerset is licensing its technology from veteran powerhouse Palo Alto Research Center, the subsidiary of Xerox famed for introducing one revolutionary technology after another—laser printing, the graphical user interface (GUI), Ethernet networking, and the first commercial use of the computer mouse, just to name a few.

Ronald Kaplan, PARC’s top natural-language specialist, is now Powerset’s chief technology and science officer, Liedtke reports.

“We have the best natural-language search technology that has ever been developed,” says Barney Pell, Powerset’s co-founder and chief executive.

And he plans to take that technology, along with Powerset’s $12.5 million in venture capital, and give Mother Google a run for her money.

Although Powerset is not the first to push natural-language searching, with Ask Jeeves failing miserably in the 1990s and Hakia currently struggling to make inroads in the Internet search market, Pell believes his company’s technology will be able to fill in the holes that keyword searches leave behind.

He compares the problem of searching with keywords to trying to talk to a toddler with limited language skills.

“In one sense, you are happy you can talk to it at all, but you still really want it to grow up so you can hold a real conversation,” he says.

Not everyone expresses the same optimism. Industry analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research says the problem with natural-language searches lies not with faults in the technology’s algorithms, but with a computer’s inability to differentiate between variable meanings of the same word and discern the subtle nuances of language.

In a search, Li says, asking “What caused the collapse of Enron?” and “What caused the downfall of Enron?” will generally yield completely different search results even though the questions are essentially the same.

For other skeptics, whether Powerset can achieve its goal of revolutionizing the search engine sector will depend on the company’s ability to transform the mindset and ritual practices of Internet searchers. These critics argue that the majority of current searches are short, only a few words long, and that Internet users, increasingly demanding that all their online interactions happen in high-speed, may not easily make, or even want to make, the shift to more typing and longer search strings.

Danny Sullivan, a blogger for SearchEngineWatch.com, says Pell fails to provide a convincing argument for why today’s keyword search users would miraculously transition to the other side.

Internet users “aren’t using keywordese now because they somehow have been trained to do it,” Sullivan writes in a blog post. “No one from Google sat the searchers down and said ‘only two words, and don’t use conjunctions.’ People search however they want—and right now, they use only a few words” (“Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend,” Oct. 5, 2006).

Testing to Determine Powerset’s Potential

The natural-language debate aside, how successful the technology and the company will be remains to be seen. Powerset is rolling out its search engine gradually and will begin by analyzing feedback from the 16,000 people who have registered as users of its test site, Powerlabs. The temporary site is currently operating in a limited capacity, explains Liedtke, only indexing content from Wikipedia, the Web-based, user-generated encyclopedia.

Powerset has set up Powerlabs to display, alongside its own results, the results returned by competitor sites like Google and Yahoo when given the same search questions. Powerlabs then requires users to choose which search engine’s results worked better for them before they can proceed with their next search.

With all the press over the past two years surrounding Powerset’s natural-language model, Google execs may be starting to feel the pressure of a competitor threatening to break Google’s steel grip on Internet searchdom. According to Liedtke, Google has been working on its own version of natural-language search technology since the end of 2005, pumping nearly $2.2 billion into research and development and beefing up its staff by thousands.

But executives at Powerset aren’t deterred by the competition or the criticism.

“Google is the king. … Their system does an amazing job, given what they have to go on” says Pell. “But we think they have plateaued.”

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Gaming Industry Giving Back to Its Girl Gamers

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 03:51:00 GMT

As big-name video game companies in the multibillion dollar gaming industry search for ways to expand their market share and find new audiences in an increasingly saturated marketplace, some of them are turning to a segment that’s oft-ignored in the gaming world: Females. Working moms and stay-at-home moms, college girls and school girls are poised to embrace this technology-as-entertainment trend, and gaming companies want to find ways to tailor their products and services to this up-and-coming demographic.

Christa Phillips, one of Microsoft’s “goodwill ambassadors” who monitor player behavior in the corporate giant’s Xbox Live online gaming communities, estimates that females already comprise about 10 to 20 percent of their seven-million-strong audience, according to an L.A. Times article by Alex Pham (“A Refuge for Women in a Hostile Game Space,” Sep. 3, 2007).

And Microsoft is looking for more.

Some hardcore male gamers, flocking to the online worlds of popular, male-dominated games like BioShock, World of Warcraft and Halo, have raised their controllers in objection to female intrusion, engaging in sexually charged greetings and hostile game play.

“American society has evolved since the advancement of women’s rights in the 1960s,” writes Pham. “But the world of video gaming has been largely stuck in a time warp with its frat house culture of sexual insults and put-downs.”

Despite some male gamers' negative reception of their female counterparts, gaming executives are beginning to recognize the benefits of welcoming more women into the traditionally male industry and of creating a supportive environment for female participation.

Changing the Face of Gaming

Whereas male gamers will spend hours immersed in virtual combat zones and first-person shooting expeditions, female players tend to be drawn to games that involve puzzles, social interaction and strong story lines.

At a panel at the 2005 Game Developers Conference focusing on female gamers, a British researcher unveiled a study that found that

more so than men, women in the UK like strong plots, rich characterizations, choices in goal-attainment strategies, freedom of self-expression, novelty, immersion in atmospheric environments, games they can immediately pick up and play, flexibility, and social interaction.

A games analyst for market researcher NPD Group presented his findings that 93.9 percent of Nintendo’s female base “prefers card, puzzle, arcade, or word games” (“GDC Panel Charts Trajectory of the Female Gamer,” March 10, 2005).

Gaming companies trying to build their female player demographic are striving to recruit more female programmers and writers to create games like these, with more female appeal.

But these companies find themselves in a catch-22: They want more female developers in order to design games that entice more female players, but they need more games that appeal to female players in order to entice females into the gaming industry. Considering that women working in the gaming industry dropped to 11.5 percent in 2005 from 17 percent the previous year, according to Gamasutra.com, the companies might be facing an uphill battle (“Soapbox: ARGs and How to Appeal to Female Gamers,” Nov. 29, 2005).

Yet not all industry analysts attribute the fledgling female gaming market to a lack of females in the business. Some cite greater competition among entertainment sources for female attention.

A panelist at the 2005 GDC, for example, “hypothesized that the explanation for why women don’t prefer games as strongly as men may be the result of men watching less television (as they shift to interactive entertainment), and television programs more aggressively recruiting female viewers.”

Another panelist suggested that gaming companies should take these entertainment preferences into account and focus on cultivating the status of many female gamers as “secondary” or “nondominant” gamers instead of trying to recruit or convert women to become primary gamers, who tend to be mostly male.

Females Virtually “Go to the Mattresses”

Besides custom-tailoring their game design and marketing approach, gaming companies working to expand their female customer base are beginning to realize they must show care for their female gamers who venture into male-dominated virtual worlds.

This realization has led to strategies like Microsoft’s recruitment of monitors like Phillips, to help defuse the sometimes heated environment stirred up by veteran gamers in some Xbox Live communities.

Phillips has run her online group, GamerchiX, since June 2006 and drew her inspiration from PMS Clan—that’s Pandora’s Mighty Soldiers—an online gaming group of female competitive players.

GamerchiX, Pham explains, “functions as a virtual Grand Central Terminal for women and girls who tread into the testosterone-steeped world of console gaming.”

Phillips says she wanted her fellow gamers to have a place to turn and feel supported when they experience the trash-talking, the naysaying, and the come-ons.

“I wanted to create a safe place for all women gamers,” Phillips says in Pham’s article. “It’s a place where you can go to socialize and not have to worry about being harassed or hit on.”

Phillips’ role as TriXie in the gaming world mirrors her role as a mother of two in the real world, as she oversees her GamerchiX like a mother hen. She holds the power to revoke Xbox Live playing rights from male gaming bullies when and if she receives complaints from one of her girls of stalking or harassment.

And the hassling female gamers experience can run the gamut.

“I’ve heard it all,” says PMS Clan founder Amber Dalton in Pham’s article. “They tell you to go to the kitchen and get them a sandwich. Or they ask you if you’re hot. You can also be targeted just because you’re a girl. They all just start shooting at you the second they find out you’re a girl.”

But GamerchiX doesn’t protect its members just from male badgering; the girls must also abide by a code of ethics Phillips calls a “manifesta,” which prohibits them from engaging in virtual cat fights or trash-talking each other.

Gaming Doesn’t Make the Grade

With gaming and gaming recruitment on the rise, concerns may surface about what effect gaming will have on college students, their study habits and their grades.

A study conducted in 2001 by Todd Stinebrickner, an econometrics professor at the University of Western Ontario, and Ralph Stinebrickner, a math and computer science professor at Berea College, found that the presence of video game consoles in dorm rooms can have a detrimental effect on study habits and grade point averages (“The Causal Effect of Studying on Academic Performance”).

The Stinebrickners analyzed a randomly chosen sample of two groups of college freshmen comparable in academic ability, preparation and motivation, but separated by whether or not their roommate brought a video game console to school.

Of those with roommates who brought game consoles, 24 percent were female and 53 percent were male. On average, the group of female students with access to their roommate’s game console studied about 46 percent less and finished their first semester with a statistically significant 0.128 lower GPA than those female students whose roommates didn’t bring a game console. The male students with console-toting roommates studied 66 percent less and finished their semester with a 0.239 lower GPA.

The study was initially designed to measure how study time affects grades, but in the process resulted in these significant findings on how much distraction video games can cause for those students just beginning to develop their college study habits.

The gaming industry may be starting to exhibit more responsibility for its female players as it becomes more cognizant of their needs, but young female—and male—gamers have a similar responsibility to themselves when it comes to their gaming practices.

As the Stinebrickners’ study shows, student gamers must be careful not to let themselves get too carried away in their virtual worlds and risk throwing away their opportunities for education.

Like mom and dad always said, study hard, and then play hard.

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