It's become rare to find comment threads on news articles that are civil and thoughtful. Instead, most comments are full of people calling the opposing side names and telling them why they're wrong. People who reply typically use the same tone and defend their own points with religious-like vigor. Nobody is listening and nobody's minds are being changed. As a result, people who could positively and constructively be contributing to the discussion are vanishing.

Last week Google debuted a new toxicity detecting service for online discussions called Perspective. While some people see this approach as an affront to our freedom of speech (which it is not), it is an affront to intentionally contentious and pugnacious commenters.

The goal of the Perspective API is to bring back some semblance of online civil discourse. To help create it, Google partnered with the New York Times and Wikipedia and analyzed their comments data.

It analyzed the Times moderators' decisions as they triaged reader comments, and used that data to train itself to identify harmful speech. The training materials also included hundreds of thousands of comments on Wikipedia, evaluated by thousands of different moderators.

I tested Perspective and was impressed by its results.

While Perspective is promising, it's still no panacea and it is a form of censorship. Machine learning and algorithms can only go so far when it comes to human language and intent. Not only will there be false positives, but some of the incorrectly filtered comments may also end up being the most profound and irenic messages that nobody will ever get to see or consider. And like most technology, it can be gamed. Civil and relevant dissent may be filtered, while useless and sardonic comments may slip through undetected.

Perhaps, over time, weighting can be applied to authors. The algorithm could take that weighting into consideration and highlight conversations by authors who engage in civil discourse, regardless of their positions and ideology.

Civil discourse is how we progress as a people. The internet presents the most incredible communication medium of our time and we're currently squandering it with our inability to speak intelligently to each other. My hope is that technologies like Perspective will help save online civil discourse without censoring diverse ideas and perspectives.

My son just turned eight and he wanted to have a Minecraft-themed party, so I figured why not throw a LAN party!

Minecraft Server

If you're going to have a Minecraft LAN party, you might as well run the server locally. I chose to go with McMyAdmin, because it's easy to use and also runs on OS X.

I installed it on an old Mac mini and had the server up and running in a few minutes.

Computers for Playing Minecraft

Finding enough computers for guests will probably be the hardest task for most people.

I highly recommend having a computer for everyone, otherwise, people will feel left out and will probably get bored. In most cases that will mean reducing the number of people you invite (which is actually a good thing).

At our party, we used my laptop, my wife's iMac, the kids' old iMac, and the old Mac mini running the server. We were short one computer, but one of the kids was able to bring his parent's laptop.

Everyone will need a Minecraft account, so make sure they know that in advance. And if they're young, get the login info from their parents before the party. Otherwise, you'll be stuck either setting up accounts or with some very disappointed kids.

Setting Up the LAN

I have a good WiFi network, but I wanted the network and gameplay to be super fast. So I set up a wired gigabit network!

I bought Netgear's 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch and hooked everything up with Cat6 ethernet cables. Needless to say, there was NO lag! :)

Minecraft Party Activities

When the kids showed up, they were greeted with Minecraft music. And by Minecraft music, I mean all of the random people who have changed the lyrics to popular songs and turned them into Minecraft songs.

I was able to do this by pulling up Spotify on my iPad mini and playing one of the numerous Minecraft playlists that were available. I used the awesome Big JamBox by Jawbone for the speakers.

We also took regular black and green balloons and Minecrafted them!

There was even a dance room, because why not!?

Before we started the LAN party, we had the kids create Minecraft objects using the Melty Beads Animal Friends kit.

We then found patterns online for them to use.

After the bead project, we started the main event. I'm pretty sure they could have kept playing for days. Lucky for us it was just two hours :)

For the finale, we made a Minecraft Pig cake out of homemade cupcakes. The boys didn't mind that it was pink, because it was a pig...and it's cake!

All-in-all, it was a great party.