When the robots take over the world, it might be helpful to have a sixth sense regarding electromagnetic fields. These people are, in a sense, low-budget cyborgs, which is just fiendishly cool.
Me, I’m waiting for the day I can turn my finger into a laser pointer. Or, you know … a laser.
You get your just deserts. Invent a device and call it the “Mosquito Teen Repeller”, and teens will turn around and find a way to use it against you. In this case, they turned the high-pitched noise into an mp3 and set it as their ringtone, one that they can hear and most adults can’t. Build a wall to stop teens from doing something, they’ll build a ladder, a bridge, some dynamite, and then turn the wall into a skatepark. It’s too bad we aren’t better able to harness all of that inventive energy. Still, I don’t see it becoming too predominant, because if you CAN hear the ringtone, it’s a really annoying sound. (see if you can hear it)
At least I know I’m not old. Yet.
(via NPR)
Imbee is a social networking site designed specifically for children aged 8-14. Along with allowing youth to chat with their friends, they can also blog, share photos, and earn points which can be redeemed for prizes and rewards.
The Internet is a powerful and essential part of our society. While it contains potential dangers, it is also a valuable and indispensable tool. imbee kids will learn real world skills, such as reading, writing, problem solving, and social interaction through an interactive and challenging environment. But, most importantly, imbee is fun! Kids will meet their classmates and neighborhood kids online, to do what the big kids do, but at their own pace and in a safe and forgiving environment.
Imbee is a product of Industrious Kid, Inc, a company that just opened in March of 2006 with the mission to develop “kid-friendly and parent-approved online products and destinations for kids and tweens, allowing them to gain positive experiences with the Internet in a safe environment.” Imbee is their first product and only one to date, but it sounds like they have plans to offer many more.
Obviously, the solution of offering an alternative “safe internet” is preferable to censoring the internet we have, and I like the fact that parents have to be involved with the process, and can see what their kids are up to. But kids need to learn how to deal with the real world too, and sheltering them from every little thing now means they’ll just be that much more disillusioned and/or vulnerable later. If parents are going to be involved, why don’t they get involved with the social networking sites already out there? If they explain to kids the dangers of the internet, and tell them to be careful of creepy stalkers and dangerous situations, wouldn’t that work as well?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware that the “adult” internet isn’t perfect, pretty, or fully-clothed most of the time, but that’s nothing that a little active parenting couldn’t fix.
Saturdays are my long day at work when there isn’t actually a whole lot of “work” to do. My charge is to man the reference desk. I understand the importance of being available, but I’m seldom called upon to actually offer any assistance. Any given Saturday is slow, and over the summer especially so. On the upside, I get to listen to internet radio in one ear since the library is so quiet. Today I’ve asked Pandora to create a Skip James station, and gotten songs from Frank Stokes, Leadbelly, Charlie Patton, and two songs from Skip himself. It’s the perfect music as I watch the clouds outside create an early dusk and threaten rain. I wonder at my preference for mellow, heart-broken music.
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Some afternoons just drag on, as if to spite a person. I don’t feel like I write well anymore, and it bugs me a little bit. On the other hand, i realize that I don’t really practice very often, so I should just shut my damn yapper and get some serious pen-time going on if I want to feel better about myself. I wrote well once, I think. My oeuvre is well liked among certain literary circles.
I freaked out a bit this past Monday about school and Montreal. I read at first that getting my student permit would take 6-12 months from application, and I panicked. Finally I found the fine print that stated that as an international student from the United States there was actually NO wait time involved, and that I could just get my student permit at my point of entry. What I do have to do is get my CAQ (quack backwards: reminds me of a bad joke. What do you call a duck that flies upside down? A quack-up!), which is something like Certification d’acceptance des etudes a Quebec, or something. The CAQ takes 4-6 weeks, which is certainly manageable, but it also requires proof of funds, not only to pay for the entire first year, but to assure them of being able to pay the second and subsequent years as well (should there be any). So, I got stressed out again, until I heard from the financial aid office at McGill that I should have already received or will at least receive soon a letter of award for the sum of $18,500 in loans. While I’d obviously prefer not to take out that much in loans, at the least it will assure my CAQ eligability while I wait for less soulsucking sources of funding to avail themselves upon my wallet. I should hear about ALA scholarships soon, though not about the big, supercool fellowship until mid-July.
I’m giving serious, very serious and honest-to-goodness no-holds-barred thought to selling my car and flying to Montreal. I would not own a car. It would be the first period of my not owning a car since before I turned 16. Over ten years. It’s a frightening and liberating concept. Montreal does have a good transportation system, and if I live close enough to campus, which is the goal, I think that I’d much prefer to walk everywhere anyway. Among other things, it will be cheaper, and the way things are looking I will most certainly be your quintessential dirt-broke grad student who needs every penny. Obviously I’ll lose a little outward mobility, i.e. it’ll be tough to visit folks like Tim who would be a relatively short drive away otherwise. I did think that maybe I would buy a motorcycle for weekend excursions, but I can come to that when I come to that.
In an effort to feel like more of a writer, today I decided I would create new idioms for the english language. Here is my first attempt. If you like it, please spread it around and say things like, “Wow, that Ahniwa fellow sure is a heck of a guy, did you hear this thing he made up?” and so on.
The idiom expresses an attempt made by someone to do the impossible, to bend a person or thing, which is impressively stubborn, around to your point of view. Furthermore, it implies a negative consequence for even making the attempt, such that by even trying to argue the point you are turning the person or object against you.
The expression itself is: trying to milk a lemon; or, milking lemons. And variations thereof.
Example: Sergei tried to impress upon Anna the efficacy of the Bush regime. The more he pushed, the angrier Anna got, until finally she threw him down a well. Years later, his friend Ajax came by to say, “That’s what you get for trying to milk a lemon.” Sergei had at that time, one might surmise, already been eaten by rats, and could not appreciate his friend’s advice.
Tee hee. Morbid, I suppose. My apologies. Please, go now, and have great weekends, and above all, don’t milk any lemons around any wells. Those rats are already overfed. Thank you.
If you don’t understand soccer football as much as I don’t, you should be sure to treat yourself to this enlightening and humorous post from CBS Sportsline, “The Ignorant American’s Guide to the World Cup.”
Learn how to pronounce players’ names ahead of time. Do not refer to English team captain David Beckham as “Mr. Posh Spice,” unless you’re watching the game with Ginger or Sporty. Finally, be forewarned: yelling “GOOOOOOOOAAAAALLLLL!” and running around the room with your arms flapping goofily will get you stabbed — justifiably, I might add.
Robin over at Yahoo! Tech has an interesting round-up on social networking sites, and the new sites that have popped up to monitor them. Now, if someone changes their MySpace “relationship status” to single, you can be the first to know. Also, any site named Stalkerati makes me cringe.
Sites like this one are why I love the internet.
Maybe this guy should have asked if the lions were faithful, first.
Or maybe the lion had prayed earlier for God to send it a tasty human?
One of my favorite topics of discussion with just about anybody (and almost everyone has an opinion about this) is gaming as an educational tool. Do people learn from gaming? Does it develop critical thinking skills? I’ll admit a bias towards always answering yes, but really I think it depends on the games. Saying that games are educational is like saying that food is good for you. It all depends on what you’re consuming.
I had the pleasure to be one of the first generations to grow up with consumer video games. I started playing games on an old Apple off of 5-1/4? diskettes. Seeing that I really enjoyed using the computer, my dad spent money to buy a lot of educational games. One game involved math equations that had to be answered by jumping over the appropriate square on a pogostick. As you progressed, the equations got more difficult and you moved faster across the screen. Critical thinking on the fly with hand-eye coordination thrown in, not to mention math superpowers.
Another game worth mention was Zork, which certainly required reading comprehension and non-linear problem solving. Myst came along a little later and required the same sort of problem solving but required more visual literacy (a term I’ve seen come up frequently of late in library discussion). Moving off the computer and onto the console, games became less obviously educational, but still required some of the same sorts of skills. Critical thinking and problem solving are what games are all about, one way or another. Even in games like Grand Theft Auto (the black sheep of gaming, at the moment), players often have to come up with clever solutions to multi-faceted problems.
I’ve recently started noticing an increase in a certain kind of game that wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago, and is perhaps the most research-oriented non-linear type of game yet. Via the Wikipedia description:
An alternate reality game (ARG) is a cross media game that deliberately blurs the line between in-game experiences and the real world. While these games may primarily be centered around online resources, events which happen as part of the game may be communicated to the players in a number of forms.
This new kind of game is mind-boggling. Crossing nearly every platform from hidden real-world clues to decoding online cryptographics to collectible trading cards to scheduled events run like massive treasure hunts, ARGs, when done well, are a new evolution in gaming.
ABC television recently announced an ARG-like game for fans of its show “Lost”, which allows players to uncover clues that piece together the history and backstory of characters and locations.
I Love Bees was another ARG marketing game that cleverly blurred the line between reality and the Halo universe. Players, on their own, discovered hidden messages in images, linked them to audio messages which, when run in order, played out character stories which wove together, and uncovered GPS coordinates across the world which tied into phone booth locations.
In the end, it was just clever marketing, but does that matter if people are enjoying themselves solving an incredibly complex mystery with other people all over the world?
Recently, Perplex City caught my eye. Offering a real $200,000 reward, the game involves solving puzzles, following stories, uncovering hidden information, and competing against and with other players across the world. The story is some of the best written sci-fi you might come across and all the more poignant for that it’s interactive. As for the puzzles, some are relatively easy to solve, given time and thought. You can sign up and answer a couple example puzzle cards here. Other cards have puzzles that are so difficult that the company has admitted that it doesn’t expect them to be solved.
One requires that the Riemann Hypothesis be proven true or false. I don’t even begin to understand the problem (my pogostick math game never got quite that far). Another puzzle requires a massive decryption effort that hundreds of users have joined together to try and solve via brute force processing. This is crowdsourcing at its most sociable. What if, via a game mechanism, the Riemann Hypothesis were solved? It’s been a mathematical conundrum for over a century now, and if it were solved by gamers working together (not likely, but possible), I’d be ecstatic.
To get back on a simpler note, Flash games bring us back to our Apple roots, with clever puzzle games that have an apparent educational value. Lore over at Table of Malcontents consistently links to games that are downright enjoyable and make my brain feel like it’s getting some exercise. Some of my recent favorites include 3-D Logic, which involves mapping colors around a cube; ClickDragType, in which solving the puzzles largely requires figuring out what the rules are, which is very enjoyable in itself; and Gwigle, which challenges you and teaches you how to utilize advancing googling technique all at the same time.
There are a ton of games out there. Perhaps not all of them are of educational value, but hey, sometimes it’s okay to have a little fun as well. I think it’s most important that if you’re going to have an opinion on educational gaming, you see some of what’s available that isn’t released by Rockstar and doesn’t involve shooting things. Because the fact is that kids are into video games. We’ve tried to bring the kids to the education with limited success. Maybe it’s time we try harder to bring education to the kids.
Wired has an interesting article on crowdsourcing.
Jeff Howe describes the term on his new crowdsourcing blog as:
Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.
It seems to me that a lot of what a librarian does has already been crowdsourced, to some extent. Information is out there, and people everywhere are trying to organize it and index it and make it searchable. Will we go the way of the stock photographer? I’d wager that librarians do still and always will serve an important role in information management. The more information provided, the more is needed someone to help determine what is credible, what is biased, and most importantly what is relevant to a specific person’s goals.
Tricks of the Trade is a site that allows specialists to submit snippets of wisdom that would otherwise probably never be heard beyond their field. From mothering to bartending to fighting off viscious dogs (also known as traveling, evidently), there’s something here to interest everyone, and I quickly got sucked in and read them all.
I was gratified to see this trick from a “Researcher”, if a bit saddened that this is considered a trick of the trade and not common knowledge.
If you need an obscure, out-of-print, or otherwise difficult to locate book or article, check with your local public library. It’s a little-known fact that the vast majority of libraries belong to a resource-sharing program that will allow you to get a book mailed from across the country. It takes a little time and you often have a limited borrowing window, but it’s an amazing resource.
Office warfare? Need to lay siege to the marketing department? Does someone keep stealing your soda from the staff fridge? Get revenge with your very own trebuchet. Fashioned from common office supplies, it’s a formidable weapon at ranges of up to four feet. Use a can of soda as bait to lure them closer.
While you’re there, be sure to poke around further on the Instructables site. It’s well worth it. If you want to bring your arsenal into the 21st century, be sure to check out these USB air darts. To think we grew up in an age where all we had to fire at each other were rubber bands.
Bonus educational reading: Wikipedia article on trebuchets.
Salon has an interesting and completely safe for work article (as much as reading about sex dolls can be safe for work) about Realdolls, and more expansively about our historical tendancy towards nonreproductive sexual activity.
“Non-reproductive sex seems to have been a part of the human sexual repertoire from the time of our divergence from our common primate ancestor,” asserts Taylor. “Human sexuality is more a cultural phenomenon than a biological drive.”
For a less serious commentary on the Realdoll phenomenon, check out today’s Questionable Content strip.
I found out via email this morning that Emily is getting married. I’m not sure why the news affected me as much as it has, but my stomach immediately tightened up. I decided to take a half-day off work. I’ll go home and relax, drink wine and watch the rain fall.
Every time I’ve thought about her in the last two years I’ve had this same feeling.
Anger. Regret. Confusion. Longing.
I don’t think of myself as someone who lives in the past. Perhaps packing up my car and moving 3000 miles away wasn’t as good a closure as I thought it would be. I still think it was the only thing I could do at the time that made any sense.
Perhaps I’m just bitter. Of the two relationships I’ve fully committed myself to as an adult, one ripped me apart in France and the other has, one way or another, been quietly gnawing at me now for nearly two years. I don’t know why I haven’t just let go and moved on. I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked, and I don’t know why that is either.
Sometimes trying to be self-aware is such a nuisance. And yet I remain a romantic, despite myself.
Pandora plays my “Zero 7 Radio” at a quiet reference desk, one earbud in as I watch the rain fall outside and wonder what the spam email I just got means by “trombone Asian-American”.
The email continues with such gems as:
CAN BIGN HAVE YOU SPEEDING PAST OTHER TRADERS LIKE A ROADRUNNER ON STEROIDS?
THE ALERT IS ON!!! DO YOUR DUE DILIGENCE!!
(and at the end) WARNING: You can lose all your money by investing in this stock.
In the sense of poetry as original language, I think that a great deal of spam email qualifies. I’m well-aware that many people take their spam email and create projects from it (spamusement, spam poetry, etc). Almost all my spam email comes to my work address, and as such a lot of it gets filtered, but even so I find that it’s some of my favorite email I receive on my work account. Would you rather know that your softball team got beat by 11 points, again, or sit and think about what a “trombone Asian-American” might be?
Me too.
Mentioned by Blogger’s Blogs of Note, BibliOdyssey claims dominion over matters of Books, Illustrations, Science, History, Visual Materia Obscura, and Eclectic Bookart. For the most part, it seems to cover illustration in various literary works, and caught my eye for its post on Hans Christian Andersen illustrations by Edmund Dulac.
Author Douglas Coupland talks with Wired about his new book, and how he became, much to his surprise, a character in the book and developed an internet persona with its own life and interesting hobbies. So what do you do if the internet version of you has more interesting hobbies than you do? Pick them up, of course!
There’s a rumor going around the Internet that Douglas Coupland collects meteorites. Nobody knows how it began, least of all Coupland. But the story started to circulate shortly after his first novel, Generation X, became an On the Road for the ’90s. Every effort he’s made to set the record straight has been ignored by his many fan sites. So he recently decided to purchase a few choice specimens.
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“We should all be so lucky to have people throw such good ideas our way,” he says.
Meredith has posted an excellent article on libraries using social networking software. It’s one of my favorite library subjects these days, and she’s really written some great thoughts and included some great links. I’m looking forward to reading her book. I particularly appreciate the distinction she makes between libraries simply being on these networks, and libraries actually using these networks.
A lot of libraries have started building presence in MySpace and Facebook by creating profiles. And I honestly think this is a really good idea though unfortunately most libraries are doing it really badly. When you decide to put up a library profile on MySpace or Facebook, what is your goal? If it’s to look cool or to make students more aware of the library, don’t bother. A profile that offers nothing but a picture of the library, a blog post or two and a cutesy thing about how we won’t shush you just looks cheesy. I think there is a big difference between “being where our patrons are” and “being USEFUL to our patrons where they are.” I think some of the libraries in MySpace and Facebook have put a profile up, but they have not tried to make it useful to their patrons at all. Just putting up a profile does not make the library seem cool, nor does it make the library more visible.
I have seen two ways that libraries have used MySpace and Facebook effectively. The first is to get feedback from students. The second is to create a library portal within MySpace and/or Facebook (or whatever social networking software inevitably will come next).
Being on MySpace as an end to itself is pointless. Using MySpace as an information or communication gateway to connect with your patronage in a place where they already are and are comfortable is, for me, the entire idea behind library 2.0. She includes some links to libraries and library systems who are using MySpace in practical and active ways. You should definately go check them out.
It was one of those things where you see something for the first time, and then all of a sudden, it appears to be everywhere. And the problem was that I had no idea where it had come from. Who had created it?
It really wasn’t too incredibly tough to track down, but I fancy myself quite the sleuth all the same.
From a fansite, collecting them, I present Pon and Zi, by Jeff Thomas. It is quite charming.
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