I started asking myself what question I'd pose in a Slashdot
q&a, and realised it's one that wouldn't likely get a high
rating, so i'll pose it here:
Most(?) of the educational advantages of games seem
related to the fact that they're simulations, but
sims are usually educational even if they're not
games.
I see simulation as a new stage of the scientific
method in general-- we can test our hypotheses best
by simulating them. But in the social sciences,
this implies a pretty complete rejection of all
20thC theories-- Will Wright had to start from
scratch to build "The Sims".
So I'd ask Professor Gee if he sees any signs of a
more all-encompassing paradigm-shift around science
and simulation, with games sneaking in by
association?
I don't think the topic here really worked
in chat format-- the answers had to be
hasty and superficial. It's a great
candidate for a Slashdot-style Q&A, though.
Imagine taking an ethics course where the 'lab'
work involves playing thru various simulated
ethical challenges and comparing the outcomes
of different choices...?
To create such a sim will require precise analysis
of all the relevant psychological factors.
One of the trickiest is modeling self-knowledge--
perhaps the player's character could have its
own impulses that have to be understood and worked
with? [more]
To turn a Vietnam game into an educational
tool for teaching history, it needs to
capture the complexities on both sides--
the North Vietnamese's incredible tunnel
system, in particular, and on the American
side the lack of insight and intelligence.
So you definitely want to show warcrimes like
My Lai, but you want the simulation/model to
explain why things like that really happened, so
that players learn from them.
Incidentally, one of the most artistic pop
songs of the 20thC was Kate Bush's "Pull Out
the Pin", sung from the viewpoint of a Viet
Cong attacking Americans. [lyrics]
The interesting point is that junk DNA has
some still-unknown function, so the
disappointing figure of 30,000 genes
isn't as bad as we feared.
Regarding mice-etc, primates began as shrews
who climbed trees and developed their
eyesight, mammalian carnivores like cats
evolved much later from the shrews that
stayed on the ground.
There you go. Style (red ink) layered on top of a structure (headings). Structure first, style later.
No, the scribes messed about with red ink, trying different things, and headings was the one that seemed most 'right'. The structure couldn't even be conceived until a style existed that could express it.
This practice of structuring first and styling after predates Goldfarb and even the print industry. I can trace an immediate path of this practice all the way back to the Middle Ages. I expect pre-historians and archeologists can trace it back even further. Even to way before the early Egyptian civilisation.
240 BC: Callimachus's 'Pinakes' alphabetises authors in Alexandria library
77 AD: 1st abstracts of literature, for Pliny
250 AD: books (codex format) replacing scrolls
400 AD: 'Vergil Augusteus' 1st manuscript with decorative initial letters
789 AD: Charlemagne standardises on Alcuin's 'Carolingian miniscule' as official letter-forms of empire (early lowercase)
1000 AD: books use cursive script, alphabetical keywords, subject-indexing, underlining and varying letter-sizes to highlight commentary and section-divisions
1463: 1st title page, for Vatican
1467: 1st printed index
1470: 1st printed page-numbers
1500: parentheses invented
1501: 1st italics in Aldus Manutius's Virgil
1534: 1st printed comma in English
1553: 1st printed exclamation mark in English
1587: 1st printed asterisk and question-mark in England
Every serious author has a plan of the structure before they start writing.
First, most webpages are not structured into paragraphs and chapters-- they're many diverse bits of semi-related text arranged by intuition.
But here's a really simple counterexample: you're rereading something you just wrote, and you notice that the single space between two paragraphs is too narrow-- you want to widen it to express a logical jump, or a chronological one.
So should you have to go back and insert a new layer of structure between paragraphs and chapters? Why not just skip the extra line? A true Goldfarbian should define the new structure as something ideal, absolute and eternal, with the style applied separately. But in actual fact, the style comes first, and the structure is a hypothetical afterthought.
There are even breaks called chapters and sections.
But are there ever semantic/structural/stylistic units that overlap paragraph/section/chapter boundaries? Are there ever odd little exceptions that the creative authors have thrown in, with no pre-existing theory about what level of structure they embody?
Finnegans Wake [no apostrophe, sweetie] is just one book written by a drug-induced fogey.
White wine is not a drug, and 41yo is not a fogey. [info]
If the p element had been used widely, such cultural conventions could be taken into account by using culturally dependent stylesheets.
Where Goldfarb erred, imho, is in thinking that styles are arbitrary/secondary/inferior, and structures are absolute and superior. But styles are actually expressive, so revising them wholesale via stylesheets actually changes the impact of the document. Mediocre authors won't mind, perhaps, but serious authors should care how the document looks, and not surrender the details to a mechanical whim.
the markup that was used was so hard to make sense out of
I have a longterm project to solve this, generally: [theory]
You aren't thinking at the right level. The author doesn't want to add some whitespace because he has Enter Key Tourette's - there is a reason for adding the whitespace. The method of adding the whitespace depends on that reason.
Finally, you've nailed Goldfarb's Conjecture-- the untested hypothesis about the cognitive processes of authors. (That's what I reject.)
People don't really have structures in mind when they write, they arrange styles and whitespace to present their ideas as clearly as possible. I might try any old experiment that the medium allows, but Goldfarb wants to deny me that natural right.
a decryption of a single text is very unlikely....So permit me to be skeptical, as someone with a degree in the subject
If you've got special training, you've got an even greater responsibility not to make dismissive comments based on superficial investigation. Faucounau handles the available evidence with brilliant insight, and even if his reconstruction is false it sets the standard by which future efforts must be judged.
I know who he is, I'm just unfamiliar with his Conjecture.
It's just my pun on Goldbach's Conjecture in math.
the presentation of the document to the end user is a completely different topic to the file format applications use to transfer information to each other.
I think you're making a cognitive claim, even there (about the cognitive relationship between structures and styles).
I'm saying nothing about Goldfarb. You asked if there was a benefit to using EM for emphasis instead of misusing I. I pointed out one tangible benefit.
Your claim of 'misuse' is a variant on Goldfarb's Conjecture. But the 'value' you claim is derived purely from an arbitrary choice by an imaginary search-engineeer, so it holds no water for me.
How is it "insanely anti-human"?
If someone authoring HTML by hand wants to skip some whitespace, multiple Ps (or BRs) is an entirely natural and reasonable way to do it. The W3C in their geekissimost devotion to Goldfarb have declared that empty paragraphs are illogical, and forced much less intuitive solutions.
Basically, separating the link from what it refers to is incredibly bad. It makes it harder to work out what it's referring to.
My theory is that there's three important dimensions in labelling a link: first the topic, then the resource-type (etext, image, etc), and last the rating (good or bad).
Topic usually doesn't change within a sentence, so I like to add a 'text button' at the end that augments the topic-info with the resource-type. [examples]
I usually skip the rating unless it's especialy good or bad.
If you're referring to an organisation or source of information, it's very useful only helpful to put it there.
The problem is, you can't specify the resource type-- if it's a book-title, are you linking a full etext, or a review, or the Amazon page? For an organisation, you can guess it will be their official website, but this is not reliable. (I make an exception when the sentence mentions the resource type, like "There's a great weblog I stumbled upon...")
If you find any inline links to be too intrusive, just set your user agent
They reduce readability for everyone, even if the color is tweaked, so the author should look for a better way....imho.
Certainly, I'm all in favor of semantic markup, but Goldfarb's Conjecture that styles should naturally be layered on top of these semantics is just deluded, imho. (The best approach to semantic markup would even be visible to screen scrapers, I think.)
As a Web author, your role is to describe the structure of the content. If you use proper markup, such as H1 for headings and P for paragraphs, then browsers can present your content in an appropriate manner whether it be visual or non-visual.
Goldfarb's Conjecture has been repeated so often and so mindlessly that everyone's forgotten it's a hypothesis about human cognition that's never actually been tested. Do writers and/or readers really organise a text as a hierarchy of nested structural containers, and then secondarily apply styles to those structures? Are there such structures for every style, and are they defined independently of the styles? Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I, or from P instead of BR-BR?
The emperor's-new-clothes quality is even clearer when you look at the Semantic Web ideal of tagging semantic components like dates or phone-numbers-- these almost never have distinctive markup styles, so the creaking mechanism of Goldfarbian markup is massive overkill.
Just using simple, clear visual markup is as accessible as anything else. HTML 2.0 forever!
Slashdot Mirror
It's all relative, but compared to Stone, Fleming definitely writes for adolescents.
1991: gopher
1992: Linux, Krol's "Whole Internet Guide"
1993: Apple Newton, Mosaic, Andrea Chen, Doom
1994: Bill Bixby haiku
1995: Yahoo, Greencard spam, Netscape IPO, DejaNews, eBay, Altavista
1996: JenniCam, Palm Pilot, WebTV
1997: dancing baby, Slashdot, 1st weblog
1998: Drudge Report, Google, HampsterDance, iMac, DMCA, PayPal
1999: TiVo, Everquest, Napster, Epinions, Y2K
2000: AOL-TW, bubble pops, ArsDigita University, All Your Base
[Lots more]
Most(?) of the educational advantages of games seem related to the fact that they're simulations, but sims are usually educational even if they're not games.
I see simulation as a new stage of the scientific method in general-- we can test our hypotheses best by simulating them. But in the social sciences, this implies a pretty complete rejection of all 20thC theories-- Will Wright had to start from scratch to build "The Sims".
So I'd ask Professor Gee if he sees any signs of a more all-encompassing paradigm-shift around science and simulation, with games sneaking in by association?
I don't think the topic here really worked in chat format-- the answers had to be hasty and superficial. It's a great candidate for a Slashdot-style Q&A, though.
To create such a sim will require precise analysis of all the relevant psychological factors.
One of the trickiest is modeling self-knowledge-- perhaps the player's character could have its own impulses that have to be understood and worked with? [more]
So you definitely want to show warcrimes like My Lai, but you want the simulation/model to explain why things like that really happened, so that players learn from them.
Incidentally, one of the most artistic pop songs of the 20thC was Kate Bush's "Pull Out the Pin", sung from the viewpoint of a Viet Cong attacking Americans. [lyrics]
Regarding mice-etc, primates began as shrews who climbed trees and developed their eyesight, mammalian carnivores like cats evolved much later from the shrews that stayed on the ground.
My semi-exhaustive collection of Iceman resources
Sig test, don't know where else to go.
No, the scribes messed about with red ink, trying different things, and headings was the one that seemed most 'right'. The structure couldn't even be conceived until a style existed that could express it.
Me too:
2500 BC: papyrus and ink for writing; red ink indicates headings, new paragraphs
560 BC: Anaximander 1st book in prose
450 BC: Protagoras classifies sentences as wishes, questions, statements, or commands; Damon analyses iambs, trochees, dactyls
300 BC: Zeno distinguishes phonetics, morphology, semantics, syntax
270 BC: Chrysippus distinguishes 5 cases for nouns: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, vocative
250 BC: Romans innovate serifs for inscriptions
240 BC: Callimachus's 'Pinakes' alphabetises authors in Alexandria library
77 AD: 1st abstracts of literature, for Pliny
250 AD: books (codex format) replacing scrolls
400 AD: 'Vergil Augusteus' 1st manuscript with decorative initial letters
789 AD: Charlemagne standardises on Alcuin's 'Carolingian miniscule' as official letter-forms of empire (early lowercase)
1000 AD: books use cursive script, alphabetical keywords, subject-indexing, underlining and varying letter-sizes to highlight commentary and section-divisions
1463: 1st title page, for Vatican
1467: 1st printed index
1470: 1st printed page-numbers
1500: parentheses invented
1501: 1st italics in Aldus Manutius's Virgil
1534: 1st printed comma in English
1553: 1st printed exclamation mark in English
1587: 1st printed asterisk and question-mark in England
First, most webpages are not structured into paragraphs and chapters-- they're many diverse bits of semi-related text arranged by intuition.
But here's a really simple counterexample: you're rereading something you just wrote, and you notice that the single space between two paragraphs is too narrow-- you want to widen it to express a logical jump, or a chronological one.
So should you have to go back and insert a new layer of structure between paragraphs and chapters? Why not just skip the extra line? A true Goldfarbian should define the new structure as something ideal, absolute and eternal, with the style applied separately. But in actual fact, the style comes first, and the structure is a hypothetical afterthought.
But are there ever semantic/structural/stylistic units that overlap paragraph/section/chapter boundaries? Are there ever odd little exceptions that the creative authors have thrown in, with no pre-existing theory about what level of structure they embody?
Finnegans Wake [no apostrophe, sweetie] is just one book written by a drug-induced fogey.
White wine is not a drug, and 41yo is not a fogey. [info]
Where Goldfarb erred, imho, is in thinking that styles are arbitrary/secondary/inferior, and structures are absolute and superior. But styles are actually expressive, so revising them wholesale via stylesheets actually changes the impact of the document. Mediocre authors won't mind, perhaps, but serious authors should care how the document looks, and not surrender the details to a mechanical whim.
the markup that was used was so hard to make sense out of
I have a longterm project to solve this, generally: [theory]
Finally, you've nailed Goldfarb's Conjecture-- the untested hypothesis about the cognitive processes of authors. (That's what I reject.)
People don't really have structures in mind when they write, they arrange styles and whitespace to present their ideas as clearly as possible. I might try any old experiment that the medium allows, but Goldfarb wants to deny me that natural right.
If you've got special training, you've got an even greater responsibility not to make dismissive comments based on superficial investigation. Faucounau handles the available evidence with brilliant insight, and even if his reconstruction is false it sets the standard by which future efforts must be judged.
It's just my pun on Goldbach's Conjecture in math.
the presentation of the document to the end user is a completely different topic to the file format applications use to transfer information to each other.
I think you're making a cognitive claim, even there (about the cognitive relationship between structures and styles).
I'm saying nothing about Goldfarb. You asked if there was a benefit to using EM for emphasis instead of misusing I. I pointed out one tangible benefit.
Your claim of 'misuse' is a variant on Goldfarb's Conjecture. But the 'value' you claim is derived purely from an arbitrary choice by an imaginary search-engineeer, so it holds no water for me.
How is it "insanely anti-human"?
If someone authoring HTML by hand wants to skip some whitespace, multiple Ps (or BRs) is an entirely natural and reasonable way to do it. The W3C in their geekissimost devotion to Goldfarb have declared that empty paragraphs are illogical, and forced much less intuitive solutions.
Goldfarb invented SGML, and initiated the theory that structures naturally precede styles.
but the person you are replying to isn't talking about human cognition. It's about presenting content appropriately.
It's only appropriate if it conforms to human cognition.
[Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I,]
All visitors do if the search engine they use pays more attention to emphasized text.
So you're trying to use this arbitrary choice to justify Goldfarb???
Series of BR elements should render as a single linebreak in conformant user-agents.
I'm sure you're thinking of Ps, but either way it's insanely anti-human. Multiple Ps should absolutely skip extra lines.
Do you think that whitespace has no effect on the readability of a document?
It's you and TimBL that are denigrating whitespace, not me.
There's no reason to burden the published page with authoring hints.
It will also make a difference for blind users when tool builders can actually count on it.
I think this oft-repeated claim is a hoax.
My theory is that there's three important dimensions in labelling a link: first the topic, then the resource-type (etext, image, etc), and last the rating (good or bad).
Topic usually doesn't change within a sentence, so I like to add a 'text button' at the end that augments the topic-info with the resource-type. [examples]
I usually skip the rating unless it's especialy good or bad.
If you're referring to an organisation or source of information, it's very useful only helpful to put it there.
The problem is, you can't specify the resource type-- if it's a book-title, are you linking a full etext, or a review, or the Amazon page? For an organisation, you can guess it will be their official website, but this is not reliable. (I make an exception when the sentence mentions the resource type, like "There's a great weblog I stumbled upon...")
If you find any inline links to be too intrusive, just set your user agent
They reduce readability for everyone, even if the color is tweaked, so the author should look for a better way....imho.
Certainly, I'm all in favor of semantic markup, but Goldfarb's Conjecture that styles should naturally be layered on top of these semantics is just deluded, imho. (The best approach to semantic markup would even be visible to screen scrapers, I think.)
Goldfarb's Conjecture has been repeated so often and so mindlessly that everyone's forgotten it's a hypothesis about human cognition that's never actually been tested. Do writers and/or readers really organise a text as a hierarchy of nested structural containers, and then secondarily apply styles to those structures? Are there such structures for every style, and are they defined independently of the styles? Does a blind-reader really benefit from EM instead of I, or from P instead of BR-BR?
The emperor's-new-clothes quality is even clearer when you look at the Semantic Web ideal of tagging semantic components like dates or phone-numbers-- these almost never have distinctive markup styles, so the creaking mechanism of Goldfarbian markup is massive overkill.
Just using simple, clear visual markup is as accessible as anything else. HTML 2.0 forever!
Either you're confusing Grapheus with Agamemnon, or you're a shallow and superficial judge.
Your own ineptitude and irresponsibility is best illustrated by the fact you can't tell Grapheus from Agamemnon.