Please keep in mind something from a couple of days ago...
"'Smart genes' prove elusive - Study of more than 100,000 people finds three genetic variants for IQ — but their effects are maddeningly small." http://www.nature.com/news/sma...
This twins study shows that general intelligence and academic achievement are affected by many different "aptitudes", not just "smart." Taken together with the Nature commentary, suggests that intelligence is just a part, maybe even a small part, of achievement.
If only this could seep into the general consciousness of the masses, then we might not have so many students think they cannot do something because they are not "smart enough."
Add another vote for using a tablet! I use a Win8 tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro 5130 BayTrail) with digitizer. I can write directly on PowerPoint without having my back to the classroom. The software and hardware for smartboards and other edutech peripherals like mobis are clunky and out of date. Game level editors are easier and more intuitive to use than the software that is provided.
I run my tablet through Air Parrot and Reflector running on an ancient desktop hooked up to the projector. This implements AirPlay (wireless mirroring) and allows me to unplug and walk through the class. Due to the Bay Trail CPU and the ancient desktop (AMD 3800+ X2), my framerate is pretty low (5-10 fps). It's good enough for PowerPoint, but I have to go to the desktop to run videos. If needed, I can use miniHDMI out and output directly to the projector through VGA/DVI/HDMI. I can even replace an ELMO since the tablet has cameras. I just place my tablet on a stand and switch to the camera app.
Tablets are SO much more versatile than a smartboard, and way easier to use.
FWIW, I am a public high school physics teacher who has taught physics to the bottom half and top half of the student population. The school I teach at is majority minority with a population that identifies as Caucasian at around 30% and African-American around 40%.
Nearly ALL students (and teachers for that matter) would like to see how they rank against others. Nearly all students also want their exact rank to be a secret. Highest grade, lowest grade, highest average or lowest average does not matter. One of the skills I had to learn was how to DISCRETELY pull struggling students aside to give them pep talks and advice on what they could do to improve their grades.
The struggling kids are shamed even if they publicly tell everyone they are ranked 99 out of 100. Adding another bad grade is just another poke at an open wound. ACTING stupid is okay if everyone thinks you are smarter than you look. No one wants to BE stupid. By being discrete, I've gotten quite a few that would do work for me.
I've also had to learn when and how to give kudos to the top achievers. For honor students, its a competition. Unless you are in the top 3, there is some shame associated to being "only" 5th. Knowing someone's rank is a little bit like knowing someone's true name in fantasy universes: there is some power in that knowledge.
Dealing with teenagers is like the super-position principle: it works until it doesn't.
I like this calculator (I have the plus variant), too. It's a great scientific calculator and can do integrals, too. It has a constants library as requested by the OP and a conversion library. It does stats.
The package says: AP, SAT I/II, PSAT, NMSQT, ACT, and is listed on the NCEES website as acceptable.
The only issue I've had is that you never know when the battery has died on the thing until the lights get too dim and it shuts down.
However, if you actually read the Tech Report's review of the GTX 670, you will find they say the exact opposite. The GTX 670 has ridiculously low latency compared to the Radeon 6990 and just a bit lower than the 7950 and 7990.
It is not unreasonable, just inconvenient. The work laptop is for work. That is why they issued one to the OP. Personal stuff should be done on your personal stuff.
I remember reading that Cell article when sonic hedgehog was first published. It made me chuckle when I got to the part where they cite Sega, since I had a great time playing Sonic 1 on the Genesis at university.
so is there another clock that turns on this clock?
My guess is yes, there is something else. It may not be a protein but a small nuclear RNA.
but when new cells form in that area weeks later, how do they know their place?
Molecular landmarks sort of like what makes one intersection different from another even if both have a coffee shop, a fast food place, and a gas station. The landmarks could be on the cells, on the extracellular matrix, a diffusable protein gradient, or some other way to differentiate an environment.
Is the HOX system reused to control the layout of my arm down to five jointed fingers? If not, what takes its place at lower levels?
Actually, they are. Nature likes to re-purpose genes temporally and spacially to do more than 1 thing when in the correct environment. Scientists have a decent understanding of how fingers in a mouse and a rat are made. It's quite interesting how expression of one Hox gene creates fingers while the another one is required to create the space between our fingers.
Precisely. From the abstract and press release, the authors imply that the opening of the super-coiled DNA is necessary and sufficient for the HOX genes to be temporally regulated. Now parsimony and K.I.S.S. usually are the correct ways of thinking about things, but based on what we already know from 10 years ago, simple unwinding can not be the temporal mechanism.
tl;dr summary: We still don't know what starts the cascade of temporal regulation. I don't think this work moves us very far upstream in the regulatory chain.
A caveat as I write this critique, I have only read the linked article and the abstract of the original scientific article, not the full Science article. Also, I'm a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology from 2000.
If unwinding the super-coiled DNA is considered the chronometer for embryonic segmentation, what makes the DNA unwind at such a specific time? I'm not sure how much new light is shed by this work. We've known for >20 years that transcription factors help "open" DNA for the transcription process. We've also known for >20 years that HOX genes in their clusters are the masters of structural differentiation. Put these two facts together and we can see it should be obvious that the HOX genes need to be "opened" sequentially.
In the end, we are left with the still burning question of "What controls the HOX genes and their clusters?"
A single game drought in early 2002 is somehow strong enough evidence for the author to verify his hypothesis. There is no pattern since the data analysis only began using information from 2001, and there is only a single gap. Not only that, the Wii was released a full 4 years later. If you believe his guess, then Nintendo started making Wii exclusive games approximately 3 months after releasing the Gamecube.
Due to the known lack of software support for the Gamecube, a more likely scenario is that lack of interest in the Gamecube prior to its release is a main component of the game release gap.
Completely agree with the parent. Tron was a movie that showed imagination about the inner workings of computers and networks. Tron Legacy grounded too much of the inner workings with the Real World. That is my main problem with the movie. The plot devices used to ramp up tension were mostly problems that exist in the Real World, but shouldn't in The Grid (e.g. the crash landing). The original movie got away with it, since Kevin Flynn had to learn how to be a User. In Tron Legacy, Kevin Flynn has been a User in The Grid for over 20 years. He should know how to make things in The Grid. Sam Flynn is part of the computer generation. He should have been experimenting with being a User from the get-go, but he does nothing User-like in the whole film. The is especially galling since he grew up listening to User stories from his dad.
Another weakness with the movie was the dialogue, but the original Tron's dialogue was just as bad. In addition, the big plot hole of "why" reintegration was bad. That plot device came out of nowhere with a single throw away line midway through the movie. Finally, I found Olivia Wilde was horribly miscast for the role of Quorra, and/or the writers couldn't figure out whether Quorra should be a sex symbol, an innocent, a little girl, a world-weary survivor, or all of the above. I guess Quorra was just a poorly conceived character.
Since my experience is primarily in molecular and computational biology, my opinions are obviously biased towards those fields. I have worked in both academia and industry (i.e. >15 years of "Science" experience with 9 years at the PhD level). In my opinion, you should be concentrating on these science skills in upper grade level high school (11-12 grades, preferably just 12).
1) Really get to know MS Office or some other package of word processing (with references support, like Endnote), spreadsheet, and presentation software. You will need a good understanding of the word processor to write grants, reports, and manuscripts. A good understanding of the spreadsheet to organize and analyze your data, with special attention on doing correct statistical analysis. A good understanding of the presentation software for... presentations. Macs or Windows since it doesn't matter.
2) Really know how to use websites such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and http://expasy.org/. The biological science world revolves around biomolecule and biopolymer databases. Then, make them find manuscripts in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed and evaluate them. They also need to learn to evaluate the quality of the information that they find.
3) Make them do journal club. That will hit all levels of Bloom's taxonomy, is student-centered, and buzzword compliant!
Other skills that maybe useful:
3) Entering, searching, and retrieving information from a SQL-like database. Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL servers are everywhere in both academia and industry. Maybe industry has enough resources to create a frontend for their scientists, but most likely they will have to wait for the comuputer analyst group to provide the data you want. Better to ask for read access and do it yourself. Any operating system can be used to access the data. MySQL and PostgreSQL are well supported in Linux.
4) Industry is moving to Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) and large data generating academic labs are also using LIMS. I don't know if there are free/low-cost LIMS software available, but this would be extremely nice exposure considering most universities won't have such a system for undergraduates. Most LIMS are web-based so it really doesn't matter about the front-end. The back-end is probably Linux or Windows Server.
5) In academia, knowing Linux/Unix/BSD is very useful as most academic software packages are made to run on a Unix-like OS. MacOS X support is actually pretty decent for academic software due to its BSD underpinnings. CygWin is a must if you want to run on Windows. Academics program for the computers that they have, and they mostly have Macs and Unix-like systems.
5) Programming languages that are used extensively by computational biologists are C/C++, PERL, PYTHON, JAVA, and Fortran (more legacy now). From what I saw, PERL and PYTHON dominate on the bioinformatics side.
As for hardware/OS... For computational biology or computers in biology, Windows is winning that market share. Macs are pretty much only found in academia and mainly for MS Office. They can be used as front-ends obviously, but the general trend of specialized software is to run on XP, for now. I don't know how many science software developers have moved their code to support Win7 natively, but probably not many as these companies are rather slow in adopting new tech. Still, obtaining these licenses is pretty much impossible for a high school. I doubt even the district could find the budget for them.
Setting a Linux cluster for computational number crunching is seen very often in academia and probably in industry, too. So, maybe you can salvage some of the older computers and turn them into a small computational cluster. However, setting up things like this may be impractical with your IT department...
Overall, I think it is very ambitious to provide "real world" science
I agree. There have only been a few peripherals that I can think of that have succeeded.
Dual Shock - became standard equipment for the later PS1's Dual Shock 3 - became standard equipment for later PS3's Guitar Hero guitar maybe the Rock Band stuff.
I like my GunCon and Street Fighter TE Fightstick, but I'd be hesitant to call them truly successful. Both are pretty much niche controllers and probably are/were profitable.
The Move controller has a high barrier to entry since it requires an Eye and the ball controller that comes in a $100 start pack. The "nunchuk" is sold separately, or you can use your existing DS3/6-Axis as a stand-in. I don't think this will be more than a niche and may not be profitable.
I never put much stock into the psychological games retailers play to get you to buy products until I went into a Circuit City. Whoever they got to design their stores obviously didn't understand what makes people feel at ease and happy. Every time I stepped into a CC, I couldn't wait to get the hell out. Something about the layout, the ceiling, and/or the lighting just made me feel uncomfortable. Then on course, you had the staff. When you wanted help, they were no where around. When you wanted to be left alone, they came in droves.
I admit their online->in store pickup functioned much smoother than Best Buy's.
I see this as a marker of just how mainstream anime has become. Back when there was only a few thousand people who knew what anime was, the studios probably didn't care. Back then, the cost of going after fansubbers when potential profit was near zero was just throwing money away. Now, millions know about anime, and there is potential profit at stake. The anime studios don't need the free advertising effect of fansubs, especially now that they have real advertising channels to play with.
Thanks for the link to the Wiki article. I found it funny that "The Audio Critic" offered up one of the systems. I used to read that magazine because many of the articles and reviews were written by IEEE audio engineers. I loved how they used a "cheap" $200 Sherwood receiver as their gold standard when comparing kilobuck-plus amps! I'm sure they put up that Mark Levinson ML-2 knowing full well that Carver would be able to duplicate it's sound.
This works using action points, which when used up will leave you with only real-time fighting until they charge back up again. If you're not in to all-out killing, Bethesda says you'll also be able to play through the game by being stealthy, or even talking your way out of trouble.
That sounds horrible. The combat systems sounds like Max Payne meets KotOR, not Fallout. Also, the ability to be stealthy or charismatic shouldn't be bonus ways of doing things, they should be considered there by default. Not having those choices would be greatly detrimental to a Fallout game.
I hope it's not like Oblivion. I thought Oblivion was a terrible game to play. They totally flubbed the combat system and the leveling up/reward system. Combat was nothing more than mash the action button until the monster died or kite the monster until it died. And you did alot of combat unless you enchanted yourself up some chameleon wear. The reward system was utter crap. Common highway robbers with Ebony? When even the lowest beggar wears discarded Glass items, Oblivion has reached the Age of Plenty!
Obsidian seems to have nailed down the atmosphere and the look of Fallout. I'm sure the world will be interesting to explore, and the storyline will be good. However, these rumored gameplay elements just makes me sad.
It had previously been recognised that asexual animals and plants can evolve through mutations into another species, but only into one species and at the cost of its original form. Bdelloid rotifers have displayed the ability to evolve into many different forms.
When does a mutation in an individual immediately cause the entire species to suddenly evolve into another species?
Also, sexual reproduction != evolution. I was taught sexual reproduction made the process of evolution or speciation more efficient, but was not necessary for either process to occur. Even the classic experiment of forcing bacteria to become resistant to an antibiotic shows that sexual reproduction is not needed, especially if you use an F(-) strain. This experiment, which is probably done by many high school students in the US these days, also "refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species."
I sure hope the actual article in PLoS doesn't use the same assumptions and hyperbole as this layman article. If it does, then it's really much ado about nothing.
I'm amazed at what these kids were able to accomplish. How much support did they have? What schools do they attend? How much money were they granted to accomplish their research?
While doing my senior research project in college and as a graduate student in a biomedical research lab, I have seen the good and the bad of high school science projects. The PI would introduce some kid to the lab and say they were there to work on their science fair project. Usually, the kid's parents would be a colleague or a friend of the PI. We, as the lab, would generally accept the kid, as if they were any other student or post-doc coming to the lab for help.
Some of these projects were done by really bright kids who were eager to learn and do the project. Obviously, having access to state of the art equipment and a full range of materials available in a productive research lab gave these projects a huge boost in what could done. Of course, these kids also got great support by engaging in scientific dialogs with grad students and post-docs. Most of the time, these kids just wanted to be pointed in the right direction.
The dark side of this were projects conceived by a parent who were experts in their field and friends with your PI. Some of the work were done by lab members, not under direct orders from your PI, but just get the kid out their hair so they could work on their own projects. Obviously, the kid still has to be bright in order to adequately present the project. Unlike the examples above, these kids just wanted the answers given to them.
I don't know any of these kids or their projects. I do not mean to tarnish their achievements, specifically. However, I have become quite disillusioned with high school science fairs in general.
...an engrossing story strung together by a bare minimum of gameplay... and it completely works. Gameplay is usually a much stronger attractive force to play the game again. I guess I'm not one of those that play a game just for the story line.
Slashdot Mirror
Please keep in mind something from a couple of days ago...
"'Smart genes' prove elusive - Study of more than 100,000 people finds three genetic variants for IQ — but their effects are maddeningly small." http://www.nature.com/news/sma...
This twins study shows that general intelligence and academic achievement are affected by many different "aptitudes", not just "smart." Taken together with the Nature commentary, suggests that intelligence is just a part, maybe even a small part, of achievement.
If only this could seep into the general consciousness of the masses, then we might not have so many students think they cannot do something because they are not "smart enough."
Add another vote for using a tablet! I use a Win8 tablet (Dell Venue 11 Pro 5130 BayTrail) with digitizer. I can write directly on PowerPoint without having my back to the classroom. The software and hardware for smartboards and other edutech peripherals like mobis are clunky and out of date. Game level editors are easier and more intuitive to use than the software that is provided.
I run my tablet through Air Parrot and Reflector running on an ancient desktop hooked up to the projector. This implements AirPlay (wireless mirroring) and allows me to unplug and walk through the class. Due to the Bay Trail CPU and the ancient desktop (AMD 3800+ X2), my framerate is pretty low (5-10 fps). It's good enough for PowerPoint, but I have to go to the desktop to run videos. If needed, I can use miniHDMI out and output directly to the projector through VGA/DVI/HDMI. I can even replace an ELMO since the tablet has cameras. I just place my tablet on a stand and switch to the camera app.
Tablets are SO much more versatile than a smartboard, and way easier to use.
FWIW, I am a public high school physics teacher who has taught physics to the bottom half and top half of the student population. The school I teach at is majority minority with a population that identifies as Caucasian at around 30% and African-American around 40%.
Nearly ALL students (and teachers for that matter) would like to see how they rank against others. Nearly all students also want their exact rank to be a secret. Highest grade, lowest grade, highest average or lowest average does not matter. One of the skills I had to learn was how to DISCRETELY pull struggling students aside to give them pep talks and advice on what they could do to improve their grades.
The struggling kids are shamed even if they publicly tell everyone they are ranked 99 out of 100. Adding another bad grade is just another poke at an open wound. ACTING stupid is okay if everyone thinks you are smarter than you look. No one wants to BE stupid. By being discrete, I've gotten quite a few that would do work for me.
I've also had to learn when and how to give kudos to the top achievers. For honor students, its a competition. Unless you are in the top 3, there is some shame associated to being "only" 5th. Knowing someone's rank is a little bit like knowing someone's true name in fantasy universes: there is some power in that knowledge.
Dealing with teenagers is like the super-position principle: it works until it doesn't.
I like this calculator (I have the plus variant), too. It's a great scientific calculator and can do integrals, too. It has a constants library as requested by the OP and a conversion library. It does stats.
The package says: AP, SAT I/II, PSAT, NMSQT, ACT, and is listed on the NCEES website as acceptable.
The only issue I've had is that you never know when the battery has died on the thing until the lights get too dim and it shuts down.
However, if you actually read the Tech Report's review of the GTX 670, you will find they say the exact opposite. The GTX 670 has ridiculously low latency compared to the Radeon 6990 and just a bit lower than the 7950 and 7990.
As clearly seen on page 3 of the 670's review.
It is not unreasonable, just inconvenient. The work laptop is for work. That is why they issued one to the OP. Personal stuff should be done on your personal stuff.
I remember reading that Cell article when sonic hedgehog was first published. It made me chuckle when I got to the part where they cite Sega, since I had a great time playing Sonic 1 on the Genesis at university.
so is there another clock that turns on this clock?
My guess is yes, there is something else. It may not be a protein but a small nuclear RNA.
but when new cells form in that area weeks later, how do they know their place?
Molecular landmarks sort of like what makes one intersection different from another even if both have a coffee shop, a fast food place, and a gas station. The landmarks could be on the cells, on the extracellular matrix, a diffusable protein gradient, or some other way to differentiate an environment.
Is the HOX system reused to control the layout of my arm down to five jointed fingers? If not, what takes its place at lower levels?
Actually, they are. Nature likes to re-purpose genes temporally and spacially to do more than 1 thing when in the correct environment. Scientists have a decent understanding of how fingers in a mouse and a rat are made. It's quite interesting how expression of one Hox gene creates fingers while the another one is required to create the space between our fingers.
Precisely. From the abstract and press release, the authors imply that the opening of the super-coiled DNA is necessary and sufficient for the HOX genes to be temporally regulated. Now parsimony and K.I.S.S. usually are the correct ways of thinking about things, but based on what we already know from 10 years ago, simple unwinding can not be the temporal mechanism.
tl;dr summary: We still don't know what starts the cascade of temporal regulation. I don't think this work moves us very far upstream in the regulatory chain.
A caveat as I write this critique, I have only read the linked article and the abstract of the original scientific article, not the full Science article.
Also, I'm a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology from 2000.
If unwinding the super-coiled DNA is considered the chronometer for embryonic segmentation, what makes the DNA unwind at such a specific time? I'm not sure how much new light is shed by this work. We've known for >20 years that transcription factors help "open" DNA for the transcription process. We've also known for >20 years that HOX genes in their clusters are the masters of structural differentiation. Put these two facts together and we can see it should be obvious that the HOX genes need to be "opened" sequentially.
In the end, we are left with the still burning question of "What controls the HOX genes and their clusters?"
Yeah, but devices that don't support iOS 4.3 will remain unpatched and vulnerable. These include: iPod Touch (1G & 2G) and iPhone 3G and older.
A single game drought in early 2002 is somehow strong enough evidence for the author to verify his hypothesis. There is no pattern since the data analysis only began using information from 2001, and there is only a single gap. Not only that, the Wii was released a full 4 years later. If you believe his guess, then Nintendo started making Wii exclusive games approximately 3 months after releasing the Gamecube.
Due to the known lack of software support for the Gamecube, a more likely scenario is that lack of interest in the Gamecube prior to its release is a main component of the game release gap.
Completely agree with the parent. Tron was a movie that showed imagination about the inner workings of computers and networks. Tron Legacy grounded too much of the inner workings with the Real World. That is my main problem with the movie. The plot devices used to ramp up tension were mostly problems that exist in the Real World, but shouldn't in The Grid (e.g. the crash landing). The original movie got away with it, since Kevin Flynn had to learn how to be a User. In Tron Legacy, Kevin Flynn has been a User in The Grid for over 20 years. He should know how to make things in The Grid. Sam Flynn is part of the computer generation. He should have been experimenting with being a User from the get-go, but he does nothing User-like in the whole film. The is especially galling since he grew up listening to User stories from his dad.
Another weakness with the movie was the dialogue, but the original Tron's dialogue was just as bad. In addition, the big plot hole of "why" reintegration was bad. That plot device came out of nowhere with a single throw away line midway through the movie. Finally, I found Olivia Wilde was horribly miscast for the role of Quorra, and/or the writers couldn't figure out whether Quorra should be a sex symbol, an innocent, a little girl, a world-weary survivor, or all of the above. I guess Quorra was just a poorly conceived character.
Don't forget, we've known about RNA editing for over a decade now...
Since my experience is primarily in molecular and computational biology, my opinions are obviously biased towards those fields. I have worked in both academia and industry (i.e. >15 years of "Science" experience with 9 years at the PhD level). In my opinion, you should be concentrating on these science skills in upper grade level high school (11-12 grades, preferably just 12).
1) Really get to know MS Office or some other package of word processing (with references support, like Endnote), spreadsheet, and presentation software. You will need a good understanding of the word processor to write grants, reports, and manuscripts. A good understanding of the spreadsheet to organize and analyze your data, with special attention on doing correct statistical analysis. A good understanding of the presentation software for ... presentations. Macs or Windows since it doesn't matter.
2) Really know how to use websites such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ and http://expasy.org/. The biological science world revolves around biomolecule and biopolymer databases. Then, make them find manuscripts in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed and evaluate them. They also need to learn to evaluate the quality of the information that they find.
3) Make them do journal club. That will hit all levels of Bloom's taxonomy, is student-centered, and buzzword compliant!
Other skills that maybe useful:
3) Entering, searching, and retrieving information from a SQL-like database. Oracle, MySQL, or PostgreSQL servers are everywhere in both academia and industry. Maybe industry has enough resources to create a frontend for their scientists, but most likely they will have to wait for the comuputer analyst group to provide the data you want. Better to ask for read access and do it yourself. Any operating system can be used to access the data. MySQL and PostgreSQL are well supported in Linux.
4) Industry is moving to Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) and large data generating academic labs are also using LIMS. I don't know if there are free/low-cost LIMS software available, but this would be extremely nice exposure considering most universities won't have such a system for undergraduates. Most LIMS are web-based so it really doesn't matter about the front-end. The back-end is probably Linux or Windows Server.
5) In academia, knowing Linux/Unix/BSD is very useful as most academic software packages are made to run on a Unix-like OS. MacOS X support is actually pretty decent for academic software due to its BSD underpinnings. CygWin is a must if you want to run on Windows. Academics program for the computers that they have, and they mostly have Macs and Unix-like systems.
5) Programming languages that are used extensively by computational biologists are C/C++, PERL, PYTHON, JAVA, and Fortran (more legacy now). From what I saw, PERL and PYTHON dominate on the bioinformatics side.
As for hardware/OS...
For computational biology or computers in biology, Windows is winning that market share. Macs are pretty much only found in academia and mainly for MS Office. They can be used as front-ends obviously, but the general trend of specialized software is to run on XP, for now. I don't know how many science software developers have moved their code to support Win7 natively, but probably not many as these companies are rather slow in adopting new tech. Still, obtaining these licenses is pretty much impossible for a high school. I doubt even the district could find the budget for them.
Setting a Linux cluster for computational number crunching is seen very often in academia and probably in industry, too. So, maybe you can salvage some of the older computers and turn them into a small computational cluster. However, setting up things like this may be impractical with your IT department...
Overall, I think it is very ambitious to provide "real world" science
I agree. There have only been a few peripherals that I can think of that have succeeded.
Dual Shock - became standard equipment for the later PS1's
Dual Shock 3 - became standard equipment for later PS3's
Guitar Hero guitar
maybe the Rock Band stuff.
I like my GunCon and Street Fighter TE Fightstick, but I'd be hesitant to call them truly successful. Both are pretty much niche controllers and probably are/were profitable.
The Move controller has a high barrier to entry since it requires an Eye and the ball controller that comes in a $100 start pack. The "nunchuk" is sold separately, or you can use your existing DS3/6-Axis as a stand-in. I don't think this will be more than a niche and may not be profitable.
I never put much stock into the psychological games retailers play to get you to buy products until I went into a Circuit City. Whoever they got to design their stores obviously didn't understand what makes people feel at ease and happy. Every time I stepped into a CC, I couldn't wait to get the hell out. Something about the layout, the ceiling, and/or the lighting just made me feel uncomfortable. Then on course, you had the staff. When you wanted help, they were no where around. When you wanted to be left alone, they came in droves.
I admit their online->in store pickup functioned much smoother than Best Buy's.
You forget about the bad part of ADB: it was powered. You had to shutdown your computer in order swap out a mouse, keyboard, joystick, or tablet.
Gates of Thunder and Lords of Thunder.
'nuff said.
I see this as a marker of just how mainstream anime has become. Back when there was only a few thousand people who knew what anime was, the studios probably didn't care. Back then, the cost of going after fansubbers when potential profit was near zero was just throwing money away. Now, millions know about anime, and there is potential profit at stake. The anime studios don't need the free advertising effect of fansubs, especially now that they have real advertising channels to play with.
Thanks for the link to the Wiki article. I found it funny that "The Audio Critic" offered up one of the systems. I used to read that magazine because many of the articles and reviews were written by IEEE audio engineers. I loved how they used a "cheap" $200 Sherwood receiver as their gold standard when comparing kilobuck-plus amps! I'm sure they put up that Mark Levinson ML-2 knowing full well that Carver would be able to duplicate it's sound.
That sounds horrible. The combat systems sounds like Max Payne meets KotOR, not Fallout. Also, the ability to be stealthy or charismatic shouldn't be bonus ways of doing things, they should be considered there by default. Not having those choices would be greatly detrimental to a Fallout game.
I hope it's not like Oblivion. I thought Oblivion was a terrible game to play. They totally flubbed the combat system and the leveling up/reward system. Combat was nothing more than mash the action button until the monster died or kite the monster until it died. And you did alot of combat unless you enchanted yourself up some chameleon wear. The reward system was utter crap. Common highway robbers with Ebony? When even the lowest beggar wears discarded Glass items, Oblivion has reached the Age of Plenty!
Obsidian seems to have nailed down the atmosphere and the look of Fallout. I'm sure the world will be interesting to explore, and the storyline will be good. However, these rumored gameplay elements just makes me sad.
When does a mutation in an individual immediately cause the entire species to suddenly evolve into another species?
Also, sexual reproduction != evolution. I was taught sexual reproduction made the process of evolution or speciation more efficient, but was not necessary for either process to occur. Even the classic experiment of forcing bacteria to become resistant to an antibiotic shows that sexual reproduction is not needed, especially if you use an F(-) strain. This experiment, which is probably done by many high school students in the US these days, also "refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species."
I sure hope the actual article in PLoS doesn't use the same assumptions and hyperbole as this layman article. If it does, then it's really much ado about nothing.
While doing my senior research project in college and as a graduate student in a biomedical research lab, I have seen the good and the bad of high school science projects. The PI would introduce some kid to the lab and say they were there to work on their science fair project. Usually, the kid's parents would be a colleague or a friend of the PI. We, as the lab, would generally accept the kid, as if they were any other student or post-doc coming to the lab for help.
Some of these projects were done by really bright kids who were eager to learn and do the project. Obviously, having access to state of the art equipment and a full range of materials available in a productive research lab gave these projects a huge boost in what could done. Of course, these kids also got great support by engaging in scientific dialogs with grad students and post-docs. Most of the time, these kids just wanted to be pointed in the right direction.
The dark side of this were projects conceived by a parent who were experts in their field and friends with your PI. Some of the work were done by lab members, not under direct orders from your PI, but just get the kid out their hair so they could work on their own projects. Obviously, the kid still has to be bright in order to adequately present the project. Unlike the examples above, these kids just wanted the answers given to them.
I don't know any of these kids or their projects. I do not mean to tarnish their achievements, specifically. However, I have become quite disillusioned with high school science fairs in general.
...an engrossing story strung together by a bare minimum of gameplay ... and it completely works.
Gameplay is usually a much stronger attractive force to play the game again. I guess I'm not one of those that play a game just for the story line.