Even better than playing biases against each other is finding information for yourself. I saw an interview once with Noam Chomsky where the interviewer asked him about some negative press he had received. Chomsky replied to all such questions with "I recommend that of those claims, you only believe what you can verify independently." Chomsky recognized that responding to bias with your own bias is meaningless, especially to the viewer. The two major parties (and now to some extent the press) want you to buy into a false dichotomy. The line of reasoning goes that Democrats have one version of the truth and Republicans another. The truth, therefore, must be somewhere in between. The major parties like it because it keeps attention on them, and the press likes it because it's conflict and exciting. That's why you read stories about Mitt Romney blowing up at a reporter (it was pretty tame) or Bill Clinton blowing up at a reporter (it was pretty tame.)
The problem with this is that the people who own the two major parties keep moving them closer to each other, without regard for the truth. To illustrate this, look at who is championing telecom immunity for the current administration.
Of course game reviews can't be trusted. Or I guess they can be trusted insofar as your experience matches the reviewer's. It's like movie reviews- you find a reviewer who seems to share your likes and dislikes and stay with them. This is, of course, if you look at reviews as purely a buying guide. For game criticism of a more literary caliber there's no real source that I know of. Frankly I don't think most games would stand up to that, and I've been playing games since 1980.
Don't forget about working conditions. A union provides a faster, more local way to apply pressure to fix health and safety hazards than phoning up OSHA. If pressure is needed. Just the existence of the union and the knowledge that the union is aware of a hazardous condition expedites the repair effort.
That's actually not true. Read Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston. There is most defintely such a thing as a free lunch, but only for those who can afford the cover charge.
A better platitude for this occasion is "you have to spend money to make money."
My dad brought home a computer from work in three parts, one of which was cooled by a powerful, noisy fan. It had a monochrome green monitor and we played Hunt the Wumpus on it. If you don't know, in Hunt The Wumpus you're a spelunker in a cave system inhabited by teh dread Wumpus. You only have 1 arrow, and you can tell by looking at the blood on the walls whether the wumpus is in a nearby room. If you walk into the room with the Wumpus, you're dead. If you fire your arrow into an empty room you're doomed. Very intense.
Then later we had the same game for the TI-994a on a cartridge. I used to play it in different languages, pretty fun!
Other shoutouts go to Yie Ar Kung Fu in demo mode on the way out of the grocery store and Speedball for the PC (the very first one with 8-bit graphics.)
One wonders how this kind of thing happens. School boards have a range of non-curricular obligations, and aren't really tasked with curriculum at all. I recently had a chance to interview some of the people running for the local school board. I was part of a committee and asked two questions: 1) How does the candidate separate "general policy" from micromanagement? Most of the candidates made that distinction and I wanted to know how exactly they did it. A couple of them said they didn't want to micromanage but then described what they would do and it was micromanagement. So that was odd. Related to this question was number 2 "Do you feel that it is the board's role to promote any particular cultural values?" The candidates all said no, but one of them had included a transcript of some questions another community group had asked him. He said he thought there should be one Biology course with evolution and a different, separate course with Intelligent Design. In the interview, he didn't go that far, saying only that he didn't have a problem with ID in bio classes. Some other candidates said they didn't mind ID in a social studies class, or the Bible as literature, which was more than I expected. The guy who wants two Bio classes goes to Liberty University in their Distance Learning program. It's a project they give to their undergraduates: get elected to local office and start pushing the Liberty University agenda.
We were interviewing to determine the union endorsee. In his district he'll run unopposed if he wins the primary so it was an important decision. We can do things like this and our endorsement does count for something around here because Maryland isn't a "Right-to-Work" state like Florida.
I was about to post that "probably blah blah blah (read parent)" but here it is confirmed. I can't imagine a school administrator going looking for trouble in this way. This is getting attention on slashdot, and it's just the kind of thing that's going to be discussed at PTA meetings and faculty meetings and teacher union meetings. I was at a union representative assembly a few weeks ago, and our lawyer was up there cautioning us not to play WOW with our students because of the real money transactions that sometimes take place. For some folks not familiar with technology AT ALL, the whole computer thing looks like a minefield. What school administration or district administration wants this notoriety?
As an aside, there's a 19-yr old man running for our school board, and that's just the demographic for Facebook. He says he wants increased security and a class on world religions, but I suspect (from other things I've read) that he is using it as cover for teaching Christianity in schools. Depending on how this guy viewed his high school years he might be predisposed against this type of activity by minors. If he gets elected. He's not running unopposed, but that's not unheard of.
If you still have cable internet through comcast, your basic cable works whether you subscribe to lifeline cable or not. I don't watch live TV anymore but I have cable internet (only) here and my TVs tune in to regular channels fine.
I was curious about the "STILL making racist remarks" link so I followed it and on the second page of the Salon article you'll find this gem:
Paul describes the federal airline security system as an extra-constitutional affront to civil liberties, and thinks security should be handled by the private sector. Then he takes a rather un-presidential jab at the appearance of many TSA screeners, a workforce heavily populated by minorities and immigrants. "We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked," he says. "Most of them are, well, you know, they just don't look very American to me. If I'd have been looking, they look suspicious... I mean, a lot of them can't even speak English, hardly. Not that I'm accusing them of anything, but it's sort of ironic." The Congressman may have repudiated the claims about his newsletter and black folks, but this is much more recent and coy in the way that racists are. As though they want to say something but know that they would get in trouble if they did.
I think context is the perfect explanation for both of these people. Women do live in a different larger context than men, and aren't as free to have the context redefined from moment to moment. I guess that's the line of thinking anyway. Your friend from 1993 should have reacted to the context of "it would have been difficult to get through this door with a double armload of books," but instead reacted to "men treat women like they're helpless." Domineering though? I'm gonna go with no. Like with most jerk behavior, it comes from insecurity. The women's studies professor has spent too much time in her head meditating on this to realize that it's not a valid way to assign blame. You personally aren't responsible for any of the way 1993 was treated in her past. She had no call to treat you that way, but women in the abstract do have some claims against men in the abstract. The freedom from a larger context in which people make assumptions about you is surely a characteristic of a (social) majority. I can relate to this because may parents are from India and I'm nonwhite. It used to be that in every group of people I was the standin for all Indians. Meaning when I met someone new they asked me if I knew their doctor or if I worshipped a cow. They weren't talking to me, they were talking to the generic case of "Indian person." Being forced to always be the ambassador from India and explain Hinduism and caste gets old very fast. It still happens now, and with people I've known for years. They see me and immediately start talking about their new Indian neighbor or colleague or brother-in-law. Or they hear that I'm vegetarian and start talking at length about their favorite meat foods from India. Whoops I'm venting sorry. I don't go off on these people but I sure feel like it sometimes, as you can see. Does that make me a jerk? I don't know.
Once when I was in high school I was working at a mall store and someone came in and angrily demanded to know whether I spoke English. I had read about discrimination before but never had it applied directly to my face. Until then I had never thought about it happening to me. Since then it's been very hard for me not to consider whether I'm being treated differently because of race. For white people I'm sure this almost never enters their thinking because by and large there are no assumptions about behaviors and competencies (and deficiencies more to the point) based on whiteness. I couldn't say for sure since I've never been white. For white people I think it most often comes from having an ethnic name, but really I don't know.
So I think that's what women's studies professor 1 meant by context, but she should have known that you can't dismiss people's experiences when trying to make them see other people's experiences. College professors aren't always teachers inside.
Maybe next time check and see what the books are first:)
You know one way those buddy parents could get in on the game monitoring is to read reviews, or better yet go to metacritic. Sure, a lot of games "journalism" is garbage, but you can use it to compare relative merits of games. I teach high school and I have more credibility talking about whether a game is good or not versus how much "mature" content it has. I am a gamer myself (since like 1980) so I don't get my info from reviews. Certainly any parent who didn't want their kid playing Kane and Lynch could point to the number of reviews that labeled it a turkey. Or insist that your kids show you good reviews before you consider a purchase. There's something to be said for insisting on quality instead of just looking at ratings. I mean, consider the ratings too, but treat it like a movie or TV show. You don't want your kids watching The Pink Panther (2006) when they could be watching The Pink Panther(1963).
The Daily Show may be a fake news show but much of the damning parts are simply juxtaposed video clips of the same person saying two completely opposite things. That's what keeps me watching, is the memory the show seems to have about public record. So many "journalists" seem happy simply to be talking to their subjects or about their subjects that they don't call them on obvious bullshit. It's a fake news show insofar as it's not purely a news program, but it's also not as though they have actors playing Bush, Cheney, Rice, Craig, etc. in skits.
The Daily Show is returning on Monday (1/7/08) without its writers.
As a consumer, I am certainly sitting out the format war. As a human being, not so much. I've even gone so far as to not have cable TV in my house at all, since the pirates have agreed on a video format. My TV is attached to my computer (this one) and it's pretty simple (and getting simpler) to find any TV show I want and some I couldn't get without paying a huge monthly subscription (read: foreign, not like HBO.) If I were a sports fan I might feel different about live TV. Let's use The Office as an example. I own the DVDs of all 3 seasons, but they don't look as nice as the 720p rips that I download of the new season. I will probably buy the new season on DVD but continue to watch my rips. I would buy it not for what I get from the deal (basically nothing) but because I want to support the work (though that connection appears to be an illusion as well.) This all extends to movies but it's even worse because once you choose they have you locked down. There's no guarantee that if I get a bluray player so I can watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that any other bluray movies will appeal to me that much. I agree with another poster about wanting an inexpensive dual format player. I would probably go for that.
Does the apple store hold any appeal for you or just the computers? I think they are two different effects. I mean do you go and hang out in the apple stores as a community center?
If I were going to buy a computer, the first thing I would do once I got it is open it up and see what I could improve down the road. This is probably why I've never been inside an Apple store. I think the NYT is using the word techie the same way they'd use the word "foodie." Foodies aren't cooks, don't necessarily know anything about cooking, but they do know what they like. And they'll tell you why.
I think the appeal of Apple computers is different (but related) to the appeal of the computers themselves.
I would like to see something similar done for the AskERIC database. Currently there's a whole lot of information there, but occasionally I run into an article from some journal that my school doesn't get, and which would cost me a lot to subscribe. I don't even want to subscribe I just want the one article. I'm trying to improve practices in my classroom, or find some research to support some suspicions I have about classroom practices. I find that it's better to go to management with research backing your ideas than to just make vague claims. In a field where tax dollars are put to work every day, I would think there would be some interest in increasing availability of research.
If either one of them had anything to do with games before now, maybe this partnership would make sense. They don't have games in common, they have a target demographic. They're not thinking "how can we make a great game out of this"" they're thinking "what are some other ways we can sell this to 18-34 year olds?"
The term "intellectual property" was regarded with similar comedy when Letterman moved to CBS. I think the joke was that the band couldn't be called The World's Most Dangerous Band anymore because that name was the "intellectual property" of NBC. It got a big laugh.
It seems as though the AP has had its role in killing newspapers as well. If your newspaper buys and reprints stories from the AP, it's equivalent to outsourcing your hard-hitting, incisive, investigative journalism. I read a long time ago in a post here that AP stories without name attribution aren't very well researched. If they were quality stories, people wouldn't mind putting their names to them. So it seems to me that if you're looking for investigative journalists and reading AP stories, look for names, and look for names that you've seen many times. That doesn't help the local scene, but talent has to go where it's valued.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better than playing biases against each other is finding information for yourself. I saw an interview once with Noam Chomsky where the interviewer asked him about some negative press he had received. Chomsky replied to all such questions with "I recommend that of those claims, you only believe what you can verify independently." Chomsky recognized that responding to bias with your own bias is meaningless, especially to the viewer. The two major parties (and now to some extent the press) want you to buy into a false dichotomy. The line of reasoning goes that Democrats have one version of the truth and Republicans another. The truth, therefore, must be somewhere in between. The major parties like it because it keeps attention on them, and the press likes it because it's conflict and exciting. That's why you read stories about Mitt Romney blowing up at a reporter (it was pretty tame) or Bill Clinton blowing up at a reporter (it was pretty tame.)
The problem with this is that the people who own the two major parties keep moving them closer to each other, without regard for the truth. To illustrate this, look at who is championing telecom immunity for the current administration.
Of course game reviews can't be trusted. Or I guess they can be trusted insofar as your experience matches the reviewer's. It's like movie reviews- you find a reviewer who seems to share your likes and dislikes and stay with them. This is, of course, if you look at reviews as purely a buying guide. For game criticism of a more literary caliber there's no real source that I know of. Frankly I don't think most games would stand up to that, and I've been playing games since 1980.
I guess when you design something to lose money you go all out.
Don't forget about working conditions. A union provides a faster, more local way to apply pressure to fix health and safety hazards than phoning up OSHA. If pressure is needed. Just the existence of the union and the knowledge that the union is aware of a hazardous condition expedites the repair effort.
That's actually not true. Read Free Lunch by David Cay Johnston. There is most defintely such a thing as a free lunch, but only for those who can afford the cover charge.
A better platitude for this occasion is "you have to spend money to make money."
It's because of the powerful asteroid naming lobby. Or the writer's strike.
My dad brought home a computer from work in three parts, one of which was cooled by a powerful, noisy fan. It had a monochrome green monitor and we played Hunt the Wumpus on it. If you don't know, in Hunt The Wumpus you're a spelunker in a cave system inhabited by teh dread Wumpus. You only have 1 arrow, and you can tell by looking at the blood on the walls whether the wumpus is in a nearby room. If you walk into the room with the Wumpus, you're dead. If you fire your arrow into an empty room you're doomed. Very intense.
Then later we had the same game for the TI-994a on a cartridge. I used to play it in different languages, pretty fun!
Other shoutouts go to Yie Ar Kung Fu in demo mode on the way out of the grocery store and Speedball for the PC (the very first one with 8-bit graphics.)
One wonders how this kind of thing happens. School boards have a range of non-curricular obligations, and aren't really tasked with curriculum at all. I recently had a chance to interview some of the people running for the local school board. I was part of a committee and asked two questions: 1) How does the candidate separate "general policy" from micromanagement? Most of the candidates made that distinction and I wanted to know how exactly they did it. A couple of them said they didn't want to micromanage but then described what they would do and it was micromanagement. So that was odd. Related to this question was number 2 "Do you feel that it is the board's role to promote any particular cultural values?" The candidates all said no, but one of them had included a transcript of some questions another community group had asked him. He said he thought there should be one Biology course with evolution and a different, separate course with Intelligent Design. In the interview, he didn't go that far, saying only that he didn't have a problem with ID in bio classes. Some other candidates said they didn't mind ID in a social studies class, or the Bible as literature, which was more than I expected. The guy who wants two Bio classes goes to Liberty University in their Distance Learning program. It's a project they give to their undergraduates: get elected to local office and start pushing the Liberty University agenda.
We were interviewing to determine the union endorsee. In his district he'll run unopposed if he wins the primary so it was an important decision. We can do things like this and our endorsement does count for something around here because Maryland isn't a "Right-to-Work" state like Florida.
I was about to post that "probably blah blah blah (read parent)" but here it is confirmed. I can't imagine a school administrator going looking for trouble in this way. This is getting attention on slashdot, and it's just the kind of thing that's going to be discussed at PTA meetings and faculty meetings and teacher union meetings. I was at a union representative assembly a few weeks ago, and our lawyer was up there cautioning us not to play WOW with our students because of the real money transactions that sometimes take place. For some folks not familiar with technology AT ALL, the whole computer thing looks like a minefield. What school administration or district administration wants this notoriety?
As an aside, there's a 19-yr old man running for our school board, and that's just the demographic for Facebook. He says he wants increased security and a class on world religions, but I suspect (from other things I've read) that he is using it as cover for teaching Christianity in schools. Depending on how this guy viewed his high school years he might be predisposed against this type of activity by minors. If he gets elected. He's not running unopposed, but that's not unheard of.
If you still have cable internet through comcast, your basic cable works whether you subscribe to lifeline cable or not. I don't watch live TV anymore but I have cable internet (only) here and my TVs tune in to regular channels fine.
I was curious about the "STILL making racist remarks" link so I followed it and on the second page of the Salon article you'll find this gem:
Paul describes the federal airline security system as an extra-constitutional affront to civil liberties, and thinks security should be handled by the private sector. Then he takes a rather un-presidential jab at the appearance of many TSA screeners, a workforce heavily populated by minorities and immigrants. "We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked," he says. "Most of them are, well, you know, they just don't look very American to me. If I'd have been looking, they look suspiciousI think context is the perfect explanation for both of these people. Women do live in a different larger context than men, and aren't as free to have the context redefined from moment to moment. I guess that's the line of thinking anyway. Your friend from 1993 should have reacted to the context of "it would have been difficult to get through this door with a double armload of books," but instead reacted to "men treat women like they're helpless." Domineering though? I'm gonna go with no. Like with most jerk behavior, it comes from insecurity. The women's studies professor has spent too much time in her head meditating on this to realize that it's not a valid way to assign blame. You personally aren't responsible for any of the way 1993 was treated in her past. She had no call to treat you that way, but women in the abstract do have some claims against men in the abstract. The freedom from a larger context in which people make assumptions about you is surely a characteristic of a (social) majority. I can relate to this because may parents are from India and I'm nonwhite. It used to be that in every group of people I was the standin for all Indians. Meaning when I met someone new they asked me if I knew their doctor or if I worshipped a cow. They weren't talking to me, they were talking to the generic case of "Indian person." Being forced to always be the ambassador from India and explain Hinduism and caste gets old very fast. It still happens now, and with people I've known for years. They see me and immediately start talking about their new Indian neighbor or colleague or brother-in-law. Or they hear that I'm vegetarian and start talking at length about their favorite meat foods from India. Whoops I'm venting sorry. I don't go off on these people but I sure feel like it sometimes, as you can see. Does that make me a jerk? I don't know.
Once when I was in high school I was working at a mall store and someone came in and angrily demanded to know whether I spoke English. I had read about discrimination before but never had it applied directly to my face. Until then I had never thought about it happening to me. Since then it's been very hard for me not to consider whether I'm being treated differently because of race. For white people I'm sure this almost never enters their thinking because by and large there are no assumptions about behaviors and competencies (and deficiencies more to the point) based on whiteness. I couldn't say for sure since I've never been white. For white people I think it most often comes from having an ethnic name, but really I don't know.
So I think that's what women's studies professor 1 meant by context, but she should have known that you can't dismiss people's experiences when trying to make them see other people's experiences. College professors aren't always teachers inside.
Maybe next time check and see what the books are first :)
You know one way those buddy parents could get in on the game monitoring is to read reviews, or better yet go to metacritic. Sure, a lot of games "journalism" is garbage, but you can use it to compare relative merits of games. I teach high school and I have more credibility talking about whether a game is good or not versus how much "mature" content it has. I am a gamer myself (since like 1980) so I don't get my info from reviews. Certainly any parent who didn't want their kid playing Kane and Lynch could point to the number of reviews that labeled it a turkey. Or insist that your kids show you good reviews before you consider a purchase. There's something to be said for insisting on quality instead of just looking at ratings. I mean, consider the ratings too, but treat it like a movie or TV show. You don't want your kids watching The Pink Panther (2006) when they could be watching The Pink Panther(1963).
this one is too easy:
how about a bigass table?
The Daily Show may be a fake news show but much of the damning parts are simply juxtaposed video clips of the same person saying two completely opposite things. That's what keeps me watching, is the memory the show seems to have about public record. So many "journalists" seem happy simply to be talking to their subjects or about their subjects that they don't call them on obvious bullshit. It's a fake news show insofar as it's not purely a news program, but it's also not as though they have actors playing Bush, Cheney, Rice, Craig, etc. in skits.
The Daily Show is returning on Monday (1/7/08) without its writers.
As a consumer, I am certainly sitting out the format war. As a human being, not so much. I've even gone so far as to not have cable TV in my house at all, since the pirates have agreed on a video format. My TV is attached to my computer (this one) and it's pretty simple (and getting simpler) to find any TV show I want and some I couldn't get without paying a huge monthly subscription (read: foreign, not like HBO.) If I were a sports fan I might feel different about live TV. Let's use The Office as an example. I own the DVDs of all 3 seasons, but they don't look as nice as the 720p rips that I download of the new season. I will probably buy the new season on DVD but continue to watch my rips. I would buy it not for what I get from the deal (basically nothing) but because I want to support the work (though that connection appears to be an illusion as well.) This all extends to movies but it's even worse because once you choose they have you locked down. There's no guarantee that if I get a bluray player so I can watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that any other bluray movies will appeal to me that much. I agree with another poster about wanting an inexpensive dual format player. I would probably go for that.
Does the apple store hold any appeal for you or just the computers? I think they are two different effects. I mean do you go and hang out in the apple stores as a community center?
Yeah that probably wasn't the best way to phrase it. The fact is that I would never by a whole computer anyway.
bah I meant the appeal of apple stores is different from computers
If I were going to buy a computer, the first thing I would do once I got it is open it up and see what I could improve down the road. This is probably why I've never been inside an Apple store. I think the NYT is using the word techie the same way they'd use the word "foodie." Foodies aren't cooks, don't necessarily know anything about cooking, but they do know what they like. And they'll tell you why.
I think the appeal of Apple computers is different (but related) to the appeal of the computers themselves.
I would like to see something similar done for the AskERIC database. Currently there's a whole lot of information there, but occasionally I run into an article from some journal that my school doesn't get, and which would cost me a lot to subscribe. I don't even want to subscribe I just want the one article. I'm trying to improve practices in my classroom, or find some research to support some suspicions I have about classroom practices. I find that it's better to go to management with research backing your ideas than to just make vague claims. In a field where tax dollars are put to work every day, I would think there would be some interest in increasing availability of research.
If either one of them had anything to do with games before now, maybe this partnership would make sense. They don't have games in common, they have a target demographic. They're not thinking "how can we make a great game out of this"" they're thinking "what are some other ways we can sell this to 18-34 year olds?"
The term "intellectual property" was regarded with similar comedy when Letterman moved to CBS. I think the joke was that the band couldn't be called The World's Most Dangerous Band anymore because that name was the "intellectual property" of NBC. It got a big laugh.
It seems as though the AP has had its role in killing newspapers as well. If your newspaper buys and reprints stories from the AP, it's equivalent to outsourcing your hard-hitting, incisive, investigative journalism. I read a long time ago in a post here that AP stories without name attribution aren't very well researched. If they were quality stories, people wouldn't mind putting their names to them. So it seems to me that if you're looking for investigative journalists and reading AP stories, look for names, and look for names that you've seen many times. That doesn't help the local scene, but talent has to go where it's valued.