Is this nearly what Michael Jackson did a while back in a major televised interview? The original interview was aired, and later that week FOX (...) aired footage from his own cameraman, who he insisted upon having present. Not having seen much of the interview tapes, my recollection from the commercials is that MJ believed the first-aired special was edited to make him look bad, and that the FOX follow-up showed his more complete responses to questions.
In an old (old old old) issue of Nintendo Power, in a feature on Japanese games, an NES/Famicom game was featured that simulated the presidential campaign and election processes. The candidates were obvious clones of current political figures (I seem to remember "George Push" (Senior)), but also included at least one female candidate and I believe some minorities. I think everyone who saw the blurb, myself included, must have marveled that the Japanese public would be so interested in the US political process when most Americans seem like they couldn't care less.
From games like the Civ series, Nation States, and many others, it's apparent that people are interested in some aspects of the role of national leader, but I have yet to see a game that really hit "being the president of the US" right on the head...maybe because that game wouldn't be worth playing?
It's really not extremely different from today's 'enhanced' CDs. I wonder, though, if it was truly meant as a feature in those days, or if it was just a way to get those crazy college students to buy the album rather than swapping it for free. If you had to copy it to cassette to play the game anyways, I imagine the piracy-prevention didn't do much more than piss off the legitimate purchasers who just heard a bunch of binary when they wanted to listen to their music.
You beat me to it! (but hey, that's the whole idea of Numbersense now isn't it:) )
In Texas (and other states?), there are a series of competitions for students called the University Interscholastic League, or UIL. From 4th grade through senior year, I competed in the UIL Numbersense competition (among others), which is a truly fascinating test.
A Numbersense test takes 10 minutes. You are given 80 problems ordered from easiest to most difficult - your goal is to work from the beginning as far as you can, with skipped problems counted as incorrect (negative points), but any problem beyond the last one attempted having no point value. Having done this for 9 years straight and successfully applied the techniques in every math class during and since, I can tell you two things:
1) There are some really amazing 'tricks' that can be very handy
2) Practice is the best way to learn them
I strongly encourage you to do some web searches for Numbersense training materials, as they should all be geared towards intelligent students, and you don't necessarily need to know much math at all, even algebra (although everything you can remember will help).
And a note to anyone still in school: Do UIL Numbersense/Mathematics competitions, or Math Counts, or whatever you can! There is no better way to boost your math skills, no matter what your current apptitude is. Academic Decathlon (and Pentathlon in Middle School/Junior High) are also good learning experiences, but the level of competitiveness is really becoming ridiculous. They are all great ways to meet a few people who have similar interests and goals, both at your own school and the competition's.
I was a poll watcher last spring at a polling place for a local election, as part of an assignment for my Political Science class. For the most part, it was very boring, but, like a true geek, I passed the time by recording demographics for my own notes: approx age, gender, couples, singles, kids, who had problems, etc. I also watched the actual poll workers a great deal. In a district where thousands and thousands of potential voters live, turn-out was in the low hundreds. The vast, vast, vast majority of these were elderly citizens.
All of the poll workers were retired. The people who are running our elections at the local level are the ones who a) were thoroughly taught pride in our nation's democratic process and b) have enough time to register to vote, decide who to vote for, and then actually get up off their butts and go vote. It is not surprising in the least that the mostly elderly population of poll watches has trouble doing anything more than the simplest tasks on a completely foreign computer application.
After seeing the way the supposedly 'trained' poll workers at my polling location were left clueless when anything even slightly out of the ordinary happened, it's obvious that some reform is needed in this area (our city used pen+paper voting, counted by machine).
Unfortunately, until more people start to care about elections, poll workers will consist of whoever is willing to sign their name for the job, regardless of whether they are truly able to do what's required.
Isn't there a huge risk of creating 'bad' law if she loses?
In cases where many, many people are in a very similar situation, it's my understanding that legal defense groups are careful to focus on cases they think they can win, even if it means going through many more trials and years just to finally build up enough small victories to support a big win. Every lost case creates a precedence that is not in your favor - 'bad' law.
But I suppose that's what legal defense groups believe in. When it comes down to an individual person, it's hard to blame them for just wanting to get their own self out of the frying pan.
UT Arlington's ResNet set-up blocks BT in addition to most other apps that can share any files - Kazaa gets through occasionally (not sure how that happens, though). To just share files person-on-campus to person-on-campus, we've got to use AIM, but configured to use AOL Proxy's...
Most people I know who have the time, know-how, and the means (including myself by the end of the semester) set up a box on a broadband line back home and connect to that.
All in all, it's been pretty ridiculous for us. There was a public forum last semester featuring a few Office of Info. Tech. personnel...basically all that we realized after going back and forth for nearly 3 hours was that there was no official statement on anything, and the OIT staff really didn't have much idea what was going on - implementing redundant solutions to problems, paying no heed to result to end users, and generally keeping the entire campus in the dark.
Unfortunately, our mostly-commuter student body says that as long as they can find a seat in a computer lab to play Yahoo! Pool between classes, they don't give a #@$% about anything else.
Napster offers pre-paid cards at retail outlets (I just won one for 15 songs, claiming to be a $14.85 value, so I don't know if other denominations are offered)...so I thought this might be an exception to the credit card info...but, of course, you have to register for an account to use the card online...whether or not this will require my CC#, I do not know.
At work, we now check with iodine pens every $20 or larger bill. In the past year, my employer sent out a memo every time the bank told us we turned in a counterfeit. Each memo made our "money-checking" policies stricter, eventually getting us to where we are now. No customer complaints, no huge lines, and, since we started with every $20, no counterfeit bills.
But what I really wanted to point out:
Make the top and bottom $20s real ones, and put one or two fake ones in the middle, and 95% of the time they won't notice.
Maybe I'm not adventurous, but I don't think I'd risk a 1 in 20 chance of getting caught doing such a serious crime, just to save $20-40. Even if the odds are better and the pay-off is higher...it'd be tough for it to be worth the sentence you'd be risking getting stuck with.
I know of at least two more exercise bike/entertainment combinations, but sadly I don't know any product names:
The first is a combination that I recall seeing at EPCOT at Walt Disney World in Florida several years ago. The user picks a city and a video of a "ride-thru" of the city is shown on a TV monitor. The speed of the rider's pedaling determines the speed of the video. It was fun to try and match the speed as perfectly as possible to the speed the video was shot at...but it was also fun to pedal as fast as possible just to see things fly by. I believe you sat in a reclined seat, more like the bicycles built for speed records
The other is more exciting. I also saw it at EPCOT on the same trip, but I've also seen it featured in Nintendo Power magazine. The unit was a fairly normal exercise bike with a TV and Super Nintendo in front of it and one half of a Super Nintendo controller on each handlebar. The only game that I know of that really took advantage of the set up was a bicycle racing game in which your pedaling determined the speed of your character in the bicycle race. The game itself was seen on the TV from behind your racer, and when other racers were next to you, you could hit a button on the controller to reach out and push/grab them. The digital pad was used to steer.
The last one especially was always an exciting idea to me, and it's a shame the idea didn't truly take off. I'd love to have something like that now with 5~ different games I could play for 30 minutes once a week each.
As a side note, I've also been interested in the Pocket Pikachu, Nintendo's Pokemon-themed digital pet. Not only was it IMO one of the superior digital pets, not only did it link via infrared to a Game Boy Color running Pokemon Yellow, it also included a pedometer that I'm sure encouraged a lot of people to take the long way to and from where they were going.
The problem isn't Jacob Nielsen, but the false image everyone has created. He isn't trying to say he's a 'web design god'. Web design is a large field that encompasses art, business, technology, psychology, and more - he's just focusing on tying these things together.
Nielsen's focus is usability, and little else; he's using knowledge of the psychology of users to help shape the site's layout (art) with the intent of improving business and taking advantage of technology. Basically, he's trying to tell people how they might be able to improve sales from their web sites.
The problem is that lots of people think he's trying to 'cramp the style' of artists by stating lots of standard practices and rules that restrict what site designers should do. A better relationship would be to look at web pages as food you'd find at a grocery store. Nielsen's advice then would be things like "putting a strobe light on a box of cereal would attract customers, but it could also cause major backlash due to epileptic seizures." That doesn't stop anyone from putting a stobe light on the box of cereal (their managers might decide to take Nielsen's recommendation as law, but that can hardly be blamed on him). He's just pointing out possibly unforseen economic impacts of product design.
Admittedly I'm not completely up-to-date on his Alertbox articles. As I see it, he might eventually start running thin on new major ideas or suggestions, as he seems to be outpacing the widespread adoption of new web-surfing technologies. However, he has come up with tons of suggestions that are worth considering, especially if you're trying to improve sales from your web site. He's definitely the most public figure in web usability (he wrote the book on it, even:) ). But please, don't listen to people who attack him for being something he's not actually trying to be.
There's a song called Freckles that appeared in the Dance Dance Revolution series a few versions back - if it's the same song, you might try checking for it at DDR sites, since I seem to remember the in-game version being in English. If it's in the DDR game, then it's probably from the Dancemania series of albums...so check along that line, too : )
Hope that helps!
Your post made me get up from the computer and go talk to the TV with my mom, dad, and sister - that's a powerful post, and an eerily appropriate one for Christmas.
I just wanted to say thanks. As a college student especially, it's easy to overlook things that really matter - I'm sure I'm not the only person you had an impact on.
My religion says that everything happens for a reason - if you believe anything like that, I hope maybe you just saw a way that your mother's unfortunate death was able to help this lowly/.'er.
I've seen almost immediate and widespread installation of the new Google Toolbar with Pop-up Blocking on student computers in the dorm. When I came home, my dad had already installed it on the computers at home.
The Google Toolbar is a great 'product' in that it gives all levels of IE users a tools that they -want- (fast searching, pop-up blocking) at a price that's hard to refuse (40~ pixels x resolution-width). The added benefits that techies can appreciate is that millions of people are going to be fighting a war on obstructive advertising -and- doing medical research (Folding@Home) at the same time.
The Folding@Home stats pages show the effects the Google Toolbar is having on their project, but I'd love to see how it's affecting online pop-up ad sales and per view/click prices.
At the University of Texas at -Arlington-, I know things seem to be going so-so. As you'd expect, basically every student and staff uses MS products. My roommates and several other people we know in the dorm run linux, and we use a linux box in the main room of our suite as a media center/dvd player.
The Comp Sci requires that assignments in the first 3 semesters of CS classes be compiled on their UNIX server (http://omega.uta.edu), which was, I must admit, my first real *nix experience. I imagine it's been successful in exposing a lot of other students to the non-Windows world.
However, our campus computer store pushes their MS and Apple products (I think $21 for Office XP?) to the point that I don't recall seeing anything else - no Red Hat, no nothing. Our OIT, while seemingly well-meaning, is under-staffed, under-funded, not listened to, and doesn't listen to us.
UTA's computer situation sort of matches the school as a whole: not bad, but not good...just sort of there.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this nearly what Michael Jackson did a while back in a major televised interview? The original interview was aired, and later that week FOX (...) aired footage from his own cameraman, who he insisted upon having present. Not having seen much of the interview tapes, my recollection from the commercials is that MJ believed the first-aired special was edited to make him look bad, and that the FOX follow-up showed his more complete responses to questions.
In an old (old old old) issue of Nintendo Power, in a feature on Japanese games, an NES/Famicom game was featured that simulated the presidential campaign and election processes. The candidates were obvious clones of current political figures (I seem to remember "George Push" (Senior)), but also included at least one female candidate and I believe some minorities. I think everyone who saw the blurb, myself included, must have marveled that the Japanese public would be so interested in the US political process when most Americans seem like they couldn't care less.
From games like the Civ series, Nation States, and many others, it's apparent that people are interested in some aspects of the role of national leader, but I have yet to see a game that really hit "being the president of the US" right on the head...maybe because that game wouldn't be worth playing?
Jennifer Government - Nation States - kind of an intro level presidential sim. Although it's really interesting, it's hard to spend more than 5 minutes a day once you have it set up.
If George Bush played Civ 3 - a little presidential gaming humor
It's really not extremely different from today's 'enhanced' CDs. I wonder, though, if it was truly meant as a feature in those days, or if it was just a way to get those crazy college students to buy the album rather than swapping it for free. If you had to copy it to cassette to play the game anyways, I imagine the piracy-prevention didn't do much more than piss off the legitimate purchasers who just heard a bunch of binary when they wanted to listen to their music.
Some things never change : )
You beat me to it! (but hey, that's the whole idea of Numbersense now isn't it :) )
In Texas (and other states?), there are a series of competitions for students called the University Interscholastic League, or UIL. From 4th grade through senior year, I competed in the UIL Numbersense competition (among others), which is a truly fascinating test.
A Numbersense test takes 10 minutes. You are given 80 problems ordered from easiest to most difficult - your goal is to work from the beginning as far as you can, with skipped problems counted as incorrect (negative points), but any problem beyond the last one attempted having no point value. Having done this for 9 years straight and successfully applied the techniques in every math class during and since, I can tell you two things:
1) There are some really amazing 'tricks' that can be very handy
2) Practice is the best way to learn them
I strongly encourage you to do some web searches for Numbersense training materials, as they should all be geared towards intelligent students, and you don't necessarily need to know much math at all, even algebra (although everything you can remember will help).
And a note to anyone still in school: Do UIL Numbersense/Mathematics competitions, or Math Counts, or whatever you can! There is no better way to boost your math skills, no matter what your current apptitude is. Academic Decathlon (and Pentathlon in Middle School/Junior High) are also good learning experiences, but the level of competitiveness is really becoming ridiculous. They are all great ways to meet a few people who have similar interests and goals, both at your own school and the competition's.
Hey, Neo Geo/SNK fans take what we can get nowadays.
I was a poll watcher last spring at a polling place for a local election, as part of an assignment for my Political Science class. For the most part, it was very boring, but, like a true geek, I passed the time by recording demographics for my own notes: approx age, gender, couples, singles, kids, who had problems, etc. I also watched the actual poll workers a great deal. In a district where thousands and thousands of potential voters live, turn-out was in the low hundreds. The vast, vast, vast majority of these were elderly citizens.
All of the poll workers were retired. The people who are running our elections at the local level are the ones who a) were thoroughly taught pride in our nation's democratic process and b) have enough time to register to vote, decide who to vote for, and then actually get up off their butts and go vote. It is not surprising in the least that the mostly elderly population of poll watches has trouble doing anything more than the simplest tasks on a completely foreign computer application.
After seeing the way the supposedly 'trained' poll workers at my polling location were left clueless when anything even slightly out of the ordinary happened, it's obvious that some reform is needed in this area (our city used pen+paper voting, counted by machine).
Unfortunately, until more people start to care about elections, poll workers will consist of whoever is willing to sign their name for the job, regardless of whether they are truly able to do what's required.
Isn't there a huge risk of creating 'bad' law if she loses?
In cases where many, many people are in a very similar situation, it's my understanding that legal defense groups are careful to focus on cases they think they can win, even if it means going through many more trials and years just to finally build up enough small victories to support a big win. Every lost case creates a precedence that is not in your favor - 'bad' law.
But I suppose that's what legal defense groups believe in. When it comes down to an individual person, it's hard to blame them for just wanting to get their own self out of the frying pan.
UT Arlington's ResNet set-up blocks BT in addition to most other apps that can share any files - Kazaa gets through occasionally (not sure how that happens, though). To just share files person-on-campus to person-on-campus, we've got to use AIM, but configured to use AOL Proxy's...
...so yeah, UT Arlington also blocks Bit Torrent.
Most people I know who have the time, know-how, and the means (including myself by the end of the semester) set up a box on a broadband line back home and connect to that.
All in all, it's been pretty ridiculous for us. There was a public forum last semester featuring a few Office of Info. Tech. personnel...basically all that we realized after going back and forth for nearly 3 hours was that there was no official statement on anything, and the OIT staff really didn't have much idea what was going on - implementing redundant solutions to problems, paying no heed to result to end users, and generally keeping the entire campus in the dark.
Unfortunately, our mostly-commuter student body says that as long as they can find a seat in a computer lab to play Yahoo! Pool between classes, they don't give a #@$% about anything else.
Napster offers pre-paid cards at retail outlets (I just won one for 15 songs, claiming to be a $14.85 value, so I don't know if other denominations are offered)...so I thought this might be an exception to the credit card info...but, of course, you have to register for an account to use the card online...whether or not this will require my CC#, I do not know.
I know of at least two more exercise bike/entertainment combinations, but sadly I don't know any product names:
The first is a combination that I recall seeing at EPCOT at Walt Disney World in Florida several years ago. The user picks a city and a video of a "ride-thru" of the city is shown on a TV monitor. The speed of the rider's pedaling determines the speed of the video. It was fun to try and match the speed as perfectly as possible to the speed the video was shot at...but it was also fun to pedal as fast as possible just to see things fly by. I believe you sat in a reclined seat, more like the bicycles built for speed records
The other is more exciting. I also saw it at EPCOT on the same trip, but I've also seen it featured in Nintendo Power magazine. The unit was a fairly normal exercise bike with a TV and Super Nintendo in front of it and one half of a Super Nintendo controller on each handlebar. The only game that I know of that really took advantage of the set up was a bicycle racing game in which your pedaling determined the speed of your character in the bicycle race. The game itself was seen on the TV from behind your racer, and when other racers were next to you, you could hit a button on the controller to reach out and push/grab them. The digital pad was used to steer.
The last one especially was always an exciting idea to me, and it's a shame the idea didn't truly take off. I'd love to have something like that now with 5~ different games I could play for 30 minutes once a week each.
As a side note, I've also been interested in the Pocket Pikachu, Nintendo's Pokemon-themed digital pet. Not only was it IMO one of the superior digital pets, not only did it link via infrared to a Game Boy Color running Pokemon Yellow, it also included a pedometer that I'm sure encouraged a lot of people to take the long way to and from where they were going.
My job must be awesome, because I hear violations all of those taboos on a weekly basis.
The problem isn't Jacob Nielsen, but the false image everyone has created. He isn't trying to say he's a 'web design god'. Web design is a large field that encompasses art, business, technology, psychology, and more - he's just focusing on tying these things together.
:) ). But please, don't listen to people who attack him for being something he's not actually trying to be.
Nielsen's focus is usability, and little else; he's using knowledge of the psychology of users to help shape the site's layout (art) with the intent of improving business and taking advantage of technology. Basically, he's trying to tell people how they might be able to improve sales from their web sites.
The problem is that lots of people think he's trying to 'cramp the style' of artists by stating lots of standard practices and rules that restrict what site designers should do. A better relationship would be to look at web pages as food you'd find at a grocery store. Nielsen's advice then would be things like "putting a strobe light on a box of cereal would attract customers, but it could also cause major backlash due to epileptic seizures." That doesn't stop anyone from putting a stobe light on the box of cereal (their managers might decide to take Nielsen's recommendation as law, but that can hardly be blamed on him). He's just pointing out possibly unforseen economic impacts of product design.
Admittedly I'm not completely up-to-date on his Alertbox articles. As I see it, he might eventually start running thin on new major ideas or suggestions, as he seems to be outpacing the widespread adoption of new web-surfing technologies. However, he has come up with tons of suggestions that are worth considering, especially if you're trying to improve sales from your web site. He's definitely the most public figure in web usability (he wrote the book on it, even
after signing up, I got spam
I hate to sound like I'm just nitpicking you, but wouldn't signing up make it -not- spam?
There's a song called Freckles that appeared in the Dance Dance Revolution series a few versions back - if it's the same song, you might try checking for it at DDR sites, since I seem to remember the in-game version being in English. If it's in the DDR game, then it's probably from the Dancemania series of albums...so check along that line, too : )
Hope that helps!
Your post made me get up from the computer and go talk to the TV with my mom, dad, and sister - that's a powerful post, and an eerily appropriate one for Christmas.
/.'er.
I just wanted to say thanks. As a college student especially, it's easy to overlook things that really matter - I'm sure I'm not the only person you had an impact on.
My religion says that everything happens for a reason - if you believe anything like that, I hope maybe you just saw a way that your mother's unfortunate death was able to help this lowly
Thanks again, sincerly.
I've seen almost immediate and widespread installation of the new Google Toolbar with Pop-up Blocking on student computers in the dorm. When I came home, my dad had already installed it on the computers at home.
The Google Toolbar is a great 'product' in that it gives all levels of IE users a tools that they -want- (fast searching, pop-up blocking) at a price that's hard to refuse (40~ pixels x resolution-width). The added benefits that techies can appreciate is that millions of people are going to be fighting a war on obstructive advertising -and- doing medical research (Folding@Home) at the same time.
The Folding@Home stats pages show the effects the Google Toolbar is having on their project, but I'd love to see how it's affecting online pop-up ad sales and per view/click prices.
At the University of Texas at -Arlington-, I know things seem to be going so-so. As you'd expect, basically every student and staff uses MS products. My roommates and several other people we know in the dorm run linux, and we use a linux box in the main room of our suite as a media center/dvd player.
The Comp Sci requires that assignments in the first 3 semesters of CS classes be compiled on their UNIX server (http://omega.uta.edu), which was, I must admit, my first real *nix experience. I imagine it's been successful in exposing a lot of other students to the non-Windows world.
However, our campus computer store pushes their MS and Apple products (I think $21 for Office XP?) to the point that I don't recall seeing anything else - no Red Hat, no nothing. Our OIT, while seemingly well-meaning, is under-staffed, under-funded, not listened to, and doesn't listen to us.
UTA's computer situation sort of matches the school as a whole: not bad, but not good...just sort of there.