I'm sorry, the disregard for books in these responses is unbelievable.
Sure, if one is studying engineering, mathematics or computer science one may question the necessity of having a massive collection of books in a library and wonder why it wouldn't be better to have just the latest data available online.
However, as it happens, these aren't the only things one studies at university. If you are doing history, the social sciences or literature, your degree involves a lot of open-ended research that may take you to esoteric, obscure topics. It may occur to you to need a 400-page book written 70 years ago about the dietary habits of third-century Roman slaves, or a structural analysis of how postcolonial policies affected Indonesian aristocracy. There is, simply put, far too much information distributed amongst so many books, every one of which are significant in some way.
This is why, as much as the system adopted by UTS IS a technological marvel, the notion of moving old books into storage and having "people [at] the center of the library rather than the books" is essentially flawed: a lot of study involves open-ended research and the ability to browse through shelf after shelf of books is crucial. At the University of Sydney just down the road where I studied, they are doing a similar library restructuring: adding more "study spaces" and moving hundreds of thousands of books from the open stack to (human-maintained) storage - and this changes people's study habits for the worst. Students are less likely to be successful in browsing the shelves and finding information they wants and other relevant texts, and become more used to looking at online article databases. Which have a bias towards things published more recently, and papers do not go into topics anywhere in depth as actual books - blinding students from the wealth of information locked away in the murky depths of "storage".
Universities are a place of learning, and the library should be the accessible fountain of knowledge that all ought to benefit from. Please, keeps the books forever.
When will people seriously get it into their think marketer heads that although cartoons or videos may be more initially eye-catching, they have low information density and are worse at getting actual information across than plain old text?
I tend to go one step further and believe that there are political/financial motivations for this "negative emphasis" on not just mathematical, but all forms of rigorous logical education.
Firstly, it can be seen as trying to appeal to the "will of the majority" and the popular discourse of inclusionism, thus making the less educated people content in their place and giving them the illusion that all skills are created equal. Indeed, the portrayal of education itself as 'eugenicist' and 'classist' mean that even the intention to go into further education can become stigmatised, especially to the "majority" which popular rhetoric have placed as antithetical to the "upper class's" whims.
This has the function of allowing political and business interests to leverage this lack of understanding to manipulate the population based on faux-mathematics and faulty logic. We see this happening every day, in areas such as the economy and counterterrorism, and it seems to be working well. "Facts and figures" are treated like holy scriptures, and even their logical inconsistencies are accepted without question - creating a docile class of proles that publicists (who all along knew the power of numbers and rhetoric) can easily manipulate for their own means.
This is why maths - and other forms or logical education is important in this day and age: it encourages people to be analytical, logical and find out answers to themselves, something highly threatening to the current politics of ignorance. Knowledge is power, folks!
(Disclaimer: I'm a Gender/Cultural Studies major, former straight-Maths student.)
Bingo, that's pretty much what this thing's built for.
Over here in Aussieland we call them 'rips', schoolchildren are taught about them, and they're pretty much the reason that surf lifesavers (who the device is intended for, as TFA states) exist in the first place.
Warning: Rips are faster than a human can swim and WILL drag you out to the deep stuff in no time unless you get out of it by swimming sideways.
As a starry-eyed 21-year-old I just have to say...
This is bloody brilliant, and looking at it makes me amazed that people once actually invented and engineered complex devices by hand, then disappointed in the realisation that today everyone takes the easy way out with solenoids, microcontrollers and bloated code that doesn't let you completely understand what's going on in there.
As much as I'd like to get into mechanical computing/engineering as a hobby, it seems to be mainly dead outside of a few eccentric British circles... is there any way for the new generation to come close to understanding what once was?
I'm not entirely sure that making a game 'global' would lead to its popularity in this day and age.
Up until the 90's, limitations in graphics and programming meant that games had to be abstract, to varying extents. When playing Asteroids, Donkey Kong or even Pokemon, their semblance to reality didn't really matter as we all knew it was just a game to have fun with. Thus, games were inherently more globalised, with less direct referencing to existing cultural products (and if there was referencing it was obvious that it was solely for marketing most of the time).
In today's day and age, however, advances in graphics and programming - combined with the prevalence of visual media through Internet videos, reality TV and increased broadcast coverage of everything that happens means that games are conceptualised as extensions of existing cultural products or genres, whether that be football, guitars, anime, war, science fiction or history. This creates marketability through association and familiarity of the source material, and enables video games to be placed within our current understandings of popular culture.
Seeing as preferences for various forms of popular culture widely differ across countries, I'm not at all surprised that Japan's influence in games has waned; there is enough of a local market that Japanese developers inevitably subscribe to Japanese conventions on popular culture, which often alienates foreign players to whom these conventions are not automatically assumed. The same applies for the Western game industry, who often draw upon MTV (and the like) for the concept of (masculine-oriented) 'coolness' that seem to dominate Western game aesthetics. Though I can't say for sure, I would think that a similar phenomenon is occurring between the American and European game industries, and I can't see the situation reversing, what with the continuous obsession with graphics and pseudorealism.
I thought this was a reasonably sound article, but it neglected something that I always found interesting about game soundtracks: namely, the correlation between the musical styles used and the game's country of origin.
For instance, Final Fantasy and Myst both feature orchestral soundtracks but the composing techniques used do vary, leading to different effects being created. The tendency seems to be that Japanese games feature melodic tunes for every scene/stage/level whereas Western games tend to use more ambient compositions.
Would someone with more knowledge in the area care to elaborate?
Aly.
Another problem that I see with this survey is that it was restricted to one geographical location. Do people universally prefer similar traits in automotive design or are there regional discrepancies?
I find the Mark 2 Ford Focus to be an interesting case study - the European and American branches of Ford made significantlydifferent cars as a follow-up to the original Focus. The European Focus uses clean-cut, simplistic lines whilst the American equivalent treats it as a scaled-down large sedan with a much more aggressive tone.
Is this a result of market demand or just a difference in design philosophy? Someone here should be an expert in automotive design...=]
Large, automatic transmission cars are a damn lot more comfortable than the small city-cars.
This seems to be one of the reasons that the American motor industry is so focused on hybrids: because they can make large, comfortable and lumbering cars that use as much fuel as a small one. In Europe, people have been used to small cars for a long time, but give the driver of a Crown Vic a Renault Clio and watch as they complain. Add that to the fact that the American commute can be as long as an European holiday, and it begins to seem that although diesel compacts are the most fuel-efficient technology, a car to truly be popular in the US should be a medium-large sedan with an efficient drivetrain.
Jeremy Clarkson did an interesting segment on Top Gear a while when he drove around a racetrack in the very same car but once in Gran Turismo 4, and then in real life.
He points out that no matter how realistic a game is, it is just not a real-life experience:
"The one thing I've learned today... is that you can have the skill to get this car around here in 1:40, and it could do 1:40... [but] it's that part of your brain that makes you frightened."
Of course, games are essentially there to entertain, and I'm sure that a lot of people will enjoy racing against the professionals from the comfort of their own couch. But just because you can play Guitar Hero and have a blast of a time doing so, it doesn't necessarily mean you can play the guitar.
This is an interesting concept and there's a lot to be learned about it, but I doubt it has a lot of practical applications since it's so far removed from reality for most people.
Having a decent understanding of Japanese, I have to say that the Japanese seem to be quite keen to prefer these anonymous BBS systems over, say, Invision or phpBB that you'd often find in English-language websites - even for smaller community sites. Is someone with more insight into the Japanese psychology able to explain this?
Also on the topic, I find it amazing that design paradigms, software used and general style of the "Japanese Internet" is often quite detached from what most of us here are used to, and to me it seems to have much more of the "hobbyist" feel to it. It probably has something to do with something I read about "recreational computing" in Japan being not as prevalent as the current Australian "MySpace society"...
Speaking as an Australian, I encourage DJs to not purchase this license. What the ARIA are doing is legally questionable, and shelling out for this only justifies their actions and legitimizes it in their eyes.
With the number of DJs here, I would not expect all of them to even know of this rule or for the ARIA to suddenly take all "offenders" to court. Don't feed the hands that bite you!
I don't know where you live, but here in Sydney, Australia I can go to a local public course and have a round for less than $20. On top of that, it's not unusual to see a true amateur in jeans and a well-used set of clubs playing with their mates just for fun. Sure, the elite golfing is for the elite - but casual golf seems to me like everyone's game, especially with the availability of cheap used clubs and/or a set lying in the family attic.
Bollocks.
Meeting are held for a reason - and usually an important one to which mood can step back for. The submission title presents meetings as bad overall, while the article says -too many- meetings are bad.
elynnia
I live in Australia, and with few exceptions, MSN is by far the de facto instant messenger: some people haven't even heard of the others. There's a small minority on Yahoo, and just one of my friends uses AIM - because she has so many friends in the States.
I think, partly, this relates to the lack of aggressive marketing on AIM's part in Australia...
Hiya,
Slightly offtopic, but - why is it that in 'Western' countries, coffee-in-a-can is virtually nonexistant? I'm a great fan of that - and the Hot & Cold vending machines they had in Japan - and don't see why it wouldn't be popular in Australia/UK/USA etc.
elynnia
I'm a 16-year-old highschooler in Australia, and - not to mean any offence - am annoyed by people who think messing abount on their xboxen is l33t. I agree with the original poster who said that less people are understanding how things work, but for me, the problem seems to be accessing all that information. I mean - I'd love to be able to understand each part of a (vintage) computer, write in assebmly, and put two and two together to make a valve radio, but it feels like it's an 'oral tradition' that is only accessible if you know the right people...
Hiya.
Being an Australian highschool student, I'm quite interested in this discussion, and - from what it seems - the American highschool system seems to be in a state of chaos. I have one friend who can back that up...she moved from our school to Texas, and told us that everything was especially easy - especially the Maths. I find that worrying, especially because I believe knowing hard maths is the key to gaining a solid understanding of daily maths. As with computers - I as lucky to be in one of the very last years before computers became mainstream in our school. Now I look at the 'computer literacy' program and find that it involves a ridiculous amount of Flash animating, Powerpoint, and other 'worthless' techniques, compared to...hmm...maybe, elegant coding? I find this reflected in the other subjects too, such as English (where many students don't understand the inherent beauty of an eloquently written and logically clear essay) and Music (If you know anything about music, DO study, read the score of, or just listen to Die Kunst Der Fuge by J.S. Bach, which, in my opinion, is one of the most elegantly written works of counterpoint. I don't have a problem with 'electric noise', but it made me cringe when the guitarist from another band asked me before a performance to tune their guitar.)
Away from my rant, I was troubled by the descriptions of the American highschool system that everyone commented. Over here (At least with the IB), all marks are externally and internationally moderated (meaning that if the teachers mark easy it'll be worse for the students), and you can -fail- Year 12 (Senior year), at which point you have to do a half/one year repeat. Also, is the picking on of academically oriented students (aka nerds), and the emphasis on sport seriously bad in the USA? In my school, I'm up there as a nerd, and I find absolutely nothing wrong with it. Don't get locked in a locker or bitched about or anything much. I suppose, that our school being only slightly more oriented in Sport, but recognising importance in Music, Dance, and the Arts in general, it's quite different to your average school...(It's a private school).
If someone could do a comparison of schooling in the USA, Australia, England, Europe, etc, it would be awesome.
elynnia
(I'm 16, by the way.)
This article brings to mind an incident I had with an Athlon I'd bought last year for my computer... I bought a 2200+ from a shop in Sydney, Australia, but when I started up the computer the BIOS recognised it as a 1800+, although it displayed it as a 2200+ when I took the computer back to the shop and the shop guy did 'Load Optimised Defaults' in the BIOS. Has anyone else here had similar experiences?
~Aly~
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, the disregard for books in these responses is unbelievable.
Sure, if one is studying engineering, mathematics or computer science one may question the necessity of having a massive collection of books in a library and wonder why it wouldn't be better to have just the latest data available online.
However, as it happens, these aren't the only things one studies at university. If you are doing history, the social sciences or literature, your degree involves a lot of open-ended research that may take you to esoteric, obscure topics. It may occur to you to need a 400-page book written 70 years ago about the dietary habits of third-century Roman slaves, or a structural analysis of how postcolonial policies affected Indonesian aristocracy. There is, simply put, far too much information distributed amongst so many books, every one of which are significant in some way.
This is why, as much as the system adopted by UTS IS a technological marvel, the notion of moving old books into storage and having "people [at] the center of the library rather than the books" is essentially flawed: a lot of study involves open-ended research and the ability to browse through shelf after shelf of books is crucial. At the University of Sydney just down the road where I studied, they are doing a similar library restructuring: adding more "study spaces" and moving hundreds of thousands of books from the open stack to (human-maintained) storage - and this changes people's study habits for the worst. Students are less likely to be successful in browsing the shelves and finding information they wants and other relevant texts, and become more used to looking at online article databases. Which have a bias towards things published more recently, and papers do not go into topics anywhere in depth as actual books - blinding students from the wealth of information locked away in the murky depths of "storage".
Universities are a place of learning, and the library should be the accessible fountain of knowledge that all ought to benefit from. Please, keeps the books forever.
No. [1]
When will people seriously get it into their think marketer heads that although cartoons or videos may be more initially eye-catching, they have low information density and are worse at getting actual information across than plain old text?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_Law_of_Headlines
I tend to go one step further and believe that there are political/financial motivations for this "negative emphasis" on not just mathematical, but all forms of rigorous logical education.
Firstly, it can be seen as trying to appeal to the "will of the majority" and the popular discourse of inclusionism, thus making the less educated people content in their place and giving them the illusion that all skills are created equal. Indeed, the portrayal of education itself as 'eugenicist' and 'classist' mean that even the intention to go into further education can become stigmatised, especially to the "majority" which popular rhetoric have placed as antithetical to the "upper class's" whims.
This has the function of allowing political and business interests to leverage this lack of understanding to manipulate the population based on faux-mathematics and faulty logic. We see this happening every day, in areas such as the economy and counterterrorism, and it seems to be working well. "Facts and figures" are treated like holy scriptures, and even their logical inconsistencies are accepted without question - creating a docile class of proles that publicists (who all along knew the power of numbers and rhetoric) can easily manipulate for their own means.
This is why maths - and other forms or logical education is important in this day and age: it encourages people to be analytical, logical and find out answers to themselves, something highly threatening to the current politics of ignorance. Knowledge is power, folks!
(Disclaimer: I'm a Gender/Cultural Studies major, former straight-Maths student.)
Bingo, that's pretty much what this thing's built for. Over here in Aussieland we call them 'rips', schoolchildren are taught about them, and they're pretty much the reason that surf lifesavers (who the device is intended for, as TFA states) exist in the first place. Warning: Rips are faster than a human can swim and WILL drag you out to the deep stuff in no time unless you get out of it by swimming sideways.
As a starry-eyed 21-year-old I just have to say...
This is bloody brilliant, and looking at it makes me amazed that people once actually invented and engineered complex devices by hand, then disappointed in the realisation that today everyone takes the easy way out with solenoids, microcontrollers and bloated code that doesn't let you completely understand what's going on in there.
As much as I'd like to get into mechanical computing/engineering as a hobby, it seems to be mainly dead outside of a few eccentric British circles... is there any way for the new generation to come close to understanding what once was?
-Aly =]
"I want to find ideas that are global."
I'm not entirely sure that making a game 'global' would lead to its popularity in this day and age.
Up until the 90's, limitations in graphics and programming meant that games had to be abstract, to varying extents. When playing Asteroids, Donkey Kong or even Pokemon, their semblance to reality didn't really matter as we all knew it was just a game to have fun with. Thus, games were inherently more globalised, with less direct referencing to existing cultural products (and if there was referencing it was obvious that it was solely for marketing most of the time).
In today's day and age, however, advances in graphics and programming - combined with the prevalence of visual media through Internet videos, reality TV and increased broadcast coverage of everything that happens means that games are conceptualised as extensions of existing cultural products or genres, whether that be football, guitars, anime, war, science fiction or history. This creates marketability through association and familiarity of the source material, and enables video games to be placed within our current understandings of popular culture.
Seeing as preferences for various forms of popular culture widely differ across countries, I'm not at all surprised that Japan's influence in games has waned; there is enough of a local market that Japanese developers inevitably subscribe to Japanese conventions on popular culture, which often alienates foreign players to whom these conventions are not automatically assumed. The same applies for the Western game industry, who often draw upon MTV (and the like) for the concept of (masculine-oriented) 'coolness' that seem to dominate Western game aesthetics. Though I can't say for sure, I would think that a similar phenomenon is occurring between the American and European game industries, and I can't see the situation reversing, what with the continuous obsession with graphics and pseudorealism.
Aly =]
"Garriott added that his assertion is somewhat tongue in cheek."
-a less dodgy source
For instance, Final Fantasy and Myst both feature orchestral soundtracks but the composing techniques used do vary, leading to different effects being created. The tendency seems to be that Japanese games feature melodic tunes for every scene/stage/level whereas Western games tend to use more ambient compositions.
Would someone with more knowledge in the area care to elaborate?
Aly.
I find the Mark 2 Ford Focus to be an interesting case study - the European and American branches of Ford made significantly different cars as a follow-up to the original Focus. The European Focus uses clean-cut, simplistic lines whilst the American equivalent treats it as a scaled-down large sedan with a much more aggressive tone.
Is this a result of market demand or just a difference in design philosophy? Someone here should be an expert in automotive design...=]
-Aly
Large, automatic transmission cars are a damn lot more comfortable than the small city-cars.
This seems to be one of the reasons that the American motor industry is so focused on hybrids: because they can make large, comfortable and lumbering cars that use as much fuel as a small one. In Europe, people have been used to small cars for a long time, but give the driver of a Crown Vic a Renault Clio and watch as they complain. Add that to the fact that the American commute can be as long as an European holiday, and it begins to seem that although diesel compacts are the most fuel-efficient technology, a car to truly be popular in the US should be a medium-large sedan with an efficient drivetrain.
Aly.
"The 'net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
And fifteen years later, we're seeing it in action. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Aly.
Although, having read the article, that may be much more simple than an actual jet-engined jetpack for the time being.
-Aly.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rkdWkAs9qmo
He points out that no matter how realistic a game is, it is just not a real-life experience:
"The one thing I've learned today... is that you can have the skill to get this car around here in 1:40, and it could do 1:40... [but] it's that part of your brain that makes you frightened."
Of course, games are essentially there to entertain, and I'm sure that a lot of people will enjoy racing against the professionals from the comfort of their own couch. But just because you can play Guitar Hero and have a blast of a time doing so, it doesn't necessarily mean you can play the guitar.
Aly =]
Having a decent understanding of Japanese, I have to say that the Japanese seem to be quite keen to prefer these anonymous BBS systems over, say, Invision or phpBB that you'd often find in English-language websites - even for smaller community sites. Is someone with more insight into the Japanese psychology able to explain this?
Also on the topic, I find it amazing that design paradigms, software used and general style of the "Japanese Internet" is often quite detached from what most of us here are used to, and to me it seems to have much more of the "hobbyist" feel to it. It probably has something to do with something I read about "recreational computing" in Japan being not as prevalent as the current Australian "MySpace society"...
Just my 2p,
Aly.
With the number of DJs here, I would not expect all of them to even know of this rule or for the ARIA to suddenly take all "offenders" to court. Don't feed the hands that bite you!
-Aly.
elynnia
...it's all about the money.
Bollocks. Meeting are held for a reason - and usually an important one to which mood can step back for. The submission title presents meetings as bad overall, while the article says -too many- meetings are bad. elynnia
I live in Australia, and with few exceptions, MSN is by far the de facto instant messenger: some people haven't even heard of the others. There's a small minority on Yahoo, and just one of my friends uses AIM - because she has so many friends in the States. I think, partly, this relates to the lack of aggressive marketing on AIM's part in Australia...
Hiya,
Slightly offtopic, but - why is it that in 'Western' countries, coffee-in-a-can is virtually nonexistant? I'm a great fan of that - and the Hot & Cold vending machines they had in Japan - and don't see why it wouldn't be popular in Australia/UK/USA etc.
elynnia
I'm a 16-year-old highschooler in Australia, and - not to mean any offence - am annoyed by people who think messing abount on their xboxen is l33t. I agree with the original poster who said that less people are understanding how things work, but for me, the problem seems to be accessing all that information. I mean - I'd love to be able to understand each part of a (vintage) computer, write in assebmly, and put two and two together to make a valve radio, but it feels like it's an 'oral tradition' that is only accessible if you know the right people...
elynnia
When Microsoft stops supporting it.
Hiya. Being an Australian highschool student, I'm quite interested in this discussion, and - from what it seems - the American highschool system seems to be in a state of chaos. I have one friend who can back that up...she moved from our school to Texas, and told us that everything was especially easy - especially the Maths. I find that worrying, especially because I believe knowing hard maths is the key to gaining a solid understanding of daily maths. As with computers - I as lucky to be in one of the very last years before computers became mainstream in our school. Now I look at the 'computer literacy' program and find that it involves a ridiculous amount of Flash animating, Powerpoint, and other 'worthless' techniques, compared to...hmm...maybe, elegant coding? I find this reflected in the other subjects too, such as English (where many students don't understand the inherent beauty of an eloquently written and logically clear essay) and Music (If you know anything about music, DO study, read the score of, or just listen to Die Kunst Der Fuge by J.S. Bach, which, in my opinion, is one of the most elegantly written works of counterpoint. I don't have a problem with 'electric noise', but it made me cringe when the guitarist from another band asked me before a performance to tune their guitar.) Away from my rant, I was troubled by the descriptions of the American highschool system that everyone commented. Over here (At least with the IB), all marks are externally and internationally moderated (meaning that if the teachers mark easy it'll be worse for the students), and you can -fail- Year 12 (Senior year), at which point you have to do a half/one year repeat. Also, is the picking on of academically oriented students (aka nerds), and the emphasis on sport seriously bad in the USA? In my school, I'm up there as a nerd, and I find absolutely nothing wrong with it. Don't get locked in a locker or bitched about or anything much. I suppose, that our school being only slightly more oriented in Sport, but recognising importance in Music, Dance, and the Arts in general, it's quite different to your average school...(It's a private school). If someone could do a comparison of schooling in the USA, Australia, England, Europe, etc, it would be awesome. elynnia (I'm 16, by the way.)
It's sort of the 10th version of the Mac OS, but the X was to make it sound cooler and sort of clever, but what comes after?
Mac OS X-2, of course.
This article brings to mind an incident I had with an Athlon I'd bought last year for my computer... I bought a 2200+ from a shop in Sydney, Australia, but when I started up the computer the BIOS recognised it as a 1800+, although it displayed it as a 2200+ when I took the computer back to the shop and the shop guy did 'Load Optimised Defaults' in the BIOS. Has anyone else here had similar experiences? ~Aly~