betajames

It's easy to dismiss this idea as just another amusing and unrealistic model dreamed up by those whacky comsologists.

That is until you look at the predictions it makes. During a period of expansion, an observer in this universe would see an odd kind of change in the red-shift of bright objects such as Type-I supernovas, as they accelerate away. It turns out, says Shu, that his data exactly matches the observations that astronomers have made on Earth.

This kind of acceleration is an ordinary feature of Shu's universe.

That's in stark contrast to the various models of the Universe based on the Big Bang. Since the accelerating expansion of the Universe was discovered, cosmologists have been performing some rather worrying contortions with the laws of physics to make their models work.

It's a value-added, remixed, platform-built economy these days. That's a whole new channel opening up for innovation, the democratization of the economy and for revenue creation. Does it cannibalize the old economy? Not if the experience of two of history's fastest-growing platform dynamos (iPhone and Facebook) are any indication. This digital economy could be called post-scarcity not because scarcity is no longer realistic or valuable, but because it's no longer a precondition for the creation of value. In fact, scarcity may produce less total value in the future than the ecosystem of augmentation, annotation, remixing and fair use of the items formerly considered scarce will.

In the case of true close friends, you know about all the crap that is going on in their lives. From deep interaction, you know the specific pains and doubt that lies behind the smiling profile picture.

No, the life-comparison danger comes from the weak ties; from those people you met at a conference, or the friends from High School that you haven’t interacted with since they friended you last year. From these people you get a constant stream of life, edited to show the good parts.

Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do intereseting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be pschologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

The Web is now old enough for us to know just how badly links rot over time. Much of the material from the early days of the Web is already gone. Facebook and Twitter actually make it nearly impossible for you to find older material, even stuff that you’ve contributed yourself. The more dynamic the Web gets and the more stuff we move into “the cloud,” the less confident we can be that information that once was public will remain available to the public.

Adventure and role-playing games typically portray the Middle East in fantasy or quasi-historical manner, exploiting 'Orientalist' imagery, whereas action games and especially first-person shooters present the Middle East in a contemporary and decidedly conflictual framework, schematizing Arabs and Muslims as enemies. The latter exhibit strong cultural bias on a variety of levels and particularly demonstrate Reichmuth and Werning's concept of 'neglected media'. The reason for this is closely connected to the question of stereotyping and schematization in video games per se, and lies in the linkage between production and consumption. Since video games are usually produced with their consumer base in mind, they tend to incorporate and reflect the general imaginations of the Middle East prevalent among the western public, as well as the audience's expectations of particular genres.

Muslims now face a question whether the video games available to play on these consoles are halal or haram. As a Muslim, this question must be asked because we are to assess the permissibility of some thing before we can sell, purchase and utilize it.

Generally video games are without a doubt haram. There are many aspects to this issue which lead to it being forbidden.

the stories Gershon heard were much more sophisticated than simply "he texted me" or "she sent me an e-mail." People she spoke to did a lot of "media switching" and made use of many forms of new media in order to look for reasons behind the breakup and even continue to follow former lovers' lives online. She said there are various things that can be learned from each form of communication.

For example, a 30-something man she interviewed learned that his wife wanted a divorce through a two-sentence e-mail while he was away on a business trip. In the meantime, she had emptied their joint bank accounts and he had no place to stay upon his return. Afterwards, she kept e-mailing his work account rather than having direct conversation. She ignored all of his notes he sent to her personal e-mail account.

"He began to pay a lot of attention to the e-mail account the messages were coming from," Gershon recalled. "He began to try and figure out what was going on. He learned that she had been experimenting with trying to have different personalities online. She had practiced being a different person on her Facebook profile," she added. "He also figured out through the technology, in part, that this other person (with whom she was having an affair) was at her workplace."

The boundaries were clear: He was no longer allowed to contact her personal account or interact with her during her personal time.

"People really are using all the ways in which these technologies give them access to different kinds of information about what's going on, to try and figure out what's going on," Gershon said. "What I find really interesting about the break-up stories is that they were really detective stories."

Games and game-like activities are vital to both children and adults for growth and development. Gameplay provides and promotes the development and formation of thinking as well as helping structure identities, values and norms of society. Games can be used as a tool where the player has the freedom to explore, create, manipulate and experiment with scenarios in a creative environment without boundaries. Because of this, games are a motivating and rewarding experience where the player consciously or subconsciously learns every time they play (Arnseth, 2006).

Through play, learning is embedded into video games which develop vital skills crucial to other areas of learning. Prensky describes this learning as occurring on five 'levels' which apply to a greater or lesser extent every time we pick up a controller. The most explicit level 'how' explains the process of how we learn to play games. When we play a new game we must learn the rules, physical manipulations (controls) and limitations.

The objective of conversation is to entertain or inform the other person while not using up all of the talking time. A big part of how you entertain another person is by listening and giving your attention. Ideally, your own enjoyment from conversation comes from the other person doing his or her job of being interesting. If you are entertaining yourself at the other person's expense, you're doing it wrong.

An academic trying to simulate a human brain has a massive super computer devoted to the task of thinking, while an AI programmer for a video game is instead working with a small percentage of processor power. The majority of the computing power in games is instead going towards depicting graphics, sound, physics, and cow bell type things. For example, technically the AI in Halo 3 is less sophisticated than in Halo 2 because most of the processor has to be devoted to graphics. A giant, open world game will inherently have stupider AI because there just isn’t enough power to go around. So the art of video game AI is in making a player think that they’re interacting with something more sophisticated than it really is.

the web was now contrary to the original utopian vision and users focused on information from a handful of wealthy countries.

"It's making us 'imaginary cosmopolitans'," he told delegates.

Social networks, he said, made the problem worse with the majority of people sharing information with folk who share their world-view.

"We think we're getting a broad view of the world, because it's possible that our television, newspapers and internet could be giving us a vastly wider picture than was available for our parents or grandparents," he said.

"When we look at what's actually happening, our world-view might actually be narrowing."