Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.
In this case, the fact that the brain - just like the internet - is a network with “small world properties” helps. Every pixel in the brain and every Internet page can be seen as a hub in this network. The hubs can be directly connected to each other just as two Internet pages can be linked.
With eigenvector centrality, the hubs are assessed based on the type and quality of their connections to other hubs. On the one hand, it is important how many connections a particular node has, and on the other, the connections of the neighbouring nodes are also significant. Search engines like Google use this principle, meaning that Internet sites linked to frequently visited sites, like Wikipedia, for example, appear higher in results than web pages which don’t have good connections.
They have covered the Crystals' He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss), American teen star JoJo's R&B ballad, Too Little Too Late, and the old English sea shanty Deep Blue Sea. On the Veckatimest tour, they have performed under huge bulbs in massive glass jars, which have blinked and sparkled in time to the music. They have also played with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the LSO, for which their songs were arranged by composer Nico Muhly (who also worked with them on Veckatimest).
Accusations of pretentiousness came with the move into orchestral performance, which rankled with Droste. "It bums me out! That playing with an orchestra is perceived as a very grand thing to do, when I wish it was just perceived as like a fun, one-night thing. I thought it would introduce younger fans to different music, and perhaps bridge a gap between the generations."
My present-day fascination with videogames does not derive from personal affection. I prefer working out and skiing to playing videogames. But that's a personal preference, not a value judgment. I happen to think that videogames are an ideal means to help broaden the imaginations of young people.
For Millennials, life is not relegated to evenings and weekends. We have been instilled with the determination to find jobs we enjoy – and why not? Many criticise my generation for having high aspirations, as if rising to the top in a sector that we hate is a preferable alternative to landing a job we are passionate about – but this view can be enormously damaging to any business.
If we value the humanities enough to teach them at the undergraduate level, if we believe that humanities education produces thoughtful, critical, self-aware global citizens, then we need to recognize that advanced training in the humanities cannot be simply the province of aspiring tenure-track faculty members. If there’s no prospect of a tenure-track job in the humanities, and humanities graduate programs train students for nothing but tenure-track jobs, how long can these programs be sustainable?
How did Facebook come to the decision to make these newest changes in its privacy policy? At one point in the conversation, Zuckerberg emphasized how the company's decision making is driven by numbers. He spoke at length about how real, everyday users were not freaking out about these privacy shifts. They keep coming back to the site, they use it more than ever in fact, and they are more concerned about the way that game notifications show up in their newsfeed than they are about the privacy debates of pundits and watchdogs. It felt like a very dismissive way to discuss the concerns being discussed.
The soundtracks of both games jarringly counterpoint the brutal actions of scavengers in the Capital Wasteland and Rapture. Inhumanity and desperation is hauntingly accompanied by songs by songs by Billie Holiday, Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ink Spots, and the Andrews Sisters. That both soundtracks are comprised of songs, which almost exclusively belong to a time associated with values, decency, and decorum, is, of course, intended to be ironic and also serves as a means of emphasizing just how rotten the world has become since a time so idealized in the American imagination.
Our practice of giving games either a "Buy, Rent or Skip" verdict is too vague for Metacritic to arbitrarily take our score and tell its readers what it thinks we meant. Since we're not weighted in the Metacritic score, no one bugs us about what rating we're going to give a game, and we've never been presented a variable embargo based on the score. In other words, not being a part of that scoring system removes a lever that publishers can use to try to change how their games are covered. Based on the number of publishers willing to send us early games to review, they don't appear to mind.
