Public intellectualism is only public when set in relief against the sordid, indulgent privatism of the liberal arts, which spends most of its collective time denigrating the general public for their false consciousness in the coffeeshop attached to the indie bookstore. Let's face it: thinking in public is orthogonal to scholarly life. The "public intellectual" is a contradiction in terms.
Researchers found that the more social platforms with which a person is engaged, the more willing he or she will be to seek the opinions of others through status messages and act on those messages.
“Although people share information with companies, organizations and others via mechanisms like polls, they are more trusting of those in their social network,” Jansen said. “Not only do people share information on social media sites, they act on information received. So, there are significant implications for a variety of areas, such as advertising and marketing.”
The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we'll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.
We need to engage deeply with these changes, and we best do that in the open, with some high profile mis-steps to guide us. In an odd way, Facebook is doing us a favor by bringing these issues to the fore, especially if (as they have done in the past), they react by learning from their mistakes. It's important to remember that there was a privacy brouhaha when Facebook first introduced the Newsfeed back in 2006!
What we're really trying to figure out are the right tradeoffs.
A careful use of the site's privacy settings may provide some protection so that only your "friends" can see them. But failing to tick the right boxes may not only enable your "friends" (or enemies) to view, use, copy and tag your images, but may leave them open to picture researchers, reporters and picture editors as a first port of call to flesh out and illustrate national news stories.
The characters of Heavy Rain are not blank slates, or characters whose identities we fill in through our own decisions -- they aren't like Gordon Freeman or Commander Shepard. They're characters with existing histories and personalities. By granting us control over these characters, the player is forced into an awkward position of half-agency: their desires intermingle with our own, forcing us to either relinquish our own sense of control and relevance, or actively participate in a story populated by characters who make ridiculous and self-defeating decisions.
the sheer scope and scale of the managed data, and the widely varied sources of the data, make it potentially possible for some interesting connections to be made. Sure, much of it is claimed to be anonymized, but there’s not really any such thing as true anonymity.
What is to stop Google from connecting the dots to say “show me a list of people who have searched for ‘alternative medicine’ who have visited an out of country clinic, have a history of cancer, and have searched for ‘google jobs’ and ‘insurance plan’?“
My point is, if any government agency proposed tracking this level of data on individuals, there would be (should be) riots in the streets. At the very least, it would be a high profile election issue.
"Our surveys showed that while laptop computers can be a distraction, students of this generation feel that they are capable of productive multitasking," Samson said.
Through LectureTools, laptops serve as robust "clickers," providing drastically more interaction than the class polling that clicker-based student response systems offer.
LectureTools also allows students to take notes directly on lecture slides. Students can anonymously ask the instructor's aide a question through a chat window during class, and others can see these questions and answers. Students can also rate their own understanding of each slide, giving the professor valuable feedback.
Come to think of it, the Arizona law doesn't go far enough: People with accents should be banned from any profession that involves communication. Politics, for instance. Henry Kissinger's accent would surely qualify for the ban. And let's not stop with the foreign-born: Ban all accents. Southern accents, for instance, or Yankee ones. Actually, there isn't anyone who speaks without an accent, so let's just ban communicating altogether. This would be a much better country if everyone just kept quiet and handed his proof of citizenship to the police.
Could a female character, perhaps older, with a few battle scars, or some gritty humor added to her appearance, be suitable for Gears of War? If such a character were designed, could she possibly appeal to potential female gamers and males as well? If she were portrayed with the same respect and visual interest as the rest of the cast, females may be more inclined to give a game like Gears of War a chance.
we talk a lot about games being based on films. Mass Effect 2 isn’t. Mass Effect’s structure is far closer to a television series – and not necessarily one with the tight MUSTWATCHEVERYEPISODEORYOUWILLNOTUNDERSTANDAFUCKINGTHING structure that’s currently popular in geek-media. The semi-loose one. There’s a main plot, sure… but an episode is an episode. I found myself thinking about Firefly as much as Battlestar Galactica, as the recruitment and loyalty missions acted as spotlight episodes on each characters, at first introducing and then resolving them in our minds. Each character’s loyalty mission is, basically, as Firefly’s Jaynestown is for Jayne. The final suicide mission is the equivalent of the double-length season finale. When viewed through this prism, the finale seems far less truncated.