WYMHM: "Explain why it is important to have a rating system for video games."

Belt Loop

Complete these three requirements:

  1. Explain why it is important to have a rating system for video games. Check your video games to be sure they are right for your age.
  2. With an adult, create a schedule for you to do things that includes your chores, homework, and video gaming. Do your best to follow this schedule.
  3. Learn to play a new video game that is approved by your parent, guardian, or teacher.

WYMHM: "fashion is a form of rhetoric" and how it functions in videogames

Thus, as games have grown more mature and more interested in communicating messages, stories, and ideas in a more complex way, it seems to me inevitable that the virtual closets of our avatars have expanded.  In a medium where the visual plays a big role in speaking to its audience, understanding characters through their physical appearance is important.  Character customization additionally plays to the medium’s strengths as it allows the player the opportunity to participate in how a story is told and how their virtual self is supposed to be understood in the context of the virtual performance that they are taking part in.

Summer Saturday Reading List & Tentative Schedule

Since graduate school, Saturdays have never been very productive. Before admitting to this, I would often get up early on a Saturday with every expressed intention to write, only to own up to miserable failure by 5pm. While I know better now than to attempt writing, I'm not satisfied with chalking up Saturday to a complete lack of productivity. Last semester, I took to reading one book over the course of one Saturday and this is something I want sustain over the entirety of the summer. So, as the title of this post implies, here's my reading list and a tentative schedule*. 

 

May 1 - Hamlet on the Holodeck
May 8 - Persuasive Games
May 15 - Academic Self / Gift Of Death
May 22 - DIY U
May 29 - A Better Pencil

 

June 5 - Wisdom of Crowds 
June 12 - Games of Empire 
June 19 - Writing at the End of the World 
June 26 - Structure of Scientific Revolutions

 

July 3 - Remix 
July 10 - A Counter-History of Composition
July 17 - Understanding Video Games
July 24 - Glut
July 31 - Wealth of Networks

 

August 7 - Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology 
August 14 - Mechanisms
August 21 - Protocol
August 28 - Always On

 

I welcome additions, deletions and suggestions for reorganization.
*I'm also reading Gravity's Rainbow, which I expect will take most of the summer.

WYMHM: "extending 4th Amendment protection to the cloud rests with the reasonableness of society's expectations"

Unfortunately, the law generally does not evolve as quickly as technology. The 1967 phone booth case was the first time telephone conversations were recognized as constitutionally protected from unreasonable searches—nearly one hundred years after the telephone was invented. The Internet and cloud computing have taken a fraction of that time to reach wide market penetration, and show little sign of slowing down. But since Moore's Law does not apply to legal innovation, the disparities between technology and the law are likely to become even greater.

 

WYMHM: "If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on"

Statistics is hard. But that’s not just an issue of individual understanding; it’s also becoming one of the nation’s biggest political problems. We live in a world where the thorniest policy issues increasingly boil down to arguments over what the data mean. If you don’t understand statistics, you don’t know what’s going on — and you can’t tell when you’re being lied to. Statistics should now be a core part of general education. You shouldn’t finish high school without understanding it reasonably well — as well, say, as you can compose an essay.

 

WYMHM: "When we understand that [PowerPoint] slide, we'll have won the war."

Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina.

 

WYMHM: In the future, we will have wearable interface devices

What a game of gadget juggling we play each day! A laptop, several mobile phones, a personal mp3 player... Wouldn't it be great if we could just join them all up together? We could have our address book, our personal preferences, our book marks, our playlists and our favourite films - a host of personal data files and documents - all accessible on any device (not just our own), anywhere.

The solution is basic, at least in concept: you simply carry all your personal information with you.

 

WYMHM: The art of the elevator pitch in email form

1. The subject line matters. Don't leave this blank, and don't write something vague like "introduction" or "pitch" or "idea" in the subject line. At least include your company name, but better yet include something that makes the email seem interesting to read.

2. Introduce yourself. Personalized emails go a lot farther than those sent from the marketing department. While attachments like resumes and press releases are sometimes appropriate, you should give a quick introduction to yourself at the beginning of an email. Your introduction should include the key details: who you are and why the recipient should know you.

3. Know your audience. Demonstrate some evidence in your email that you know who the recipient is. Make sure you are targeting the right person with the right message.

 

WYMHM: "So why are students so smitten with random video-chatting?"

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State who teaches Mr. Park's digital-ethnography class, thinks something more is happening.

"Think about the anxiety of trying to impress a girl when you're young," Mr. Wesch says. These days the soft-spoken 34-year-old is a new-media rock star­—called "the explainer" by Wired magazine and admired for videos on education and technology that have been viewed by millions—but it's easy to imagine him as an awkward high-school kid in Fairbury, Neb., anguishing over whether to ask out a girl. Teenage Romeos get very little practice at impressing girls, he said, because every time they get shot down, "that's one less girl in the pool." If you grow up where he did, the pool can be pretty tiny.