betajames

The discovery is that the players exist in your game in two instances, the "avatar" and the "organism". The avatar is, of course, what is rendered on screen; the organism is what is left of the player after passing through the plane into the game world -- the preservation the game's functionality and its translation into in-game abilities.

In nature, there is no "avatar", since a creature's body is an exact representation of the organism's capabilities. In games, however, there is an inherent discrepancy between the two -- since the developer dictates in detail the embodiment of the organism. The game might dictate that the hero is a space marine; the challenge, however, is to design a user interface -- or let's call it "organism interface" -- that makes the player feel adequately that he or she is a space marine.

The history of game design is not simply a result of technological developments, but increases in data storage capacity certainly allowed the scrolling game to replace the non-scrolling game: suddenly, new playing experiences came from games that were data-intensive, and the processual economy of the changing level layout became less important.

Learning to play any game is a process of creating strategies for playing that game, but changing the level layout forces the player to constantly reconsider his or her strategies. In the history of video games, this way of creating variation was superseded by data storage, by new games with vast expanses for the player to explore.

Amit Singhal types that koan into his company’s search box. Singhal, a gentle man in his forties, is a Google Fellow, an honorific bestowed upon him four years ago to reward his rewrite of the search engine in 2001. He jabs the Enter key. In a time span best measured in a hummingbird’s wing-flaps, a page of links appears. The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google’s servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there’s no direct referral to Siwek.

“The work we’re doing has to do with the facilitation of cultural training,” said Dr. Marjorie Zielke, an assistant professor in the ATEC program and the principal investigator on the project. “The way some of that training has been done in the past and may still be done in certain areas is to build actual villages and hire actors to replicate a particular culture,” Zielke said. “That kind of approach has some limitations in the sense that it’s expensive, not everyone can attend, it’s not easily changed because it’s a physical structure, you have to work with actual actors, and so forth.”

Quick blogging tools are characterized by two main features that set them apart from more traditional blogging tools. One is a focus on specific types of content. Instead of every post being a generic entity, with the author responsible for including the necessary media and formatting, quick blogging tools allow you share specific items like quotes, photos, videos, and links. Each type of item is automatically presented in a suitable format for its content type, and it's possible to use type-specific styling in pre-made or custom templates.

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance...these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility...these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in spades. It's not too late xxxx...

the fans and bloggers who helped spread “Here It Goes Again” across the Internet can no longer do what they did before, because our record company has blocked them from embedding our video on their sites. Believe it or not, in the four years since our treadmill dance got such attention, YouTube and EMI have actually made it harder to share our videos.

Old CDs wind up skipping, anyway-- "perfect sound forever" was a lie. Cassettes have their own problems, from unruly tape that you may need to tape together to inevitable disintegration, but there are certainly worse offenders. "Cassettes and vinyl are the analogue cockroaches to the nuclear Armageddon that is digital formats," Super Furry Animals' Rhys proclaims. "Back in the 90s when Super Furry Animals were starting out, we used to master tunes to digital DAT tapes if we didn't have the budget for reel to reel tapes. Most of these are unplayable today. The sound from them has seemingly vanished to thin air. I have had to remaster some back catalogue stuff from cassette copies-- which sounds great. It's unclear how long information will actually last in hard drives. In that sense it's always worth keeping a vinyl or cassette copy of a piece of music you truly cherish."

Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.

While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.