Jerz's Literacy Weblog

Scratchy “Cloak of Darkness” on Scratch

Dennis G. Jerz — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:51:10 +0000

“Scratchy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments.

“Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion in five or six moves, so it’s not going to keep you guessing for long. (On the other hand, it may qualify as the most widely-available game in the history of the genre.) There are just three rooms and three objects.

The Foyer of the Opera House is where the game begins. This empty room has doors to the south and west, also an unusable exit to the north. There is nobody else around.

The Bar lies south of the Foyer, and is initially unlit. Trying to do anything other than return northwards results in a warning message about disturbing things in the dark.

On the wall of the Cloakroom, to the west of the Foyer, is fixed a small brass hook.

Taking an inventory of possessions reveals that the player is wearing a black velvet cloak which, upon examination, is found to be light-absorbent. The player can drop the cloak on the floor of the Cloakroom or, better, put it on the hook.

Returning to the Bar without the cloak reveals that the room is now lit. A message is scratched in the sawdust on the floor.

The message reads either “You have won” or “You have lost”, depending on how much it was disturbed by the player while the room was dark.

The act of reading the message ends the game.

And that’s all there is to it…

Here is my Scratch implementation. On the Scratch site, you can see all the code (along with my annotation).

Scratchy “Cloak of Darkness” on Scratch.

There is already a canonical Inform 7 version of Cloak of Darkness (it’s part of the documentation), but I’ll post more on that soon. (Coming — Linky, Blendy, and Texty “Cloak of Darkness.”)

Two Steps Down the Interactive Fiction Road

Dennis G. Jerz — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:43:00 +0000

Wonderfully detailed analysis of two ground-breaking works of interactive fiction. I regularly assign “Photopia” and “Galatea,” but in our media projects course we never have time to analyze the works in this detail. I never did use a walkthrough for “Galatea,” so I am sure I missed lots of it.

Last time I looked at two examples of contemporary interactive fiction that were iterations of the classic text adventure genre. If I can borrow from Scott McCloud’s Six Steps of Art from his book Understanding Comics, those games sought to adjust and play with the craft and structure of their chosen medium. Photopia and Galatea are not iterations, but something entirely new that happen to use the same form. The two games I want to talk about now dig down and look at what the form of interactive text can accomplish and focus instead on the story and form levels of McCloud’s same steps. –PopMatters.

A Box With A Hidden Video Camera Documents Journey Through The Mail

Dennis G. Jerz — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:49:57 +0000

As a big fan of Richard Scary, I really wanted to see how postman Zip delivers Betsy bear’s birthday letter to grandma, but this is almost as good.

Singularity Hub.

My Ouya arrived.

Dennis G. Jerz — Tue, 21 May 2013 20:21:55 +0000

My Ouya arrived — a Kickstarter-funded gaming console.

I have never been a console gamer. Lately, I haven’t even been a PC gamer — when I have the time I would much rather create in Blender 3D or, in the past year or so, make a video.

But the principle behind the Ouya — that all games should have at least some free content, and that developers should have easy access to publish their own games — reminds me of the environment in which I first encountered computer games, by typing in source code from computing magazines, and hacking the results. Of course, those games looked and sounded terrible, but they were OURS, in a way that no game that comes on a cartridge or runs on a black box behind a paywall will ever match.

Not sure whether I’ll have the time to do an unboxing, but I’ll certainly need to look into game creation for this gadget.

We Need to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

Dennis G. Jerz — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:49:51 +0000

Maybe it’s not the super-robots we need to fear, but the ones just good enough to displace one worker’s salary.

Consider the automated checkout line at your local grocery store. It makes more mistakes than a human clerk, it is harder to use, and it is slower because of the rotating error light that loves to interrupt the whole process every few minutes. Is it better than a human? Of course not. It is simply good enough. And so begins the march of mediocre robots that can defensibly replace humans, not because they advantage the customer, but because they save money for a corporation. Robots will be able to fix your car poorly before they can fix it well. They will cook food that is bland and mealy before they garner a Michelin star. But they will take on middle-class jobs and win, not because of their qualitative merits, but because they look good in the antiseptic light of financial balance sheets. –via MIT Technology Review.

The new marshmallow test: Resisting the temptations of the web

Dennis G. Jerz — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:52:04 +0000

The Stanford marshmallow experiment is a famous study that linked the willingness to delay gratification (children were told they could have one treat now, or two if they waited about 15 min) to a range of positive life outcomes. Many of my students who can’t resist checking their phone in class or during one-on-one office visits are also the same students who have difficulty following instructions, meeting deadlines, managing a life-school-work balance, etc.

Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,” he declares. It’s difficult for anyone to properly evaluate how well his or her own mental processes are operating, he points out, because most of these processes are unconscious. And, Meyer adds, “there’s nothing magical about the brains of so-called ‘digital natives’ that keeps them from suffering the inefficiencies of multitasking. They may like to do it, they may even be addicted to it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s far better to focus on one task from start to finish.”

Researchers have documented a cascade of negative outcomes that occurs when students multitask while doing schoolwork. First, the assignment takes longer to complete, because of the time spent on distracting activities and because, upon returning to the assignment, the student has to re-familiarize himself with the material.

Second, the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and picking up a mental thread leads to more mistakes. The cognitive cost of such task-switching is especially high when students alternate between tasks that call for different sets of expressive “rules”—the formal, precise language required for an English essay, for example, and the casual, friendly tone of an email to a friend.

Third, students’ subsequent memory of what they’re working on will be impaired if their attention is divided. Although we often assume that our memories fail at the moment we can’t recall a fact or concept, the failure may actually have occurred earlier, at the time we originally saved, or encoded, the memory. The moment of encoding is what matters most for retention, and dozens of laboratory studies have demonstrated that when our attention is divided during encoding, we remember that piece of information less well—or not at all. As the unlucky student spotlighted by Rosen can attest, we can’t remember something that never really entered our consciousness in the first place. And a study last month showed that students who multitask on laptops in class distract not just themselves but also their peers who see what they’re doing.

Fourth, some research has suggested that when we’re distracted, our brains actually process and store information in different, less useful ways. In a 2006 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas-Austin and two colleagues asked participants to engage in a learning activity on a computer while also carrying out a second task, counting musical tones that sounded while they worked. Study subjects who did both tasks at once appeared to learn just as well as subjects who did the first task by itself. But upon further probing, the former group proved much less adept at extending and extrapolating their new knowledge to novel contexts—a key capacity that psychologists call transfer.

Brain scans taken during Poldrack’s experiment revealed that different regions of the brain were active under the two conditions, indicating that the brain engages in a different form of memory when forced to pay attention to two streams of information at once. The results suggest, the scientists wrote, that “even if distraction does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acquisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.”

Finally, researchers are beginning to demonstrate that media multitasking while learning is negatively associated with students’ grades. In Rosen’s study, students who used Facebook during the 15-minute observation period had lower grade-point averages than those who didn’t go on the site. And two recent studies by Reynol Junco, a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, found that texting and using Facebook—in class and while doing homework—were negatively correlated with college students’ GPAs. “Engaging in Facebook use or texting while trying to complete schoolwork may tax students’ capacity for cognitive processing and preclude deeper learning,” write Junco and a coauthor. (Of course, it’s also plausible that the texting and Facebooking students are those with less willpower or motivation, and ths likely to have lower GPAs even aside from their use of technology.) –Hechinger Report.

What Modern Humans Can Learn From The Neanderthals’ Extinction

Dennis G. Jerz — Sun, 19 May 2013 14:34:42 +0000

“You don’t like to think about a holocaust, but it’s quite possible,” he said. He referred to the long-standing belief among many anthropologists that H. sapiens exterminated Neanderthals with superior weapons and intellect. For a long time, there seemed to be no other explanation for the rapid disappearance of Neanderthals after H. sapiens arrived in their territories.

Today, however, there is a growing body of evidence from the field of population genetics that tells a very different story about what happened when the two groups of early humans lived together, sharing the same caves and hearths. Anthropologists like Milford Wolpoff, of the University of Michigan, and John Hawks have suggested that the two groups formed a new, hybrid human culture. Instead of exterminating Neanderthals, their theory goes, H. sapiens had children with them until Neanderthals’ genetic uniqueness slowly dissolved into H. sapiens over the generations. This idea is supported by compelling evidence that modern humans carry Neanderthal genes in our DNA.

Regardless of whether H. sapiens murdered or married the Neanderthals they met in the frozen forests of Europe and Russia, the fact remains that our barrel-chested cousins no longer walk among us. They are a group of humans who went extinct. The story of how that happened is as much about survival as it is about destruction. –Popular Science.

Why Can’t Millennials Find Jobs?

Dennis G. Jerz — Sun, 19 May 2013 14:00:11 +0000

Half of hiring managers say wearing attire ill-suited for an interview was one of the biggest mistakes they saw. Others include lack of eye contact (33%), checking phone or texting (30%), fidgeting (26%) and bad posture (22%). Other interview horror stories? Nearly half of hiring managers (44%) said showing up late or on the wrong date was a mistake they witnessed in job seekers.

[...]

One online privacy company wants to address the potential negative effects of social profiles. An Abine survey found that while most students updated their resume as part of a job search, less than 30% spent time removing potentially damaging content from social media accounts. Also, 84% have not created a professional website or other positive online content which would improve online search results for their name. –Why Can’t Millennials Find Jobs?.

11 Compound Word Errors that Might Make You Look like a Numbskull

Dennis G. Jerz — Thu, 16 May 2013 01:40:03 +0000

You might wonder why we ~~flip out over~~ stress the importance of accurate grammar and usage. Well, there are a couple of reasons …
You look silly or unprofessional when you don’t get it right. Don’t think the proofreading police aren’t watching. They are. And they never sleep.

Great writers not only struggle with their words and getting ideas down on paper accurately, but with fine tuning everything — including their usage.

Sharpening the saw in the small stuff is a healthy habit for writers … no matter how long they’ve been in the business. – Copyblogger.

Sam Shepard Giggles, Doesn’t Google

Dennis G. Jerz — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:05:16 +0000

I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on the plays of Sam Shepard. I took my first-ever date (hi, Maria) to see Shepard in The Right Stuff.

He’s dressed in country clothes – a checked shirt and a nondescript jacket – and, unlike most writers, he has an outdoors complexion; a lived-in face. But what’s most noticeable is his sense of humour. It’s a lovely, gentle thing; he pokes fun at me, at himself; and when I listen back to the tape, I realise something more shocking still: he doesn’t just laugh, and on occasion guffaw, he actually giggles. Sam Shepard is a giggler.

[...]

He writes on a manual typewriter, and refuses to so much as look at the internet. “I have a cellphone but I have no Google, I have no gaggle.”

Really? But everything you’ve ever wondered, ever, is out there, I say.

“No, no, no! The things that I wonder about most are not on the internet, I promise you that.” –The Observer.