Recently in the Psychology Category

My sixth-grader has scored very well on standardized tests for math, but he finds a blank page of math problems intimidating and boring. He spends hours -- literally hours -- wasting time at the kitchen table, not doing his long division or word problems. Yet for pleasure, he reads Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries and the last two bedtime stories we've finished have been kid-friendly biographies of Archimedes and Galen.

My son wants to be a scientist, but finds math boring. Clearly we have to do something about this!

Age-appropriate development and understanding of mathematical concepts does not advance at a rate fast enough to please test-obsessed lawmakers. But adults using test scores to reward or punish other adults are doing a disservice to the children they claim to be helping.

It does not matter the exact age that you learned to walk. What matters is that you learned to walk at a developmentally appropriate time. To do my job as a physicist I need to know matrix inversion. It didn't hurt my career that I learned that technique in college rather than in eighth grade. What mattered was that I understood enough about math when I got to college that I could take calculus. --Joseph Ganem, American Physical Society

One day, my wife put the book 10 Things All Future Mathematicians And Scientists Must Know: But Are Rarely Taught into the stack of books at my son's bedside. I glanced through the table of contents and got very excited.  The book mentions the Challenger disaster (managers ignored the engineers who warned that a low-temperature launch was risky), Dr. Snow's study of a cholera outbreak (he plotted deaths on a map and realized one water pump in the neighborhood was infected), and the principle of Occam's razor (which, in the absence of compelling evidence either way, favors the simple explanation over the complex).

Each chapter features a series of anecdotes that explain a big-picture concept (causation and correlation; bias; mistakes as an integral part of scientific inquiry; ethical experimentation), a cartoon mouse and cartoon Einstein comment on the stories, and the chapter ends with discussion questions that first require you to solve a word problem before you can weigh in with an opinion. This chapter is training young minds not to jump to conclusions, especially when all the information they need is right in front of them.

While I won't pretend this one book has solved all our math woes, I will say that at bedtime the other night, Peter was happily pondering this question:

A hot-air balloon can safely hold 1055 pounds. It currently has 6 people in it whose average weight is 128 pounds. In addition, it has a 4-foot by 6-foot metal floor that weights 8 pounds per square foot. How many 25-pound bags of sand can be safely placed in the balloon?

This question came at the end of a chapter that described the 2001 death of the up-and-coming singer Aaliyah. (A pilot initially said it was unsafe for her entourage and all their baggage to fly in a small plane; but the group refused to leave any people or any baggage behind. The pilot relented, the plane crashed soon after takeoff, and all nine people aboard were killed.) My son has a well-developed sense of morality, so he was pretty much furious at that pilot.  The emotion motivated him to answer the word problem number story.

I guided him through the process, of course, asking questions to make sure he remembered the various subtotals.

When my wife came past the door and saw that we were still up reading (and calculating), she ordered us to stop for the night.

In several of my classes this week, I asked the students to estimate how many children had been poisoned by Halloween candy in the last 20 years.  Guesses ranged from one per year to one, but nobody guessed zero.

No child has been poisoned by a stranger's goodies on Halloween, ever, as far as we can determine. Joel Best, a sociology professor at the University of Delaware, studied November newspapers from 1958 to the present, scouring them for any accounts of kids felled by felonious candy. And...he didn't find any. He did find one account of a boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix his father gave him. Dad did it for the insurance money and, Best says, he probably figured that so many kids are poisoned on Halloween, no one would notice one more.

Well, they did and dad was executed. That's Texas for you. Another boy died after he got into his uncle's heroin stash and relatives tried to make it look like he'd been killed by candy. And that's it.

Now look at how the fear that our nice, normal-seeming neighbors might actually be moppet-murdering psychopaths has turned the one kiddie independence day of the year into yet another excuse to micromanage childhood. --Lenore Skenazy, Huffington Post

Razor blades in apples! Poison in home-made cookies! Hospitals offer to X-ray your candy for you (while passing out brochures featuring smiling doctors in front of gleaming new equipment). In 2003, The Onion memorably spoofed the Halloween candy fear in "Generic Candy Corn Will Give You AIDS."

Our decision to homeschool began when we moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania with a five-year-old, and found there was no option for half-day kindergarten. We decided the move was stressful enough, and since school attendance wasn't mandatory until age 7, we decided to handle the afternoon naps, storytimes, and playing-with-blocks ourselves. As long as our kids continue to thrive, we'll continue to homeschool.

It's been more than two decades since Robert Fulghum published the oft-quoted (and oft-mocked) essay "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." The piece describes a bucolic world of wonder, a place for cookies and afternoon naps.

That world is long gone.

Earlier this year, the nonprofit advocacy group Alliance for Childhood, based just outside Washington, D.C., issued a report titled "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in Schools," drawing from nine new studies of public school classrooms around the country. Kindergartners in the studies spent four to six times as much of the school day being drilled in literacy and math as they did playing.

Recess has been truncated or has disappeared entirely in some schools, a double whammy, since children are stressed out by the demands and also deprived of their major stress reliever. The report cites study after study showing increasing stress, aggression, and other behavior problems, and even breakdowns.

Roz Brezenoff taught kindergarten in the Boston Public Schools for 36 years, retiring five years ago. "I have heard stories of kids having what they call psychotic breakdowns in kindergarten, kids who are distressed because they are 'kindergarten failures' because they can't read and they can't write," she says.

To be sure, many children thrive in an academic environment, and some parents seek out institutions like the Edward Brooke Charter School in Roslindale, which bills itself as "unapologetically college preparatory." Teachers there assign nightly homework in kindergarten. But many children that age are not ready for that kind of work, and all are being held to new standards. --Patti Hartigan, Boston.com

Last week, I spent a little while doing the rounds, trying to drum up some advertising customers for the student paper. Ordinarily there's a student who carries the role of business manager, but when we're in between student workers, or outside of class time, I try to push things along.

There were twenty different things I'd rather have been doing at that time, but the money goes directly to support the school's educational mission. We recently replaced our six-year-old hand-me-down computers with a couple of new ones, and over the years we've students to training workshops and conferences in New York and elsewhere.

So here I am, going door to door, mentioning that I'm trying to sell ads, and watching eyes glaze over. 

"I can give you two minutes," said a guy in an apron.

It was a humbling experience -- being blown off by a guy wearing an apron.  I didn't even have two minutes of stuff to say -- I just mentioned that his competition down the street just bought an ad of X size, and leaving my contact information. 

But it was a good experience, too. 

I'm used to walking into a chattering room full of students who immediately settle down and wait for me to start talking. A small handful of students who feel very comfortable around me will politely mime a wristwatch check when I've run over time; most just sit there and wait for me to finish. Of course, it's my goal in the classroom to let the students do most of the talking, but on the first day of classes, the students are perfectly happy listening as I go over the syllabus. I also spend part of my week working on committees with other faculty and staff members, so it's not as if I expect the world to revolve around me.

I wasn't mad at the busy employees who didn't even look up from their desk during my pitch, who didn't give me their name or accept my card, who didn't take the copy of The Setonian.  Instead, I was feeling guilty for all the times I have blown off a sales representative, thrown a sales pitch directly into my spam folder, or avoided eye contact with someone wearing a "Vendor" nametag.

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed offers a gentle rebuke to the edupunk movement, which celebrates do-it-yourself technical solutions over the pre-packaged corporate products. If a few admissions and hiring decisions had gone a different way in the past, I might very well be peddling educational software or textbooks to busy professors.
 

The Golden Rule for Ed Tech Vendors

• Many of the people in the for-profit world in fact come from the non-profit educational world. You will be surprised that their backgrounds, interests, and passions will so closely match your own. For this reason, they tend to identify too strongly with their customers, and will be unhappy when they think their companies actions are not in the best interests of the colleges and universities that they work with.
• If you talk to your ed. tech. vendor representative you may be surprised to the degree that they believe in the profit-motive as a motivator for innovation. They have often left the slow and hidebound cultures of academia precisely because of the slowness of traditional institutions to change and innovate. They like that their success or failures can be measured by bottom line evaluations, in hard profit and loss numbers. They will believe, and they will be correct, that it is the for profit educational technology world that is responsible for much of the innovation in higher education. --Joshua Kim
  

A few years ago, I bought a wireless mouse, used it for a few days, then put it away in favor of my old mouse.  Every so often, like when I'm not feeling the course-prep love and I'm desperately looking for an excuse to procrastinate, I remember that wireless mouse, but can't remember why I stopped using it. So I dig it out, reinstall it, use it for a while, and then put it away again.  The last time that happened, I decided I would put it away so far that I wouldn't be able to find it the next time I wanted to try it again.

I want to try it again, but I can't remember where I put it. And no, I don't remember why I must have decided the corded mouse was better.

TV news emphasizes the immediate and the emotional.  This screen shot shows how the NBC news affiliate in Miami allows readers to rate stories by emotions.

Notice that this mechanism does not reward stories for being fair, informative, accurate, or even newsworthy. 

I stumbled across this feature while reading a story about the 11-year-old reporter who got a one-on-one interview with the president. Miami is apparently "bored" with that story, though the city is "laughing" about stories on Cuba running out of toilet paper, an elderly couple starting a fire while doing the nasty in bed (illustrated by the image of a sexy young couple in bed, since apparently no sexy hidden camera footage of the newsmaking and whoopee-making elderly couple was available), and a man who pretended to be disabled so a hired nurse would change his dirty diapers.

The first man on the moon doesn't feel his life is defined by being the first man on the moon? As if the world would remember much more than Armstrong's "one piece of fireworks"? Would his name belong beside Magellan's or Marco Polo's if not for Armstrong's singular achievement? --Paul Farhi, Washington Post

Post office boxes! Post office boxes!

My face hurts from laughing.


New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition--including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead--evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language. -- Jamais Cascio, The Atlantic

"What if I had a check on my desk for $5,000? And what if I rewarded the writer whose introduction most caught my attention, who most effectively made me want to continue because of a solid and clear thesis, with a check for five grand? Would your introductions improve even more?"

Cries of "Absolutely!" filled the room -- to which I replied, "Then you always could do it. You just couldn't be bothered."

Silence followed. -- Bob Kunzinger, Chronicle of Higher Education (paid subscription)

After working with students on their thesis, Kunzinger has his students write the introduction to their papers in class, and gives them a separate grade on each section of the paper. He points out that students know their professors have to read anything they write, and that professors will allow rewrites, so they don't put much effort into their drafts. (He notes that this isn't malice on their part -- they've been trained through high school that a good assignment is a finished one, and he argues that poor performance in wiriting classes has more to do with students choosing not to make any significant effort, rather than students being unable to write.)

The first few panels of a 12-panel cartoon.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

I've never been a phone guy.  My voicemail recording advises people to e-mail me rather than wait for me to remember to check my messages. 

Around 2004, I told a class of students that I didn't use instant messager because I would have nobody to talk to.  I got a generous "awww!" of pity from the class. 

I didn't mean to imply that I had no friends; rather, for years I had already been keeping up with friends and family via e-mail and telephone, and with professional contacts through e-mail, blogs, and Usenet.  I had no personal or professional need to hang out in chat rooms, so I've never done it (just as I have never gone para-sailing, or owned a ferret).

If you spread my handheld computer investment across the 12 years I've used a PDA, I've spent a very reasonable $4/month.  I will probably want my next PDA to have WiFi, but I'm never more than a few steps from a computer when I'm at work or home.  I just don't feel obligated to pay the phone company so that, if I'm out on an errand or playing with the kids in the backyard, I will be available to high school students with grammar questions or SEO prospectors asking me for reciprocal links.

While liveblogging a talk at Computers and Writing 2009, I overheard people talking about the back-channel discussion that was occurring on Twitter.  In the registration room, there was a projection stream displaying the Twitter feed for #cw09. 

For the first time, I found a reason to tweet. 

Shackle yourself to your work, and set the timer.


Thanks for the link, Josh.

• Katie Retzinger, "Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity"
• Mathew S.S. Johnson "The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change"
• Phill Alexander: "Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft"

The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture and identity studies have long been areas of overlap.  I didn't detect a shred of defensiveness in the approach these scholars took, which has not always been the case at games-related CCCC events.  The idea of presenting games as an avenue for social change sounds like another potential growth area, in which the study of composition can turn games into a tool of inquiry and challenge, in much the same way that composition teachers often posit their role as preparing future citizens of a literate society.  I wanted just a bit more of the "How my thesis applies to college composition and communication" bullet point, simply because one expects that in a talk at this venue, but all three held up as explorations of issues relevant to both games studies and identity politics.

What follows are my own rough notes, lightly edited, with my own comments inserted in square brackets.

You are pleased to find scientific evidence of a phenomenon that you had been familiar with all along through your love of interactive fiction. You check BoingBoing, where you find exactly the same lame second-person intro gimmick.

When the volunteers read statements that began, "You are..." they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However, when they read statements explicitly describing someone else (for example, sentences that began, "He is...") then they tended to view the scene from an outsider's perspective. Even more interesting was what the results revealed about first-person statements (sentences that began, "I am..."). The perspective used while imagining these actions depended on the amount of information provided - the volunteers who read only one first-person sentence viewed the scene from their point of view while the volunteers who read three first-person sentences saw the scene from an outsider's perspective.

[...]

The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements ("You are..."), there is a greater sense of "being there" and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.-- Association for Psychological Science

Let's face it--each new stage in life brings dramatic changes that are difficult to anticipate. No matter how smart you can be in college, you will still get surprised by the working world.

I faced these surprises myself. I thought the working world would be hard since it lacked the freedom I had at Stanford. I was wrong. During my first job, I had much more free time than during college in part because I didn't have to study on weekends.

I encountered many other surprises along the way. In the spirit of guiding others, here are the top 10 things I learned while working...  - Presh Talwalkar (Mind Your Decisions)

After I got my BA, I stayed at the same school for my MA, so the transition wasn't that hard.  For my PhD, I went to a different country, which involved some culture shock, but the isolation was good for my studies. Yet here I am, in my 10th year as a faculty member, and I'm still adjusting to all the stuff I'm expected to do (teaching! advising! research! meetings, meetings, meetings!).

All of Tawalkar's tips are worth reading, but the one that really caught my attention is this:

3. You're on a team-you don't need to compete for grades

In college, course success was usually measured by beating the curve. Professors often forced a distribution of grades, meaning even very high marks could be a B grade if everyone happened to do better.

This is why the working world can be liberating. Work projects were like being on a great team in a school project, with even fewer slackers. People helped you in times of need, and often projects were split across different offices.

It reminded me about my seventh grade science class. He was an amazing teacher, and one time asked us what companies value the most. This had nothing to do with science, but he was willing to spend time telling us this. We spent a whole class discussing ideas, proposing things like initiative and intelligence. Just before the bell rang he told us the answer was "team work." None of us believed him then, but looking back, I would say he is 100 percent correct.

I have a few upper-level students who hatehatehate group work. Some will grit their teeth and do it anyway, recognizing that I'll get to the advanced material more quickly if the pack is ready for it. Other students recognize that the class includes people with a variety of learning-style preferences, and accept that I'm doing my job as a teacher if I use a wide range of teaching techniques (including group work).  Still others think about group work the way I think about smoking: I accept as factual that people do smoke, but I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would find the smell of tobacco smoke -- hovering in the air, clinging to clothes, lurking beneath mint-masked breath -- anything other than repulsive.

Of course, I teach mostly very small classes, where I have the time to get to know each student individually. (This term is the first time in several years that I've taught a class with 30+ students.)  I ask for informal status reports -- both orally and in writing. It's pretty obvious when one student gives a full timeline of accomplishments and another repeats a few general lines from the proposal. 

A slacker might get a decent grade on a group assignment by riding on the backs of peer-enablers, but in my courses the group assignment is never an end in itself. It either prepares the students to do the same task solo, or it's just a lab apparatus that helps me see how students react under pressure, and how they communicate with each other and with me, so that I can see who is demonstrating real leadership potential.

Where do I do most of my group work?  Of course, it's in those dreadful meetings! meetings! meetings!  Sometimes I come home from work feeling depressed that I spent 2 hours in the classroom, 2 hours marking papers, and 4 hours in meetings of one sort or another. 

But how else will I get to know my colleagues, gaining new insight from their experiences, and contributing to the university's well-being by applying my own special talents? From my perspective as the teacher, every course is one, big, semester-long group-learning activity (even if I'm assessing students individually on the vast majority of their assignments).

The challenge in an adventure game is not based on fighting enemies, building armies, or the usual competitive activities associated with video games. Rather, the player has to figure out what the designers were thinking when they built the game and follow some script of events in order to win. These events are activated by actions the user can perform and the necessary actions are created by the player executing a particular command on a particular object in the game world. The player interacts with the world by performing actions on individual objects, using objects with each other, and navigating through the world. To progress in the game, the player needs to find a particular sequence of events or combination of actions which trigger other behaviors and events in the world. Gradually, those events lead to some winning state. The user is given a set of graphical, verbal, or textual descriptions of the game world and is supposed to figure out exactly what the programmer expects him or her to do. -- Mark Newheiser, Strange Horizons

I've blogged before about an episode of Blake's 7, a British sci-fi series from the late 70s, that centered on the thief Vila, who usually played a supporting comic-relief role. In this episode, the main action focused on his efforts to escape from a trap, and we see him develop a relationship (of sorts) with the long-dead designer of said traps.

Here's a bit of the script from City on the Edge of the World, written around 1980... I think it does a good job describing one way of thinking of the player's relationship with the puzzles in an adventure game:

KERRIL: We're shut in. Vila, we're shut in!
VILA: Don't worry. My man knows we're here.
KERRIL: Your man?
VILA: The designer. He knows we're here, and he knows we're not stupid because if we were, we wouldn't have got this far.
KERRIL: So?
VILA: So if he wanted to stop us, there's only one way left to him.
KERRIL: What?
VILA: Shh.
KERRIL: According to the locals, this lot is thousands of years old. You sound as though you're expecting to meet this character.
VILA: He may be dead, but he's still trying to outthink me. Keep behind me. Step where I step, and don't touch anything. Right?
KERRIL: Right. What are you expecting him to do?
VILA: I'm expecting him to try and kill us.

But note that the encounter with the puzzle is less meaningful when it's divorced from its context. As I noted, Vila is the comic-relief sidekick, who chooses cowardice and self-preservation over action. This episode is memorable not simply becuase of the cool puzzle, but also because the story furnishes the character with a love interest (who's turned on by the very geekiness that dooms him to sidekick status in an action TV series). I enjoyed watching Vila figure out what the designer was thinking, but that's becuase the show provided a framing narrative that explained the stakes, and I got to watch how Vila reacted to changes in the environment.

But if, while playing an adventure game, my primary reaction is "What was the designer thinking?" it's probably because the story was not sufficiently interesting. 

When I play an adventure game, I want to spend time thinking, "What would I do if I were in this situation?" or, better yet, "What would the protagonist do if he/she were in this stituation?"  If I click randomly on the screen in hopes of hitting a hot button, or if I have to type ten different synonyms to get the game to understand me, then the game world does not contain sufficient clues to help me solve the puzzle on my own.

Given my obsession with narrative, I would have liked Newheiser to have spent more time talking about the story that contextualizes the puzzles, so that the player feels that solving each separate puzzle advances the PC one step closer to reaching a goal.

An adventure game is a series of puzzles, solved by interacting with discrete elements in the game world, usually in a way that does not depend on reflexes or real-time concerns.

Bloxorz and Echochrome both fit Newheiser's definition, but they certainly aren't adventure games. Portal is a string of puzzles, but they're given meaning by a story.

It's worth the time to look back at Grahamn Nelson's classic "The Craft of Adventure," (which refers specifically to text adventures, which continued evolving on their own trajectory after the graphic adventures became popular) and Jesper Juul's Half-Real for some meaty analysis of the relationship between puzzle and story.

That may be the best headline I've seen on all the coverage related to the KFC teen girls sink bath MySpace photo story, but note that the <title> of the page is the more informative "KFC Bath Prank: Three Girls Fired From California KFC After Bathing In Restaurant Sinks." 

The photos themselves are silly, rather than particularly racy (for bikini pictures, anyway), but I'll let you find them on your own if you want to.  What made this story blogworthy for me is the following:

The 17-year-old girl who posted the pictures online responded with a message to those who tipped off her employer.

She wrote (sic): "Its a sad world when one has to stoop low enough to go through ones dirty laundry.... one womans trash is anothers treasure!

"Thanks alot for having good respect how can you live knowing the little bit of money you made was made hurting someone!"

Somebody has a little bit more growing up to do, it would seem.

"It was on the third night that we found out that the octopus Otto was responsible for the chaos

"We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water."

[...]

Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it.-- Telegraph

"It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online," said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report's lead author. "There are myths about kids spending time online - that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age."  -- MacArthur Foundation

Some details:

The researchers identified two distinctive categories of teen engagement with digital media: friendship-driven and interest-driven. While friendship-driven participation centered on "hanging out" with existing friends, interest-driven participation involved accessing online information and communities that may not be present in the local peer group.

Significant findings include -

• There is a generation gap in how youth and adults view the value of online activity.
  • Adults tend to be in the dark about what youth are doing online, and often view online activity as risky or an unproductive distraction.
  • Youth understand the social value of online activity and are generally highly motivated to participate.
• Youth are navigating complex social and technical worlds by participating online.
  • Young people are learning basic social and technical skills that they need to fully participate in contemporary society.
  • The social worlds that youth are negotiating have new kinds of dynamics, as online socializing is permanent, public, involves managing elaborate networks of friends and acquaintances, and is always on.
• Young people are motivated to learn from their peers online.
  • The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another.
  • Young people respect each other's authority online and are more motivated to learn from each other than from adults.
• Most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet.
  • Most youth use the Internet socially, but other learning opportunities exist.
  • Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible to pursue interests that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.
  • "Geeked-out" learning opportunities are abundant - subjects like astronomy, creative writing, and foreign languages.

I'm already aware of much of this. Knowing that students would rather learn from peers, I've added more group work, and I've added a requirement that students in my advance media classes publish a screencast about their final project to YouTube.  In future classes, I'll have students review those videos as part of their research process. 

My younger students (in the entry-level class) are generally much more excited about new media than the upper-level students (some of whom either barely tolerate or openly loathe the "new media" component of the "new media journlaism" program).  I've got to watch my lower-level students closely, so that I can adapt the upper-level classes to their strengths, and keep that process going throughout the major. That means I'm probably going to have to introduce more experimentaton in the lower-level classes, since I've got to cast a wider net to find out which techniques are the most productive.

Wired reviews Mirror's Edge

When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot -- precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you.

What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable. Because the game is designed around the concept of parkour, or moving through obstacles, most times when you see something that looks like you could jump on it, you can. The gameplay requires it.

The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception. It's why you feel so much more "inside" the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic.

This will be an interesting update for all the dissertation chapters that have already been written on Lara Croft's virtual body.

I heard about Bloxorz this afternoon at a meeting.

This evening, I came down to the study where my kids were playing Lego Indiana Jones for the umpteenth time, and without any fuss, started playing Bloxorz on the laptop.

Within thirty seconds, my six-year-old daughter was begging to play it. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old son wanted to play, so we fired up another computer for him.  I taught my daughter a few moves, which she then taught to her brother.

Now they are alternating turns (with some fussing and complaining, but no more than usual.)

Peter: "Oh, man! This the hardest game and the most fun puzzles I've ever played"

Carolyn (glaring at me) "Daddy, are you done blogging? Now, daddy? Now? Daddy! You said you'd let me play Bloxorz on your laptop! (Singing a song) Now, now now... now, now now.... now now now?"

A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn't recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and cavorting, blinking and wiggling in throes of mercantile ecstasy. 

It took me about five minutes to see their new trick. So I looked around and found a more aggressive ad blocker, which, fortunately for me, blocks even more of the non-intrusive ads that I had been willing to put up with.

On Gameshelf, Andrew Plotkin offers a great discussion of flash ads. This line sums it up pretty nicely:

You cannot get me to start watching ads by making them more intrusive; you can only make me hate you more.

I will put up with text ads, or graphic ads that don't blink. I won't put up with things that reach across into the content area, that add paid hyperlinks in the content area, or that otherwise interfere with my ability to use my browser (popups, disabling the "go back" button, etc.). 

There are millions and millions of pages on the internet, and if yours annoys me, I will leave.

I'm always amused when the TV reports from storm landfalls are peppered with statements such as, "There's nobody here but reporters." Who needs fairness, objectivity, and nuance when there's a storm a-brewin?  Who needs balance, when you've got a pole to lean against? Oh, the drama of the live storm stand-up!

TV correspondents bellowing while taking facefuls of driving rain? Got it. Reporters hunched and squinting in the teeth of hurricane-force winds? Got that, too. Reporters dressed in the standard uniform of the intrepid weather correspondent -- colorful-but-flimsy network-logo jacket and ball cap -- to dramatize the effects of the driving rain and hurricane-force winds? Oh, yeah, got that, too.

It's not enough to report on a storm by showing TV viewers its impact. Dramatic as it is, the standard B-roll footage of pounding surf, wind-whipped palm trees and mangled power lines serves as a mere palate-cleanser. On storm stories, TV reporters are required to interact with the weather and become, potentially, human sacrifices to it.

This makes weather reporting different than every other kind of breaking TV news story. No one covers a house fire by rushing into the burning building, or reports on a war by doing stand-ups in the middle of a tank battle.

With the weather, however, participation is mandatory. -- Paul Farhi, The Washington Post

Am I a bad person because I found this Language Log posting hilarious?

Which word is grosser?

#27	Moist	Used
Men	48%	52%
Women	56%	44%

Thanks for the link, Rosemary. From The Atlantic.

Economists and ecologists sometimes speak of the "tragedy of the commons"--the way rational individual actions can collectively reduce the common good when resources are limited. How this applies to traffic safety may not be obvious. It's easy to understand that although it pays the selfish herdsman to add one more sheep to common grazing land, the result may be overgrazing, and less for everyone. But what is the limited resource, the commons, in the case of driving? It's attention. Attending to a sign competes with attending to the road. The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions. The limits on attention are much more severe than most people imagine. And it takes only a momentary lapse, at the wrong time, to cause a serious accident.

An Ohio State press release discusses how a student's psychological profile correlates to academic integrity. An interesting study in rhetoric, focusing on promoting a cultural identity for the "academic heroes" who do honest work, rather than hunting and trapping those whose behavior is less exemplary:

The students completed measures that examined their bravery, honesty and empathy.  The researchers separated those who scored in the top half of those measures and contrasted them with those in the bottom half.

Those who scored in the top half - whom the researchers called "academic heroes" - were less likely to have reported cheating in the past 30 days and the last year compared to the non-heroes.  They also indicated they would be less likely to cheat in the next 30 days in one of their classes.

Josh suggest this story. Experimental software now under development can automatically swap eyes and facial expressions from one face to another, and the software is being tested as a way to anonymize faces that appear in Google Maps.  This story is about more personal, more targeted, use of image-processing software. (NYT)

Ellen Robinson, a volunteer college trustee in Denver, commissioned Sara Frances, a local photographer, to shoot a formal family portrait to hang prominently in their new house. Working for $150 an hour, Ms. Frances changed expressions of family members and swapped the dog's head between images. She slenderized bodies, adjusted skin tones and changed the color of several outfits to make for a more unified palette. She even straightened the collar on one son's shirt.

"You're spending a lot of money on these portraits," Ms. Robinson said. "They're supposed to last a lifetime -- generations, really. So why not get a helping hand to do it right?"

Photography has always represented, to some degree, a distortion of reality, said Per Gylfe, the manager of the digital media lab at the International Center of Photography in New York. A photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by tweaking the color and tone of the image in the darkroom.

"We've always taken photographs as proofs of events, and we probably never should have," Mr. Gylfe said.

The headline writer was having an off day, but the content -- a thoughtful examination of the trolling subculture -- is excellent. NYT Magazine.

In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word "troll" to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what the M.I.T. professor Judith Donath calls a "pseudo-naïve" tactic, asking stupid questions and seeing who would rise to the bait. The game was to find out who would see through this stereotypical newbie behavior, and who would fall for it. As one guide to trolldom puts it, "If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it."

Today the Internet is much more than esoteric discussion forums. It is a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others. Teenagers groom their MySpace profiles as intensely as their hair; escapists clock 50-hour weeks in virtual worlds, accumulating gold for their online avatars. Anyone seeking work or love can expect to be Googled. As our emotional investment in the Internet has grown, the stakes for trolling -- for provoking strangers online -- have risen. Trolling has evolved from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt.

Interesting observations on the internet's response to the death of Randy ("The Last Lecture") Pausch.

You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet. --Alexis Madrigal