The Birth of Loop
Humans first learned how to create music from nature, listening to wild animal calls, so it's only natural that like bird songs, many songs created by man exhibit a certain repetitiveness. There's a pleasing quality to repetitive songs, and eventually, after the rise of contemporary music, looping became a common technique. First possible in the sixties, looping is now very easy to do for almost anyone with a computer, and digital looping is as ubiquitous as it is pleasing to the ear.
The Five Principles of New Media
Numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding are the five principles. They are the basic pillars of how a computer functions and processes logic. The five different principles provide an interesting perspective on how human innovation and computer logic create a very powerful synergy for creativity. Each principle discusses how humans and computers interact, determining how things are created by each entity.
Avant Garde as Software
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Scott Snibbe
A graphical artist that grew up in a seventies plastic work shop that learned to create things for his own entertainment. Very cool. His work is very impressive and very fun. Showcased at the Berkley art museum, students can actually participate in Snibbe's pieces, posing for video cameras that capture volunteers' movements, adding them to the piece in real time. The whole thing is displayed masterfully through a visually entrancing video. Snibbe has a very interesting background, and it's cool to see someone use such a wide array of degrees that seemingly have no connection do something very impressive.
{Software} Structures
There are some very ingenuous things that can be pulled off using processing and similar languages. It's both very impressive and very intimidating to see the different types of artwork that can be made just using simple idea and having it executed through a series of code. It definitely broadens my view of what processing can actually do.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
AME Homwork Week 4
Faked Rumsfeld
I love these videos. They're so simple yet so clever at the same time. It's a pretty successful demonstration of how video editing can be done believable, even if it's a bit ridiculous.
Between You and Me
I could not get this video to play.
The Way of All Flesh
This photo series is interesting to look at, but it's not because the person is aging, it's because the culture is changing. With each consecutive photo, you can see how the woman is influenced by the style of each period, completely altering her hair style, clothes and in some cases, her expression.
Daily Photo Projects
These are really fun to watch. It almost inspires me to do one of my own but I feel like if I did, it would come out looking more or less like the #3 video. I don't think I have the patience for this kind of thing, but for the people that do, it really pays off. I still think there's some unexplored areas with this, it doesn't just have to be the face, it could be an entire body sort of thing like: 2 years of eating McDonalds every day or maybe 2 years of not cutting your finger nails. Come to think of it, it's probably already been done.
Oscar Fishinger
Maybe this stuff was a lot more provocative back in it's day, but right now it just seems kind of boring. Sort of a cross between Mr. Holland's Opus and Monty Python, except half as good as either. Fifty years ago this was probably a step in the right direction, but I feel as though it doesn't have the same effect on a contemporary audience.
Norm McLaren
It's impressive that this was done with a pen and some ink but like Fishinger's stuff, McLaren's work has not aged well. The shorts get pretty repetitive and almost look like they're using the same exact animations for parts of it. I'm sure that back in it's day, it was the coolest thing out there, but in 2010, it's just not that good...
Star Guitar
I'm not sure if I watched the right video, but what I so was complete nonsense juxtaposed with... more nonsense. It had no continuity and was impossible to follow. Most parts of it were very creepy visually.
Rules for Youtube: Make Art not Bore
This whole article is entirely contradicting what youtube is. Youtube is popular because it's a way of public expression without rules, the minute people have to follow rules or guidelines for making stuff is the same minute that something is lost. It's not always about artistic expression, and half of the stuff that's good on there is good because it's so random and chaotic. If you just want art, then go to Vimeo or something.
What is Art For?
To be perfectly honest, I don't quite understand this article. I don't understand what Hyde is trying to prove and I don't understand hat this article is saying about Hyde's accomplishments, if you can even call them that. It's seems as though he was just trying to preserve some sort of freedom of thought.
I love these videos. They're so simple yet so clever at the same time. It's a pretty successful demonstration of how video editing can be done believable, even if it's a bit ridiculous.
Between You and Me
I could not get this video to play.
The Way of All Flesh
This photo series is interesting to look at, but it's not because the person is aging, it's because the culture is changing. With each consecutive photo, you can see how the woman is influenced by the style of each period, completely altering her hair style, clothes and in some cases, her expression.
Daily Photo Projects
These are really fun to watch. It almost inspires me to do one of my own but I feel like if I did, it would come out looking more or less like the #3 video. I don't think I have the patience for this kind of thing, but for the people that do, it really pays off. I still think there's some unexplored areas with this, it doesn't just have to be the face, it could be an entire body sort of thing like: 2 years of eating McDonalds every day or maybe 2 years of not cutting your finger nails. Come to think of it, it's probably already been done.
Oscar Fishinger
Maybe this stuff was a lot more provocative back in it's day, but right now it just seems kind of boring. Sort of a cross between Mr. Holland's Opus and Monty Python, except half as good as either. Fifty years ago this was probably a step in the right direction, but I feel as though it doesn't have the same effect on a contemporary audience.
Norm McLaren
It's impressive that this was done with a pen and some ink but like Fishinger's stuff, McLaren's work has not aged well. The shorts get pretty repetitive and almost look like they're using the same exact animations for parts of it. I'm sure that back in it's day, it was the coolest thing out there, but in 2010, it's just not that good...
Star Guitar
I'm not sure if I watched the right video, but what I so was complete nonsense juxtaposed with... more nonsense. It had no continuity and was impossible to follow. Most parts of it were very creepy visually.
Rules for Youtube: Make Art not Bore
This whole article is entirely contradicting what youtube is. Youtube is popular because it's a way of public expression without rules, the minute people have to follow rules or guidelines for making stuff is the same minute that something is lost. It's not always about artistic expression, and half of the stuff that's good on there is good because it's so random and chaotic. If you just want art, then go to Vimeo or something.
What is Art For?
To be perfectly honest, I don't quite understand this article. I don't understand what Hyde is trying to prove and I don't understand hat this article is saying about Hyde's accomplishments, if you can even call them that. It's seems as though he was just trying to preserve some sort of freedom of thought.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
AME Homework 3
I was there, just ask Photoshop
Image altering has become so easy to do and so ubiquitous in the last decade that it finally has been accepted in to contemporary family ideals. Poor "photoshopping" jobs are still frowned upon or even laughed at by some blogs, but most people just accept that photoshop and other image editing software has been fully integrated into our society. People have adapted to photoshop, taking every celebrity photograph with a grain of salt, fully knowing that the model or actor has been digitally slimmed down and toned. With even non-famous people using photoshop for their own altercation needs, it's only a matter of time until people will start judging photos on how well they looked but how good of a job the retoucher did.
Photography as a Weapon
Humans use up to fifty percent of their brain just processing visual information and a large amount of that is very emotional to us. A single image can provoke more rage, more nostalgia than any single sentence or any single paragraph can. Long passages of time are condensed into just a few images: an entire childhood summarized by a photograph of a naive toddler on a bike or an entire war symbolized by one image of a napalmed scarred bystander. With photoshop becoming common place in just about any digital image nowadays, it's becoming harder to identify what truly is fake, with nothing to compare fake images to except other fake images. Now the photoshop battlefield has become more dangerous to societies, where almost anything can be forged and set upon entire countries. Any emotion can be elicit with just a deft hand a cloning stamp.
The Ethics of Digital Manipulation
Just the phrase digital manipulation sounds malicious to most people, but the manipulation of photographs is not a recent discovery and is not always an unethical practice. Photo manipulation started almost immediately with photography and is only unethical in certain circumstances. When used for artwork, any all artwork is fair game as long as it's for the purpose of making something look more aesthetically appealing but as soon as something is not supposed to be known as manipulated, then the shades of gray start to creep up around the ethics of manipulation. If a magazine cover model is made to look more attractive, is it wrong when it's used to sell more copies? Photo manipulation is only wrong when the audience feels maliciously deceived. The creator can never decide when the manipulation is wrong, only the audience can.
No Time to Think
This entire video was just a little too slow. It really only has one point to make and it takes too long to get there. What I got from this is that people have been able to creatively think in times of crises, the limiting factor has always been technology and how effectively people can record their creativity, but up until recently, technology has finally become accessible and smart enough so that the only limiting factor now is our own imaginations. In this age, people can now let creativity find themselves and not have to worry about making their dreams a reality.
Reboot
Let me start of by saying that I was barely able to finish this. Sterling seems capable of only talking in metaphor and fails to make his point clear. In addition to only eluding to vague new ideas that we currently have no way of imagining, Sterling is a complete cynic. This is honestly very depressing. All I can gather from this is that technology is not so much as advancing the human race, but pulling in back into a technological darkness where humanity is destroyed by it's own innovativeness, which makes no sense to me seeing as how technology has only helped in the past hundred years. Sterling, practice speeches.
Image altering has become so easy to do and so ubiquitous in the last decade that it finally has been accepted in to contemporary family ideals. Poor "photoshopping" jobs are still frowned upon or even laughed at by some blogs, but most people just accept that photoshop and other image editing software has been fully integrated into our society. People have adapted to photoshop, taking every celebrity photograph with a grain of salt, fully knowing that the model or actor has been digitally slimmed down and toned. With even non-famous people using photoshop for their own altercation needs, it's only a matter of time until people will start judging photos on how well they looked but how good of a job the retoucher did.
Photography as a Weapon
Humans use up to fifty percent of their brain just processing visual information and a large amount of that is very emotional to us. A single image can provoke more rage, more nostalgia than any single sentence or any single paragraph can. Long passages of time are condensed into just a few images: an entire childhood summarized by a photograph of a naive toddler on a bike or an entire war symbolized by one image of a napalmed scarred bystander. With photoshop becoming common place in just about any digital image nowadays, it's becoming harder to identify what truly is fake, with nothing to compare fake images to except other fake images. Now the photoshop battlefield has become more dangerous to societies, where almost anything can be forged and set upon entire countries. Any emotion can be elicit with just a deft hand a cloning stamp.
The Ethics of Digital Manipulation
Just the phrase digital manipulation sounds malicious to most people, but the manipulation of photographs is not a recent discovery and is not always an unethical practice. Photo manipulation started almost immediately with photography and is only unethical in certain circumstances. When used for artwork, any all artwork is fair game as long as it's for the purpose of making something look more aesthetically appealing but as soon as something is not supposed to be known as manipulated, then the shades of gray start to creep up around the ethics of manipulation. If a magazine cover model is made to look more attractive, is it wrong when it's used to sell more copies? Photo manipulation is only wrong when the audience feels maliciously deceived. The creator can never decide when the manipulation is wrong, only the audience can.
No Time to Think
This entire video was just a little too slow. It really only has one point to make and it takes too long to get there. What I got from this is that people have been able to creatively think in times of crises, the limiting factor has always been technology and how effectively people can record their creativity, but up until recently, technology has finally become accessible and smart enough so that the only limiting factor now is our own imaginations. In this age, people can now let creativity find themselves and not have to worry about making their dreams a reality.
Reboot
Let me start of by saying that I was barely able to finish this. Sterling seems capable of only talking in metaphor and fails to make his point clear. In addition to only eluding to vague new ideas that we currently have no way of imagining, Sterling is a complete cynic. This is honestly very depressing. All I can gather from this is that technology is not so much as advancing the human race, but pulling in back into a technological darkness where humanity is destroyed by it's own innovativeness, which makes no sense to me seeing as how technology has only helped in the past hundred years. Sterling, practice speeches.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Homework Week 2
Making College "Relevant"
In the past decade college has become more focused on what majors produce what careers. With some colleges even going as far as to advertise the fact that they will guarantee jobs, schools are losing perspective on the basic skill sets that students are supposed to obtain through their degrees. Instead of those abilities that most professions actually look for, students have developed a narrow minded focus on majors, putting too much emphasis their majors and not enough emphasis on developing a broad range of experience that can be easily accessed based on career. There are a few exceptions to this, such as engineering, which keeps students on a strict track, not valuing exploratory classes. As long as students are too frightened over not getting a job immediately after their four years, colleges will keep producing the same student.
Tinkering to the Future
Technology has become increasingly dynamic recently and cannot always be approached with a formulaic attitude. It's become more common for people to work from the bottom up rather than to have a specific goal in mind. Sometimes it's more productive to just "see what happens". With technology becoming more ubiquitous in the modern world, it's likely that someone will do something interesting.
Pixel Perfect
We live in an extremely vane society, one that needs a target image to be constantly reminded of. Even in the professional modeling world, blemishes and imperfections need to be perfected, and with the millions of different outlets there are for this kind of thing, it's only logical that people be trained in making things look "normal" to the consumer's eye. People like Dangin have become pixel correctors, making human nature look more... human.
Transform Education
The American education system, and for that matter, the global education systems are not so much as education their students as they are mining their students' minds as if they were an unlimited resource. Schools are all looking for math and science skills instead of letting their students choose their own skills and abilities that they already have a knack for. There are two different types of education in most peoples' perspective: actual and less respectable. No one ever wants to encourage the kid wanting to be an artist, they only want to qualm his fears of becoming an engineer instead. Schools are producing less diverse students that all were trained for the same thing. The only problem is, only a some are going to be good at it.
Digital Detectives
Using photoshop to edit vanity fare magazine covers is one thing, but it's entirely another when images are doctored in illegal ways. Digitally doctoring videos and pictures has gone beyond smearing some of the blemishes of certain celebrities. In courts of law people will now provide doctored evidence that is almost undetectable. Only with the use of highly advanced algorithms can law enforces actual determine if a picture is fake or not. There are other methods, like using metadata, but that opens up an entirely different debate: how much metadata should be allowed to track our private lives?
Building a Culture of Teaching and Learning
People recall high school, think of the crowded classrooms, recall the boring teachers and say, "that sucked". Throw in even more students and it's called higher education. Students, teachers and parents are collectively letting college become more depersonalized, making college a less effective learning environment. Some colleges are arbitrarily named "good schools" but are still demonstrating the same flaws that even the mediocre schools exhibit. College is what you make of it, but it's becoming surprisingly more difficult with contemporary school teaching formulas.
The Next 5000 Days of the web
The web right now, as versatile as useful as it is, is not intelligent. It cannot think for itself and cannot become unified because it is unable to decide what should be put together. Without giving too much credence to Jame's Cameron's admonitions, the internet will become self aware and will be able to think for itself and there will be full transparency, where everyone can learn anything they want, with nothing withheld.
In the past decade college has become more focused on what majors produce what careers. With some colleges even going as far as to advertise the fact that they will guarantee jobs, schools are losing perspective on the basic skill sets that students are supposed to obtain through their degrees. Instead of those abilities that most professions actually look for, students have developed a narrow minded focus on majors, putting too much emphasis their majors and not enough emphasis on developing a broad range of experience that can be easily accessed based on career. There are a few exceptions to this, such as engineering, which keeps students on a strict track, not valuing exploratory classes. As long as students are too frightened over not getting a job immediately after their four years, colleges will keep producing the same student.
Tinkering to the Future
Technology has become increasingly dynamic recently and cannot always be approached with a formulaic attitude. It's become more common for people to work from the bottom up rather than to have a specific goal in mind. Sometimes it's more productive to just "see what happens". With technology becoming more ubiquitous in the modern world, it's likely that someone will do something interesting.
Pixel Perfect
We live in an extremely vane society, one that needs a target image to be constantly reminded of. Even in the professional modeling world, blemishes and imperfections need to be perfected, and with the millions of different outlets there are for this kind of thing, it's only logical that people be trained in making things look "normal" to the consumer's eye. People like Dangin have become pixel correctors, making human nature look more... human.
Transform Education
The American education system, and for that matter, the global education systems are not so much as education their students as they are mining their students' minds as if they were an unlimited resource. Schools are all looking for math and science skills instead of letting their students choose their own skills and abilities that they already have a knack for. There are two different types of education in most peoples' perspective: actual and less respectable. No one ever wants to encourage the kid wanting to be an artist, they only want to qualm his fears of becoming an engineer instead. Schools are producing less diverse students that all were trained for the same thing. The only problem is, only a some are going to be good at it.
Digital Detectives
Using photoshop to edit vanity fare magazine covers is one thing, but it's entirely another when images are doctored in illegal ways. Digitally doctoring videos and pictures has gone beyond smearing some of the blemishes of certain celebrities. In courts of law people will now provide doctored evidence that is almost undetectable. Only with the use of highly advanced algorithms can law enforces actual determine if a picture is fake or not. There are other methods, like using metadata, but that opens up an entirely different debate: how much metadata should be allowed to track our private lives?
Building a Culture of Teaching and Learning
People recall high school, think of the crowded classrooms, recall the boring teachers and say, "that sucked". Throw in even more students and it's called higher education. Students, teachers and parents are collectively letting college become more depersonalized, making college a less effective learning environment. Some colleges are arbitrarily named "good schools" but are still demonstrating the same flaws that even the mediocre schools exhibit. College is what you make of it, but it's becoming surprisingly more difficult with contemporary school teaching formulas.
The Next 5000 Days of the web
The web right now, as versatile as useful as it is, is not intelligent. It cannot think for itself and cannot become unified because it is unable to decide what should be put together. Without giving too much credence to Jame's Cameron's admonitions, the internet will become self aware and will be able to think for itself and there will be full transparency, where everyone can learn anything they want, with nothing withheld.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Week 1 Homework
Faces, Faces Everywhere
The main reason humans are so good at facial recognition is because it's a major evolutionary adaption. Faces convey important messages to each other and it's crucial that humans be able to understand them. One side effect at being so hypersensitive to facial recognition is registering faces in images that are not actually faces. Some are more clear than others but people can generally identify at least some features. This phenomenon is not a miracle or worth buying a piece of old toast over, it's just critical human survival technique.
The Naked Face
Regardless of whether other mammals are just as expressive as humans, humans can convey some pretty subtle things to each other with a slew of different facial expressions. Some people read and transmit these expressions without even knowing and others actively research and practice these messages. Psychoanalysts have found that facial expressions are hundreds of times more complex than angry sad, etc. The human face is an important tool for the most cultural animal on the world, and it's no coincidence.
Confidence game
Faces are useful for communication and they can be helpful the very cultural human world, but faces can also be used for less than honest means. Con men can pull off grandiose lies about themselves, making others believe their phony reputations or their fabricated achievements. Con men take advantage of the fact that people generally believe one another when initial meeting. There are other genetic factors that tie in rather than just the pure skill of lying and that is the genetic factor. Some people will simply appear more trust worthy than other and vice versa. Some faces, even with the slightest variations, can look radically different and produce a different effect when trying to lie. The height of the eyes, the narrowness of the nose, the sharpness of the cheekbones, every aspect of the face yield a different response. In addition to the face, con men also elicit body language, and the best of them, can even make themselves appear to be an aloof millionaire, recluse.
Beauty is in the Processing
On a subconscious level, humans instantly decide who they like and dislike simply based of the initial processing of a face. Average looking faces are generally found to be attractive to most people because the more common the face is, the easier it is to process and whether or not people are aware of it, it pleases them. One related phenomenon is that criminals faces are seen to be average looking and attractive, making them more successful in their crimes because people initially like them more.
How to give and receive criticism
People giving and receiving criticism act as if they always know everything. Critics especially do this, making it seem like they are all powerful in their decision making and can conform any piece of work to one measurable scale. People receiving the criticism act as if they too know everything and instant start to defend their topics, never listening to the critic. Good critics will always talk about the good and the bad equally and good receivers will always just listen before trying to rebuttal.
Bruce Mao's Manifesto for Growth
Experiments should be seen as living things and have to be let to go their own way. People conducting them should do nothing more that try to guide the experiment in the right direction, only stepping in when things can go deeper and become more useful and meaningful. Even mistakes made in experiments are not necessarily bad, because everything is learned from.
Ted Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity
After watching this video, Mr. Robinson makes some very good points. He points out how the current education system is formed around an ill-advised hierarchy system that places the math and sciences departments at the top. Robinson points out how this completely neglects other talents that students possess, and forces them to discard their creativity in the areas that they could flourish. The educational system sees the human brain like it does any other landscape and haphazardly mines for two resources, math and science skills. Any other talents are belittled, never truly accepted as "respectable" abilities. No one encourages people to be an artist or a dancer, instead it's always mathematics talents that are reinforced, trying to shape everyone into a university professor even when the mold doesn't fit. This is an enlightening video and makes some fairly disturbing predictions about a kind of bleak future where college degrees in math and sciences are completely common and while more people are out of a job, the human arts slowly dwindles away. I can say that I was moved by it, but then again, I'm not on an education board.
A Vision of Students Today
I really didn't like this video. It seems like it's trying to be more shocking than informative. I'm pretty sure the creators of the video would be much more pleased with themselves if their audience pissed themselves instead of actually taking into account that statistics shown via quick cuts and edits of gloomy students holding sheets of paper. This video tells us what we already know: college is a lot of bullshit in many aspects, people are studying for jobs that don't exist yet, the teaching systems are largely ineffective for most people. Why was this video created? Because someone thought that scratching statistics into the wall was clever. Informative, but really annoying.
Matt Webb Scope
Webb's speech was very inspiring and I've never quite realized just how easy it can be to become "good" at something. The 100 hours that he claims is all that's required is a very cool idea. For this class specifically, I want to spend my 100 hours becoming "good" at programing. If Webb is right, then in 10,000 hours, I can become a master. I think I'll even apply this concept to my other classes and hobbies.
Henry Jenkins et al, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for he 21st Century"
Technology has exploded to such an extent of the last thirty years that it encompasses every aspect of modern life. Where curmudgeons could hold their ground in the past, ignoring such advances while still being able to live normally, nowadays, avoiding how ubiquitous electronics has become and refusing to learn about them is cultural suicide. Anyone who decides simply to not use computers or not watch youtube cannot be considered normal. Maybe ten years ago that might have still been okay, but it's become too apparent that technology is here to stay. And just like people needed to learn how to drive cars once they made their niche in society, people are going to have to start learning how to use computers and all of the road signs and turning singles of the virtual world as well. Programming is not a novelty talent, but a means to survive a future where not knowing how to program would be as fatal as not knowing how to put on a seatbelt.
I Use This
Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm a student at Arizona State University. I'm majoring in design studies.
My Laptop: An HP Pavilion with an 11.5 inch screen. As far the hardware, I was only really concerned with the video card, which is an ATI Radeon 3600 Mobile. It's not that great, but it can handle most of the old school stuff that I'll play and occasionally some of the new stuff. In retrospect, I should've gotten a netbook and opted for more battery life.
My Phone: an LG VX9400. It has no redeeming qualities other than it being in the Iron Man movie. Also there's a huge hidden antenna on the back that looks pretty funny.
Software
Phone: Nothing. Not even tetris
Laptop: A version of photoshop that someone handed me a while back, a bunch of different emulators and a very buggy version of microsoft word.
Other than that I use gmail, google reader and google docs when my word isn't working correctly.
The main reason humans are so good at facial recognition is because it's a major evolutionary adaption. Faces convey important messages to each other and it's crucial that humans be able to understand them. One side effect at being so hypersensitive to facial recognition is registering faces in images that are not actually faces. Some are more clear than others but people can generally identify at least some features. This phenomenon is not a miracle or worth buying a piece of old toast over, it's just critical human survival technique.
The Naked Face
Regardless of whether other mammals are just as expressive as humans, humans can convey some pretty subtle things to each other with a slew of different facial expressions. Some people read and transmit these expressions without even knowing and others actively research and practice these messages. Psychoanalysts have found that facial expressions are hundreds of times more complex than angry sad, etc. The human face is an important tool for the most cultural animal on the world, and it's no coincidence.
Confidence game
Faces are useful for communication and they can be helpful the very cultural human world, but faces can also be used for less than honest means. Con men can pull off grandiose lies about themselves, making others believe their phony reputations or their fabricated achievements. Con men take advantage of the fact that people generally believe one another when initial meeting. There are other genetic factors that tie in rather than just the pure skill of lying and that is the genetic factor. Some people will simply appear more trust worthy than other and vice versa. Some faces, even with the slightest variations, can look radically different and produce a different effect when trying to lie. The height of the eyes, the narrowness of the nose, the sharpness of the cheekbones, every aspect of the face yield a different response. In addition to the face, con men also elicit body language, and the best of them, can even make themselves appear to be an aloof millionaire, recluse.
Beauty is in the Processing
On a subconscious level, humans instantly decide who they like and dislike simply based of the initial processing of a face. Average looking faces are generally found to be attractive to most people because the more common the face is, the easier it is to process and whether or not people are aware of it, it pleases them. One related phenomenon is that criminals faces are seen to be average looking and attractive, making them more successful in their crimes because people initially like them more.
How to give and receive criticism
People giving and receiving criticism act as if they always know everything. Critics especially do this, making it seem like they are all powerful in their decision making and can conform any piece of work to one measurable scale. People receiving the criticism act as if they too know everything and instant start to defend their topics, never listening to the critic. Good critics will always talk about the good and the bad equally and good receivers will always just listen before trying to rebuttal.
Bruce Mao's Manifesto for Growth
Experiments should be seen as living things and have to be let to go their own way. People conducting them should do nothing more that try to guide the experiment in the right direction, only stepping in when things can go deeper and become more useful and meaningful. Even mistakes made in experiments are not necessarily bad, because everything is learned from.
Ted Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity
After watching this video, Mr. Robinson makes some very good points. He points out how the current education system is formed around an ill-advised hierarchy system that places the math and sciences departments at the top. Robinson points out how this completely neglects other talents that students possess, and forces them to discard their creativity in the areas that they could flourish. The educational system sees the human brain like it does any other landscape and haphazardly mines for two resources, math and science skills. Any other talents are belittled, never truly accepted as "respectable" abilities. No one encourages people to be an artist or a dancer, instead it's always mathematics talents that are reinforced, trying to shape everyone into a university professor even when the mold doesn't fit. This is an enlightening video and makes some fairly disturbing predictions about a kind of bleak future where college degrees in math and sciences are completely common and while more people are out of a job, the human arts slowly dwindles away. I can say that I was moved by it, but then again, I'm not on an education board.
A Vision of Students Today
I really didn't like this video. It seems like it's trying to be more shocking than informative. I'm pretty sure the creators of the video would be much more pleased with themselves if their audience pissed themselves instead of actually taking into account that statistics shown via quick cuts and edits of gloomy students holding sheets of paper. This video tells us what we already know: college is a lot of bullshit in many aspects, people are studying for jobs that don't exist yet, the teaching systems are largely ineffective for most people. Why was this video created? Because someone thought that scratching statistics into the wall was clever. Informative, but really annoying.
Matt Webb Scope
Webb's speech was very inspiring and I've never quite realized just how easy it can be to become "good" at something. The 100 hours that he claims is all that's required is a very cool idea. For this class specifically, I want to spend my 100 hours becoming "good" at programing. If Webb is right, then in 10,000 hours, I can become a master. I think I'll even apply this concept to my other classes and hobbies.
Henry Jenkins et al, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for he 21st Century"
Technology has exploded to such an extent of the last thirty years that it encompasses every aspect of modern life. Where curmudgeons could hold their ground in the past, ignoring such advances while still being able to live normally, nowadays, avoiding how ubiquitous electronics has become and refusing to learn about them is cultural suicide. Anyone who decides simply to not use computers or not watch youtube cannot be considered normal. Maybe ten years ago that might have still been okay, but it's become too apparent that technology is here to stay. And just like people needed to learn how to drive cars once they made their niche in society, people are going to have to start learning how to use computers and all of the road signs and turning singles of the virtual world as well. Programming is not a novelty talent, but a means to survive a future where not knowing how to program would be as fatal as not knowing how to put on a seatbelt.
I Use This
Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm a student at Arizona State University. I'm majoring in design studies.
My Laptop: An HP Pavilion with an 11.5 inch screen. As far the hardware, I was only really concerned with the video card, which is an ATI Radeon 3600 Mobile. It's not that great, but it can handle most of the old school stuff that I'll play and occasionally some of the new stuff. In retrospect, I should've gotten a netbook and opted for more battery life.
My Phone: an LG VX9400. It has no redeeming qualities other than it being in the Iron Man movie. Also there's a huge hidden antenna on the back that looks pretty funny.
Software
Phone: Nothing. Not even tetris
Laptop: A version of photoshop that someone handed me a while back, a bunch of different emulators and a very buggy version of microsoft word.
Other than that I use gmail, google reader and google docs when my word isn't working correctly.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Gortsky, eat your heart out
This is very cool trick for photoshop. I didn't have time to crop it perfectly, so the edges of the photograph are still a little sloppy, but the main image is pretty crisp. There's two others, but this is definitely the most interesting one I did.
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