check it--now anyone can make their own channel.
*finally*.
Best interface ever...direct to the brain:
Facial expression recognition means that your character will interact in a game based on your emotive state.. Sensitivity to states of excitement means that you'll run faster the more adrenaline going through your system. Imagined movement means that you can move and manipulate objects just by imagining yourself doing it. Rad rad rad.
It's not the first time this has ever been attempted. But this is the first time it looks promising.
What good is an automaton if it can't groove?
Keepon is the best, and the inspiration for this post. You love it, you want to dance with it, and not just because it's cute to the nth power.
PBDR is lame.
Wasada Belly Dance No. 1 is freaky.
QRIO is impressive, but totally preprogrammed.
Japanese hipsters do a good job too, considering.
HRP-2P is also preprogrammed, but looks like a match for this old Japanese woman.
What good is an automaton if it can't groove?
Keepon is the best, and the inspiration for this post. You love it, you want to dance with it, and not just because it's cute to the nth power.
PBDR is lame.
Wasada Belly Dance No. 1 is freaky.
QRIO is impressive, but totally preprogrammed.
Japanese hipsters do a good job too, considering.
HRP-2P is also preprogrammed, but looks like a match for this old Japanese woman.
Video games are about agency, movies are about empathy. Video games already enable players to tell stories; we can amplify this element to make more meaningful play. These and other wonderful thoughts on Will Wright's nifty keynote at SXSW Interactive, "Video Games and Storytelling."
Meanwhile, I have borrowed from the library but been unable to focus on Unit Operations, Ian Bogost's (what I'm sure is a) fascinating attempt to meld high literary theory, philosophy, and computer science to create a language and theory for interrogating video games the way academics critique literature. It is dense and very into "high theory," but I look forward to my rapidly progressing sore throat to keep me bedridden and hopefully able to concentrate on piercing this somewhat impenetrable read.
(At the very least, I understand that video games are a $32 billion/year industry, versus $9 billion/year for films. Where are the academic departments on video games?)
My greatest critique of Easterly's book is his reliance on growth as the ultimate objective for development. He defends his choice by pointing out that real improvements of conditions for the poor are solidly linked to national economic growth. Undoubtedly, a second tacit reason is that growth is quite easy to measure, and good economics requires something around which to wrap a quantitative hand. Given this, you can apply a standard critique of growth (i.e. lack of concern for its distribution in society), mention alternative measures of success (say, GPI in lieu of GDP), and conclude by saying, "The well-to-do become amazingly well-to-do while the poor gain slightly--and thus the power of the well-to-do to impose as they would like on the poor multiplies further, enabling processes of exploitation, dispossession, environmental devastation, and so on." But that wouldn't let you read this book with any appreciation.
If you let go of the critique of growth, you can read with appreciation Easterly's takedown of proposed panaceas through the use of cross-country regressions. This statistical model has distinct shortcomings, given its relative lack of reliable data, but you get Easterly's point: all of the resources poured into capital-gap financing, education, conditionality, population control, and debt forgiveness don't have any significant impact on a country's growth. This is not to say that these policies should not be pursued--indeed, education has its many advantages--but rather, given the context of poorer countries' economic environments, it should not be a surprise that pouring resources into these channels of aid did not have their desired effect. Easterly rakes every supposed aid plan over the fire of incentives, showing how for example education fails to have its intended effect when incentives for learning are low.
Easterly does push the envelope with his incentive structures sometimes; he argues at one point that in the relationship between the IMF/World Bank and recipient countries it is recipient countries that hold the upper hand (knowing as they do that IMF/WB country managers gain stature by giving loans, and that these countries can extract aid anyway by "holding hostage" their citizens, etc). It is very hard for me to swallow the narrative of status-seeking World Bank economists holding their noses and knowingly giving large amounts of money to governments that will waste it--but then again, Easterly is the World Bank economist, not me. Nevertheless, I wonder how Easterly can casually point out this phenomenon and not expand on its workings or methods by which these incentives are being addressed.
Easterly's best moments come in explaining explaining the socioeconomic phenomena that are not immediately obvious but make perfect sense upon exposition. He focuses on "knowledge leaks," "skill matching," and "poverty traps" to show how social phenomena and institutions produce different incentive structures, and he takes these concepts into further exposition of possible solutions for development. His conceptualization of the ill effects of government corruption is elegant in its clarity and simplicity, inviting us not to merely judge corruption as bad but to understand how it works, then using his statistical tools to show their linkages to poor growth and decline.
Of course, Easterly avoids calling for a panacea of his own. Rather, he is content to conclude with the basic "It's institutions, stupid" approach, combined with a rallying cry "Think incentives!" But you didn't read this book for solutions anyway, and so the lack of a policy vision beyond standard free-tradeism shouldn't disappoint too much. Instead, sit there and wonder why you too are now curious to join this elusive quest for growth.
(For a more scholarly discussion of Easterly's use of statistics and what it means for his book, check out Stanford's Romain Wacziarg's review from 2002.)
Impeach Richard Cheney. Now.
Apparently, the Office of the Vice President has not been reporting statistics on its classification of info. From Cheney's reasoning:
The Vice Presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch, but is attached by the Constitution to the latter. The Vice Presidency performs functions in both the legislative branch (see Article I, section 3 of the Constitution) and in the executive branch (see Article II, and amendments XII and XXV, of the Constitution, and section 106 of title 3 of the United States Code).
An aggregation of relevant articles is here. Basically, Dick Cheney says the Vice President is a "unique office" not subject to executive orders--in essence, it is a fourth branch of government.
This comes on the heels of revelations that DoD was indeed writing its own intelligence:
...the team headed by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, developed “alternative” assessments of intelligence on Iraq that contradicted the intelligence community and drew conclusions “that were not supported by the available intelligence.” Mr. Feith certainly knew the Central Intelligence Agency would cry foul, so he hid his findings from the C.I.A. Then Vice President Dick Cheney used them as proof of cloak-and-dagger meetings that never happened, long-term conspiracies between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden that didn’t exist, and — most unforgivable — “possible Iraqi coordination” on the 9/11 attacks, which no serious intelligence analyst believed.
I must say, I admire Dick Cheney's imagination. He is truly an innovator in the realm of American politics, and you have to admire his motivation to consolidate power and rework the status of the Vice President. In another climate, I might say he is starting an interesting conversation on how to make the VP's office something more meaningful and worthy of taxpayer dollars than merely a seat warmer for the President.
But in this climate, it's just sinister. This man has got to go.
"Success is fucking up on your own terms."
--Guillermo Del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth
"Getting stuff done requries shitty first drafts."
--GTD lecture series on Odeo
So I took the plunge, and now I have begun my career as a microlender. I've put $50 into the start-up metal working shop of Tom Ochieng, who will use the funds to buy welding equipment.
Tom is a father of five children. He is married and is educated up to level 12. He started his business with $150 from his father. He has undergone training in loan and business management with Rafode. He has successfully managed his business for the last five years.
Given the loan of $400, he intends to buy welding materials in bulk and make iron doors and windows, which are in high demand. His business is located in an estate where construction is rampant. He intends to use the profit to pay for school fees, to obtain an insurance policy for the family and buy medication. The loan term is eight months and he should be able to pay without any problems.
And I'll be sure to detail how it goes, as I hear about the project. Of course, nothing starts until he gets all $400 funded...so what do you say? Got $25 laying around? Do it.
Curiously, browsing through the different loan applicants, it occurred to me that quite a number are very middle-class. This doesn't particularly bother me per se--I don't really mind helping someone who already has other resources to leverage--but it does speak to one of the main critiques of microcredit: that it predominantly helps those who already have resources at their disposal, partly because they're the ones most able to effectively make a loan application (due to education, availability of time, etc). It may be less of an anti-poverty tool and more a general boon to the lower-middle class. Then again, is that really so bad?
A standard critique looks like this. It makes the above point--which I think is the most salient one--but goes on to point out how the mania to lend can produce really bad loan decisions, and the debtor has to bear the bad decisions of the lender. Indeed, I would be interested to see how microcredit is treated "on the ground"...there's a very blurry line (well, less a line than a nebulous area) between predatory lending and well-intentioned but misguided credit. In intention there may be a chasm, but in practice it may look the same.
From there, the critique goes on to make the general point about microcredit as another way of ignoring political and social justice concerns, which is an extraordinarily boring point. Not doing well-intentioned microcredit doesn't somehow make action on the political concerns automatic, and I think that the dismissal of all microcredit is really undeserved. It ain't no panacea, but it can work.
And this is where I want data to understand how it's working. Forthcoming, I suppose.
By way of Philosophy Now, I get The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond:
"This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded."
It may be a bit too academic and full of English department jargon for some, but read through it fully and it's an interesting thesis. (Though I agree with a friend who thinks the comparison of Big Brother television programming and Dickens' Great Expectations is a stretch.)
Turning this analysis outward to the world at hand, it makes me wonder if the "cult of personality" of George W Bush's acolytes is not rather a pseudo-modern entrancing, a reading of onesself into the being of the President, of unselfconsciously becoming his mouthpiece with each word written explaining what he means, of unselfconsciouly becoming his eye with each scan of ideologically compatible news and ignoring of inconvenient facts, of unselfconsciously becoming the text that is George W Bush. Forget simulacrum and ironic self-awareness--this is pseudo-modern politics...
(Yeah, I know it's a stretch...)
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jasonized said:
I don't think Burke says that because we are "less than stellar" that it is sufficient reason to let politicians... read more
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The Madmouser said:
I do believe we have been privvy to some very honorable politicians during our country's history. They are role models... read more
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