The HTML5Rocks site may be slanted toward Google’s implementation of HTML5 (and works best in Google’s Chrome browser). But it’s an impressive compendium of demos and how-to’s for everything HTML5, from 2- and 3d animations, to instant text columns, to building databases in the browser (“Web Storage”), to drag-and-drop with a single line of code. Web designers, prepare for HTML5 to rock your world.
At least according to Bruce Sterling (and Radical Simplicity author Jim Merkal, among others). Sterling was among many commenters to note how Kelly Sutton’s choice to do more with less was not some freakish counterculture choice but an increasingly desirable mainstream lifestyle.
The Apertus is an open-source high-definition movie camera. New media programs (not to mention governments like Brazil and the state of California) have been looking to save cash by using open-source software like Open Office or Ubuntu. So why aren’t schools buying up open-source hardware as well?
Famed science fiction author Neal Stephenson has unveiled a digital novel platform created with a cabal of interactive fiction / martial arts enthusiasts. To judge from initial glimpses of their first interactive novel, The Mongoliad, this “new” platform is more of a combination of older ideas: part interactive CD-ROM (Voyager in the 1980s), part paid subscription (the New York Times in the 1990s), and part user-generated content (Wikipedia in the 2000s). At least the authors have given up on DRM from the get-go.
Touched by the expression of a dying baby Orangutan, Willie Smits and the Orangutan Survival Foundation regrew a destroyed rainforest in Borneo using satellite imagery and permaculture (though he doesn’t use the word in his TED talk). Why was the project so successful and long-lived (still going after twenty years)? The key, according to Smits, is not to swoop in like an environmental missionary with no regard for the economic plight of local people, but to factor human economic activity in the complex ecological solution.
Defenders of realism in violent RPG videogames sometimes argue that the ability to play different roles helps stimulate understanding of cross-cultural conflicts and historical context, or even inspire empathy. So what happens when US military personnel play the Taliban side in Medal of Honor in their free time? And how is that different from soldiers who act out the role of the “enemy” in Army-initiated training exercises?
I’m all for designing with simplicity in mind. But when I was shown this sign by a Bangor ER triage nurse after breaking a crown off my molar, I couldn’t help noticing that the picture had a couple of names in the “credits.” Which left me with two questions: 1) Did both scientists get tenure as a result of creating this innovative “pain scale”? And 2) did this clever pair go on to create the US government’s color-coded Terror Threat Levels?
Do RFID tags in clothes for preschoolers make them more or less safe? Check out the ACLU’s timeline of cracked RFID schemes.
Are you getting subliminal messages from your spam-blocker? Check out these examples of captchas gone crazy. (And no, I don’t want to enable images, thank you very much!)
This seems quite similar to a senior capstone proposal from the 2010 New Media class at UMaine. http://www.wired.com/playbook/2010/09/vails-epicmix-app/
So in the 1950s you could buy real products (air rifles) advertised alongside imaginary entertainments (comic book stories). But now you can buy imaginary entertainments (Farmville credits) advertised alongside real products (at Target). My brain hurts!
Given his McCarthy-esqe methods, it’s easy to dismiss Wertham as a power-hungry quack. Some of his observations about air rifles and knives being advertised alongside violent comics, however, suggest layers of influence that go beyond even what we expect from videogames Wertham would have freaked to see Grand Theft Auto, but might have been consoled by the rarity of in-game advertisements.
“It’s not a focus on opening up restaurants… it’s re-purposing land, arable land.” Not something you hear everyday from a restaurant proprietor.
Facebook owns the “book”, media mogul Rupert Murdoch owns the “sky”. George Orwell was right that our language would shrink with time, except that it’s thanks to corporate trademarks rather than totalitarian government. Then again, we have the government to blame for the legally imposed monopoly that is copyright…
Get ready for a whole new wave of goth tattoo graffiti art, thanks to DeviantArt and HTML 5.
Blogs, wikis, videoconferencing? “No thanks,” say most professors; “PeopleSoft and PowerPoint will do.”
When the rich get richer in the digital sphere, there’s no real consequences… right?
Stop landfill odor with your own perfume-spraying truck. Kudos to New Jersey for thinking up this “innovation.”
Terry Gilliam is kicking himself for deleting this scene from the movie Brazil.
Two bits of good news for anyone who wants to start a simple location-based game: 1) SCVNGR offers a readymade tool for creating one; and 2) you’ll have little competition, as all the games made so far sound moronic.
Alberti would have had an aneurysm if he had seen this Augmented Perspective.
New Media at the University of Maine
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