From Boing Boing I came across this article by Mark Frauenfelder on Having Fun with Your Finances in Credit.com (April 25, 2011). The article reviews two sites that gamify your home finance goals, payoff.com and smartypig.com. It sounds like smartypig is the best, but is also still in beta.
I suspect we are going to see an explosion of sites gamifying things (and I’m actually working on one too.)
My vote for the best article on computer games in a long time is ‘Alone together?’ exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. Ducheneaut and colleagues at PARC have found a way to gather data from World of Warcraft (WOW) and analyze it for social data. The paper gives a nuanced view of the social aspects of WOW summarized by the phrase “alone together.” Unlike some other MMOGs the game doesn’t encourage socialization. In fact playing solo is more effective for leveling up (until you get to the very top levels.) The social aspect of WOW has more to do with being seen as having achieved. You may not be actively playing with others, but players like playing alone in a game where there is an audience for their achievements and the potential for social interaction.
Interestingly, what seems effective in the design of WOW is the steady leveling. There is always another level achievable with a bit more work.
Thanks to Slashdot I came across two articles in Nature about the excess of PhDs in the West. Education: The PhD factory (you need a licensed login) says that the “world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?” This story is largely based on an OECD Working Paper titled Careers of doctorate holders: employment and mobility patterns (PDF).
The other Nature article is an opinion piece titled Reform the PhD system or close it down by Mark C. Taylor. He argues that the system should be changed drastically, at least in the US.
On the web I came across this page on the History of Project Management on the web site lessons-from-history.com. Most histories of project management are pathetic, this is more substantial. The page and associated pages come from a forthcoming book on The History of Project Management.
The Latin word projectum means, “to throw something forwards.” The word “project” originally meant “something that comes before anything else is done”. When the word was initially adopted, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project was called an object. This use of “project” changed in the 1950s when several techniques for project management were introduced: with this advent the word slightly changed meaning to cover both projects and objects. However in certain projects there may still exist so called objects and object leaders, reflecting the older use of the words.
As an alternative view, you might try What Monty Python Taught Me About the Software Industry which applies selected key gems of Python wisdom (like “I’m not dead”) to the software development process.
A student of mine, Calen Henry, has created a neat animation of the explosion of computer game genres, see IGN Genre Evolution on Vimeo. He is studying computer game genres and went through different game outlets tracking the genre topology they used. He created this animation to show the evolution of IGN’s game genres.
Reality is Broken is the recent book about gamification by Jane McGonigal (New York, The Penguin Press, 2011) that has been getting a lot of attention. My copy finally came in the mail so now I guess I have to read it. I sound reluctant because everything I’ve read about the book disposes me to dislike it. The vapid “computers are going to save the world” (once more) hype by and for the author is enough to choke on. The idea that gamifying can solve all sorts of problems reminds me of when I thought I could get students to learn by making games out of completing assignments (yes, I too used scratch-and-sniff stickers to gamify learning.) I say all this to acknowledge that as I write one or more blog entries on this book as I read it, I am not reading the work with a fair mind, so readers of my comments beware.
Chuck Bush, a long-time member of the humanities computing community, passed away on April 13th. I tried to find a web page about him and the closest is the ACH Officers, Council Members, and Liaisons page which has his photo. Ever since I can remember he has been quietly contributing to the community. He has been our appointed Treasurer for years and we will miss him terribly.
James Fallows has written a good article in the latest The Atlantic on Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media. He sets up the standard argument that the old ways of consuming news from a small number of serious outlets brought us together and ensured that there was serious news. Now that everyone can choose their own news things have changed. Fallows talks with the editor of Gawker about what works on the Internet. Gawker gives its audience what they want, not what serious people think they want. Fallows ends up by making his peace with how things have changed hoping that new forms will evolve.
But perhaps this apparently late stage is actually an early stage, in the collective drive and willingness to devise new means of explaining the world and in the individual ability to investigate, weigh, and interpret the ever richer supply of information available to us. Recall the uprisings in Iran and Egypt. Recall the response to the tsunami in Indonesia and the earthquake in Haiti. My understanding of technological and political history makes me think it is still early. Also, there is no point in thinking anything else.
Wandering through The Atlantic I came across an article I loved back when I first read it. The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart (June 2006) has a subtitle that says it all, “Most of Management Theory is Inane …” Stewart compares philosophy to business degrees and comes to the conclusion that philosophy should take over.
The recognition that management theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.
I was on The Atlantic site and noticed a neat visualization badge by Infomous. It is a variant on the usual word cloud that draws lines between related words and puts simple cloud circles around related words. As you can see it doesn’t always get the clouds right. On the left you have Japan connected to protesters and protesters connected to Syria. There is not, however, any connection between Japan and Syria except that protests are happening in both.
If you get an account Infomous lets you make your own clouds.
Update: Pablo Funes from Icosystem Corp sends this email comment on the post:
We use Mark Newman’s algorithm for network communities to identify clusters of news. In your example, Japan and Syria are both connected to “protesters” and therefore share the same cluster even though there are no news articles that bear on both Japan and Syria (so there is no direct connection between both terms). One could argue, with this example at least, that there is a worldwide series of events that have been unfolding over the last few months, with public protests as the visible common feature (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and so on) which makes the connection “countries where protests are happening” a relevant one. And yet, it is true that sometimes the connection is not relevant at all, as it happens when generic words, such as “video” or “said” for example, are shared across news stories.
Our Appinions-based clouds rely on sophisticated semantic analysis provided by Appinions.com (see http://www.infomous.com/site/events/JapanNuclear/). Here, topics are connected because they are discussed by the same web user in the same posting. We use the same algorithm to identify clusters in this network. You can turn off clustering by unchecking “groups” on the bottom toolbar.
