ENTRIES TAGGED "minecraft"
Audience Fragmentation, Default Passwords, Fabricated Data, and Javascript in Minecraft
- Bruce Sterling Interview — It changed my work profoundly when I realized I could talk to a global audience on the Internet, although I was legally limited from doing that by national publishing systems. The lack of any global book market has much reduced my interest in publishing books. National systems don’t “publish” me, but rather conceal me. This especially happens to writers outside the Anglophone market, but I know a lot of them, and I’ve become sensitized to their issues. It’s one of the general issues of globalization.
- bAdmin — database of default usernames and passwords for popular software. (via Reddit /r/netsec)
- Just Post It: The Lesson from Two Cases of Fabricated Data Detected by Statistics Alone (Uri Simonsohn) — I argue that requiring authors to post the raw data supporting their published results has, among many other benefits, that of making fraud much less likely to go undetected. I illustrate this point by describing two cases of fraud I identified exclusively through statistical analysis of reported means and standard deviations. Analyses of the raw data behind these provided invaluable confirmation of the initial suspicions, ruling out benign explanations (e.g., reporting errors, unusual distributions), identifying additional signs of fabrication, and also ruling out one of the suspected fraudster’s explanations for his anomalous results. (via The Atlantic)
- ScriptCraft — Javascript in Minecraft. Important because All The Kids play Minecraft. (via Javascript Weekly)
Kids Design With Minecraft, MOOC Analysis, Hobbit Revisited, and Santa's Little Drones
- Kids Use Minecraft to Design School — “Students have been massively enthusiastic, with many turning up early to school to work on their Minecraft designs and they continue to do so at home too.” Also see the school’s blog.
- Napster, Udacity, and the Academy (Clay Shirky) — the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it. [...] The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
- The Hobbit, Redux — the main programmer for The Hobbit game was a woman. Under-credited, as usual.
- Aerial Drones — from the Make magazine holiday gift guide. I want five of everything, please Santa.
Drone Burnout, Middle-Class IoT, ePUB Interactive Fiction, and Minecraft Booming
- High Levels of Burnout in US Drone Pilots (NPR) — 17 percent of active duty drone pilots surveyed are thought to be “clinically distressed.” The Air Force says this means the pilots’ stress level has crossed a threshold where it’s now affecting the pilots’ work and family. A large majority of the pilots said they’re not getting any counseling for their stress. (via Beta Knowledge)
- The Internet of Middle-Class Things (Russell Davies) — my mind keeps returning to this: you know, commercially, that a technology has succeeded when it’s used for inane middle-class tasks.
- First Draft of the Revolution (Liza Daly) — interactive fiction, playable on the web and as epub book. Very nice use of the technology!
- Minecraft for Raspberry Pi — see also Minecraft augmented reality for iOS. Minecraft is Lego for kids, and it can be a gateway drug to coding.
Minecraft Devastation, Constructive Dialog, Oatmeal Rocks, and Pwning Printers
- Minecraft Experiment Devolves into Devastating Resource War — life imitates art, but artificial life imitates, well, Haiti.
- Finding Unity in the Math Wars — I recently heard a quote about constructive dialog: “Don’t argue the exact point a person made. Consider their position and respond to the best point they could have made.” I like this! (and the point that math teachers fighting with each other is missing an opportunity to fight for the existence of math education) (ps, “unity … math”, I see what you did there)
- Tesla Museum Funded — Matthew Inman, cartoonist behind The Oatmeal, used IndieGogo to raise over $850k to buy Tesla’s old building in New York and turn it into a museum. In five days. There are still 39 days to run. Impressive channeling of his audience for good.
- Printers Spontaneously Printing “SQL” Strings (Hacker News) — it’s a sign that someone’s scanning your network for vulnerable web apps, found the exposed printer port, and sent an malignant HTTP request to it.
Post-PC Numbers, OS X Admin Tool, C Templating, and Real Life Minecraft Cube
- Data Monday: From PC to Tablet (Luke Wroblewski) — some great stats here. Sales of Apple’s iPad pulled in 30% more than all of Dell’s consumer PC business in just the first half of the year.
- Munki — munki is a set of tools that, used together with a webserver-based repository of packages and package metadata, can be used by OS X administrators to manage software installs (and in many cases removals) on OS X client machines.
- Crustache (GitHub) — a fast C implementation of the Mustache templating engine. (via Hacker News)
- Minecraft Cube in Real Life — clever hardware hack with projection and Arduino sensing.
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