It's not everyday that you have the founders and co-founders of the largest virtual companies come together to talk about an educational cause. That statement wasn't sarcasm. Although these geniuses on the keyboards share their stories and advice from time to time, they rarely have much to say about academic issues. Some of the top programmers didn't even go to college. Regardless of their pasts, this video on Code.org shows the importance of computer programming and why our future society depends on its acceleration. According to the CNN article, only 1 in 10 schools in the US provides classes that teach programming. Programming is apparently easy to learn, however, I am a new media productions major and I haven't even heard of classes that teach programming. Admittedly, I have only been with this major for 3/4 of a year, and I haven't had time to fit those classes in anyways. I am planning on learning programming, in my field, it's a given that I should know it. The video on Code.org claims that over the next 10 years there will be 1.4 million jobs in computer science, and we are only on track of having 400,000 students capable of filling these jobs. I am looking forward to programming, it is intimidating, but like Chris Bosh said, what isn't?
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Some Art and Some Technology
On a hike back in Manoa, Hawai'i, I took this picture of the UH campus. I've been toying around with it lately on Photoshop and Illustrator. I've used certain composition tools such as tiltshift, added noise, and color channel mixers. The orange building utilizes vector graphics which uses a formula to fill the area with color, thus never rasterizing or pixelating. Click to zoom.
Everybody Loves Raymond
Ray Kurzweil is a genius and psychic. Although he will disagree with that title, he has rightfully predicted the coming era of the Internet, the human genome, and the demise of the USSR. Ray is also responsible for first flatbed scanner, text-to-speech synthesizer, and music synthesizer. Widely considered a revolutionary and a superb futurist, Ray now works for Google and writes his owns books. Ray is now predicting that the world of technology is going to progress so quickly that humans will need to embed technology within themselves just to keep up.
The coming horror movie that is technology/ human integration will be the next era of the human race. Ray believes that future humans will back up their "mind files" just as we backup our hard drives. I support change in technology, and would like to formally retract my statement from before about my fear of future technology. I am nostalgic, and I would like things to stay the way they are, however, I must be aware of the changing pace of today's world. I intend to keep up with technology just as much as everyone else, if not more so because of my future career in new media. I have watched too many sci-fi flicks to not worry about Skynet's takeover or the robot apocalypse. With all that in mind, I am not very conservative when it comes to keeping up with technology. I want people to be aware of who and where they are; I have a very Zen approach to life, maybe because of my upbringing, but I do wish people were more awake to what is happening around them. People are too easily distracted, walking around with their phones, almost getting hit by cars, or scrolling Facebook during lectures, defeating the purpose of their parents' dollars at work.
My only concern is the loss of awareness. I want people to socialize face-to-face. If my concern is misconceived, then my fears are confirmed. Take off those Google glasses and look with your eyes, you have special eyes.
The coming horror movie that is technology/ human integration will be the next era of the human race. Ray believes that future humans will back up their "mind files" just as we backup our hard drives. I support change in technology, and would like to formally retract my statement from before about my fear of future technology. I am nostalgic, and I would like things to stay the way they are, however, I must be aware of the changing pace of today's world. I intend to keep up with technology just as much as everyone else, if not more so because of my future career in new media. I have watched too many sci-fi flicks to not worry about Skynet's takeover or the robot apocalypse. With all that in mind, I am not very conservative when it comes to keeping up with technology. I want people to be aware of who and where they are; I have a very Zen approach to life, maybe because of my upbringing, but I do wish people were more awake to what is happening around them. People are too easily distracted, walking around with their phones, almost getting hit by cars, or scrolling Facebook during lectures, defeating the purpose of their parents' dollars at work.
My only concern is the loss of awareness. I want people to socialize face-to-face. If my concern is misconceived, then my fears are confirmed. Take off those Google glasses and look with your eyes, you have special eyes.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Shooting Close to Home
With the shootings in Newtown, CT, only 30 minutes from my home, I can't seem to stay far enough away from all the gun talks. I generally don't have much opinion about guns, which is unusual, if you know me. I certainly don't condone violence, however, I do not disagree with Americans' rights to own weapons, within reason. Assault weapons seem a tad unnecessary, considering that most people don't have to ward off mobs of people if they did nothing wrong. Regardless, of my side in the argument, I would like to switch to the topic of the correlation between violent video games and gun violence.
Unfortunately, I do not have much background knowledge on the ties between virtual violence and in-real-life (IRL) violence. I understand the concern people (mostly parents) have with their children learning about violence in video games, and how that might be cause for actual violence. Based on research, however, I have learned, and been aware of, the fact that there is no statistical correlation between the two. According to this Washington Post Article on Video Games and Gun Violence, video games have increased in popularity among kids, yet youth violence has declined in recent years.
From my own experience, I would like to point out one thing I noticed in myself. After playing Grand Theft Auto 4 with my friends at one of my friends houses, I would have to drive back home. For some reason, I would almost always have a weird sense of invincibility. When I got in my car, I could almost feel myself being able to drift and skid my car around corners. Acceleration also seemed a lot less dangerous. Although I had this weird sense, my driving was never truly affected. I was always totally aware of how to drive properly, but that feeling was still in the back of my head.
The last thing I would like to point out is a reader's comment at the end of the Washington Post article linked above. The reader wrote "I read this article the other day, this girl is a video game blogger and although she's new to the scene she presents an outstanding and well written article about how it's not the medias fault we're violent, it's our own fault. She references our own history in the process and puts these critics to shame." I'm glad someone did their research. We need more people like this guy.
Unfortunately, I do not have much background knowledge on the ties between virtual violence and in-real-life (IRL) violence. I understand the concern people (mostly parents) have with their children learning about violence in video games, and how that might be cause for actual violence. Based on research, however, I have learned, and been aware of, the fact that there is no statistical correlation between the two. According to this Washington Post Article on Video Games and Gun Violence, video games have increased in popularity among kids, yet youth violence has declined in recent years.
From my own experience, I would like to point out one thing I noticed in myself. After playing Grand Theft Auto 4 with my friends at one of my friends houses, I would have to drive back home. For some reason, I would almost always have a weird sense of invincibility. When I got in my car, I could almost feel myself being able to drift and skid my car around corners. Acceleration also seemed a lot less dangerous. Although I had this weird sense, my driving was never truly affected. I was always totally aware of how to drive properly, but that feeling was still in the back of my head.
The last thing I would like to point out is a reader's comment at the end of the Washington Post article linked above. The reader wrote "I read this article the other day, this girl is a video game blogger and although she's new to the scene she presents an outstanding and well written article about how it's not the medias fault we're violent, it's our own fault. She references our own history in the process and puts these critics to shame." I'm glad someone did their research. We need more people like this guy.
Stop and Go Motion
Back in elementary school, I used to go to a nerd camp after school called Smarty Pants. Essentially, it was just a bunch of 20 year-olds and young adults who were tech-savvy and wanted to teach kids. Every Wednesday and Friday, I believe, we would walk over from the elementary school to Smarty Pants and work on different projects, such as Photoshop, photography, LEGO robotics, or video game design. One week I worked on a few stop animation projects with my mentor John. I remember one project using Play-Doh, we made a cartoon-ish piece of poop (pictured below) and the story line was that we would find the poop, pick it up, place it in the microwave, and it would come out burnt. I know, it was a childish stop-animation project, but I was like 10 years old. The time it took us to make this 30 second masterpiece must've been at least 2 weeks (including editing). With this in mind, I watch these videos such as Kina's jelly beans (I love her stuff), or the weird Mexican N.A.S.A. video, and I realize that my project was fractions of a percent of the work and effort these artists put in. The White Stripes' video of LEGOs was also one of my favorites, I remember seeing the video on MTV a while back. Lastly, the video "Bottle," which I remember being big on this website Wimp.com was a great insight at another stop animation project that must've been killer to work on. Much respect to these artists, I wish I had the patience and drive to do what you do.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Don't Forget About MUTO
Wow. I still cannot fathom how much time and effort this guy put into this painted stop-animation. I'm going to start showing more "personality" in my blog posts, and the only thing I can think to emphasize is my disbelief in the ridiculousness that is this video. The usage of the world around the wall (like the ground and street objects) really brings out the awesome ability of this artist (BLU). My only question about this video is "how did they get away with this during the day?" To the best of my knowledge, most of grafite artists work at night. This was a big project with a lot of paint and was clearly done during the day. Kudos to BLU for that feat. Also, although it is imperfect, I like that you can see the old layers of paint under the white. It's a nice effect.
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