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“The effects of violent video games on children” or some variation thereof, is one of those paper topics I love to hate, but a few things recently have me thinking about the calming potential of some of the games out there.
Now if that all sounds like too much excitement then falling sand might be just the thing for you. Pretty much exactly what it sounds like, this game starts with four colors of falling pixels that you can manipulate with a few simple tools. I was concerned this might be stretching the definition of “game” just a little too far, but I was pleased to discover the first OED definition of “game” is “Amusement, delight, fun, mirth, sport.” While I won’t claim falling sand resulted in mirth or sport, I did find it surprisingly amusing, delightful, and fun. I will admit to being easily amused.
I don’t have a Playstation so Flower wasn’t on my radar at all until I saw this Slate.com article where the author claimed it was the only video game he’s played that makes him “feel relaxed, peaceful, and happy.” Wow. I’m hoping there’s a Wii version in the works, I’d like to try this game.
Finally, here’s the product that started me thinking about all this, a “mind-body game” called Wild Divine. Honestly I don’t know what to make of it, especially the nearly $300 hardware that “monitors your physical and emotional responses to stress.” Meditation is not something I have practiced, but I’m finding it tricky to reconcile the idea of meditation with the idea of trying to complete tasks or otherwise control what is happening on a screen at the same time. What do you think?
If you’ve been a long-time reader, you probably know several of us work together. For me, most of the time, working together looks like this:
I’m at a branch campus, 127 miles and two mountain passes away from most of my colleagues. While sometimes there’s no replacement for face-to-face communication, I’d spend half my life driving back and forth if it wasn’t for the Polycom.
I had big plans to talk about some of the research on video-mediated communication, but the book I requested last week was sent to the wrong campus and I’ve barely had a chance to flip through it so unfortunately I can’t draw on it too heavily. So far, though, most of the stuff I’ve looked at has mentioned the benefits of being able to pick up on all those non-verbal cues like nods, smiles, and even the more subtle cues, like eye contact. To be sure, video conferencing is a big step up from the speaker phone in this department, but in some ways the video phone still falls short in the non-verbal (and even verbal) cues department.
Notice the sort of bored look on my face, like I’m staring off at something totally unrelated to what might be happening on the screen? That’s an unfortunate effect of having my camera off to the side of my monitor. It used to sit on top, before I switched from a bulky CRT to a narrow LCD screen; back then my colleagues mostly saw the top of my head. It’s often not much better on the other end. In the room where we meet most frequently, the tables are arranged in a big square which means the camera that’s streaming what’s happening on that end mostly shows the empty space in the middle of the room, and the room where we have big important meetings and interviews has the camera way off to one side, though the microphone is inevitably right next to a paper-shuffler. There’s a slight sound delay, so I’m constantly interrupting people because I don’t realize they’ve started to speak (something I have enough trouble with in real life,) and bandwidth issues occasionally mean that neither the video nor the sound come through clearly, let alone in sync.
It might sound like I’m complaining, though I don’t mean to be; I appreciate the Polycom every time it saves me six hours in the car and I appreciate it almost as much when I have to spend 90 minutes trying to hear and be heard over the phone. My co-workers and I are fairly used to the quirks of our particular set-up and we can almost always make it work. I just think it’s interesting (and important) to acknowledge the limitations.
On Sunday I was fooling around on the web while my husband watched the Super Bowl. I didn’t have any desire to watch the game, but when he was totally entertained by the Doritos commercial, and then later, when people on twitter started talking about the Hulu ad I was happy to be able to easily find and watch them online. That’s how I generally use YouTube and similar video sites; I go looking for something I heard about somewhere, your typical known-item search.
When we decided to focus on video this month though, I knew immediately I wanted to talk about this post from ReadWriteWeb and this anecdote in particular:
“Whenever his [9-year old] son needed any information, he would open up YouTube, type in the search term and then just watch the videos that showed up as matches. He never Googled anything; he never went to any other site; his entire web experience was confined to YouTube videos.”
I found this fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever gone straight to YouTube to search for information, but here’s a kid who doesn’t even “Google it,” he “YouTubes it.” Now, I’m not going to use this story to make any big predictions about how when these kids come to college they’ll be expecting to find what they need to know about the library in video form. I suspect for most kids who use YouTube this way it’s about what they’re looking for as well as where they are with their reading skills, both things I would expect to change pretty drastically in the next 10 years. But it’s not just kids who use YouTube (or if it is, they’re using it like crazy.) YouTube made the news this fall when it was reported to beat out Yahoo for the title of #2 search engine. We could spend some time talking about whether it makes sense to call YouTube a search engine, whether Google has influenced the trend, and looking at the numbers, whether or not this can even be called a trend, but I think we can agree on one thing; there are a lot of people searching for stuff in YouTube.
I also think there may be some opportunities for libraries to be responsive to the people (of any age) who use YouTube as a first stop when they’re looking for information, but I suspect it will need to go beyond the “how to find a book” tutorials into the territory of providing some actual content. It would be nice to catch the people who aren’t looking for library information but might be interested in a reminder of what we have to offer. For example, when I used to work at our local public library I often handed out a guide to gardening resources geared to our local (challenging) climate. How cool would it be to have a short video featuring a local gardening guru demonstrating how to protect plants from summer frost? (Yes, we have such a thing as summer frost here.) The video could end with a plug for the additional resources available in the library. Academic libraries could feature favorite professors sharing a short tip about a popular research topic, then mentioning some of the journals, databases, or other resources they like to use for their own research in that area.
Thanks to my friend Memo for calling my attention to this simple tool that will make many of my reference patrons a little happier!
Printwhatyoulike.com allows you to eliminate sidebars, advertising, and anything else you don’t want from a web page before sending it to the printer. It also allows you to decrease (or increase) text size and widen columns of text. This helps save paper, obviously, but it will probably be equally as exciting to patrons for the $.07 they save for every page of “junk” they don’t have to print.
While I’m sure I’ll still be helping people figure out how to print what they want, at least with printwhatyoulike.com I will have a way to do it.
My apologies to our non-US readers–today’s doodad is wholly US-centric. We’re fairly obsessed with our upcoming presidential election these days. The Voting America project from the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab is interesting because it helps to visualize and analyze historical election data back to 1840.
In addition to animated maps illustrating election history over time, there are also short video commentaries from historians and political scientists and even an interactive map (that they describe as “processor- and memory-intensive” and usually resulted in a browser-restart for me.)
Voting America is an interesting way to put the current US presidential election in a historical context.
I’m sure you’ve had all the fun you can handle today, but just in case I thought I’d share these cool games from Orisinal. Created by artist Ferry Halim, the games are beautiful, intuitive, mellow, and addictive. Many of them are accompanied by original music. Most are controlled solely by the mouse; some involve clicking, others just work by moving the mouse around. Each game starts with a brief overview of game play.
(Yes, that is a shot of a pirate-esque game.)
Orisinal has been around for a long time, but I just discovered it via this Ask MetaFilter thread where someone was looking for computer games appropriate for her 84 year-old grandmother. Many of the games seem perfect for all ages, and could be useful for someone who would like to improve mouse dexterity. Or for someone who just, you know, would like to have a little fun!
Gas mileage is one of those things I feel like I should give more of my attention than I do. Oh sure, when the day (finally!) comes for me to upgrade my vehicle, miles per gallon will play a starring role in the selection process, but as far as my day-to-day consumption goes I’ve been rather blissfully apathetic. Fuelly may be just the tool to change my ways.
The primary purpose of Fuelly is to help you keep track of your vehicles’ gas mileage. Sure you could do this with a spreadsheet, but Fuelly also lets you update from your mobile device, compare your mileage with others, share tips and participate in discussion fora about getting the most out of every gallon. For those who need a little extra incentive to avoid jackrabbit starts you can even earn a gold star for your “best tank.”
Fuelly is still new; the creators are already responding to requests for features and fixing the little things that need to be fixed. I learned about it from the folks over at Wesabe, a web-based personal finance program I reviewed last year that I still use regularly. The Wesabe folks are already talking about integrating the two and I can’t wait to see what they come up with!
I’ve been waiting all week to share the Periodic Table of Videos with you! While one- to four-minute videos about each of the elements in the periodic table might not sound exciting, the chemists who star in these little clips are so enthusiastic about what they do it’s hard not to get excited right along with them. You might not love Boron quite as much as Deborah Kays but you’ll be hard-pressed not to giggle along with the crew demonstrating the reactive nature of Sodium.
Produced by a team at the University of Nottingham, the videos are all available via YouTube. They’ve also provided them on an alternate server for those who might not be able to access YouTube.
I-N-F-OdoodaDs brought to you by the letters Si, In, and many more I’m sure!
I’ll admit it, I used to take the ability to effortlessly count words for granted. Now that I do more and more on the web though, I find that I can’t always easily get word counts when I need them. For example, I use Google Docs fairly regularly for collaborative writing projects, or even for writing I want to ensure will be easily accessible to me in multiple places. Google Docs does have a word count feature, but it doesn’t let you see counts for individual text selections, only the document as a whole. This used to occasionally result in a lot of copying and pasting into Word, but now I just highlight the text I want to count, right click, and Word Count Plus shows me the word count in the bottom right corner of my browser.
I know, it’s simple, but sometimes simple stuff is the most useful, no?
We’ve all been there. You head for a favorite website all ready to get some work done and…well…nothing happens. “Huh”, you wonder, “is it down for everyone, or is it just me?”
Somesites find ways to let us know. Barring this, the old-school way to figure out if it was just you was to prairie-dog your cube neighbor and ask her to try and pull the site up too. But what about those poor souls without a colleague nearby? Thankfully they can consult downforeveryoneorjustme.com, the site designed to help you answer that burning question on your own.
I know, I know, who has time to read for fun, let alone for talking about reading for fun. If you do manage to eke out the time to participate in a book group though, the last thing you want to spend it on is taking care of all the details about what to read and when to meet. Enter Booksprouts, an online community designed specifically to help book clubs organize and communicate the details.
Once you sign up for Booksprouts you can join an existing club or start your own. Clubs can be open to the public or invitation-only, and you can either select the book for the group to read yourself or let group members nominate a title and then put them up to a vote. Clubs are very simple to create; non-fiction lovers is one I put together in just a few minutes. You’re welcome to join if you want to check it out.
There’s really no reason why your Booksprouts book group can’t be all-virtual although you do have to enter an actual location when creating a new group. That, and you’ll always have to supply your own wine and cheese.
My video game knowledge could be kindly described as “lacking.” Oh, sure I dominated at Dr. Mario back in the day and I still get sucked into the occasional Facebook application, but for the most part I just don’t have a lot of opportunities to play and, consequently, don’t know much about the games.
While it’s billed as “the parents guide to video games”,” What They Play seems to do a good job of describing games without the hand-wringing that often accompanies discussion of controversial games like Grand Theft Auto IV . You can search for games by platform, genre, age, and rating, and the site also includes overviews of popular trends like Webkinz, a blog, and articles and advice from folks with pen names like Gamerdad and Mothership.
I must admit I covet the Wii, so maybe someday I will level up and be able to talk about what *I* play instead, but for now I think I’ll check in with What They Play if I need to know more about the games that everybody is talking about.
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Thanks to my friend 
Gas mileage is one of those things I feel like I should give more of my attention than I do. Oh sure, when the day (finally!) comes for me to upgrade my vehicle, miles per gallon will play a starring role in the selection process, but as far as my day-to-day consumption goes I’ve been rather blissfully apathetic. 
I’ll admit it, I used to take the ability to effortlessly count words for granted. Now that I do more and more on the web though, I find that I can’t always easily get word counts when I need them. For example, I use 
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