To me it´s really astonishing what we can do with science and even though this now might look more like a toy, I am sure it will be helpful for a lot of different fields. Just a bit over one hundred years ago we didn´t have airplanes and now we can build robots that imitate birds.

I hope you enjoy!

-Schin

Well, I d´like to start out with a rather long quote, but I think it is an interesting one; especially in relation to the video I would like to share with you. Chick and Barnett (Pellegrini, 1995, p.47) write:

Cultural innovation may take place in play, a behavior pattern or context usually attributed to the young, leading to consequent information distribution. Kroeber, for example, suggested that what he termed “human play impulses” are responsible for “all of the discoveries and innovations of pure science and fine art – those intellectual and aesthetic pursuits which are carried on without reference to technology of utility”. [...] Similarly, Huizinga emphasises the creative aspects of play as a medium for imagination and cultural transformation. In the words of Finkelstein, “rather than reflecting culture, play precedes it

Playing is an explorative and open way to deal with our environment. Unlike any “serious activity” it´s not a problem if we fail or something goes wrong because we can just start anew. Children make things into something different, a broom becomes a sword, another child becomes a mother and so on, things are not fixed in play. I think this is a very important factor as it teaches to change perspective and not take for granted that things are how they are, it leads to questions and exploration. Adam savage presents in 3 cases how important inventions in history can be traced back to such small observations and questions and might very well have emerged in playing.

Think of this what you want but I personally can very well imagine that these three cases are true. If you do not think it is a valid point, just take the time to watch children building stuff with lego, reshaping the world in role plays and finding out about simple physics while playing with a marble track.

Reference:

Pellegrini, A. D. (1995). The future of play theory: a multidisciplinary inquiry into the
contributions of Brian Sutton-Smith. SUNY Press.

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Fire would have helped early humans stay warm and keep nighttime predators at bay, and enabled cooking, which would have made food more digestible. In addition, “socializing around a campfire might actually be an essential aspect of what makes us human,” Chazan said. “The control of fire would have been a major turning point in human evolution.”

The original report is about findings that suggest that humans used fire earlier than had been assumed so far. This statement here caught my attention because it highlights something important; how fire influenced humans. The use of fire makes it possible to cook meat and thus transforms our diet but I have not thought about the socializing part. I ll go out on a limb here and relate this to my thesis where I noticed:

The marble run is central to the activity as it is occupying a space that is designed and redesigned during the playing. The children organize themselves around the object and change proxemics depending on what they want to do.

My data shows 4 children gathered around a marble track, much like they were sitting around a fire-place, as they interact with their toy and talk about it. In both cases, a tool is located in the center of the activity and it seems to be the “thing” that makes people organize around it which then leads to several forms of interaction.

A place for inspiration

Is there an analogy to be made between people sitting in caves around a fireplace and children gathered around a marble track? After all in the first quote it is stated that these gatherings are essential and “part of what makes us human”. The marble track might not be shining in bright lights, heating up the environment and sizzle like a campfire does, but it provides the opportunity to create. While the children construct their track and watch the marbles run down, they might find inspiration and relaxation in the experience of handling the object. Davin D. Thornburg has an interesting paper on “Campfires in Cyberspace” where he relates storytelling and campfire to teaching as he writes:

There is a sacred quality to teaching as storytelling, and this activity took place in sacred places, typically around the fire. The focal point of the flame, the sounds of the night, all provide backdrop to the storyteller who shares wisdom with students who, in their turn, become storytellers to the next generation. In this manner, culture replicates itself through the DNA of myth.

He relates back to my point when he quotes Robert Frost stating:

We sit in the circle and suppose, while the truth sits in the center and knows.

Even though neither the campfire nor the marble track work on their own, they provide rich opportunities that can probably be used to gather and learn from each other. All of this raises questions like:

Why are we not using this layout for the design of classrooms or workplaces? How can we use objects to stimulate interaction and what kind of interactions are taking place there?

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When I play games like Diablo, World of Warcraft or Baldurs Gate, this is what keeps me in; the small reward each time I defeat a monster. But there is more to these items then them just being rewards. Has anyone ventured to study them? Has anyone ever wondered what the story behind the Dwarven Fishing Pole is? What does it do to dwarves, how does it convey it´s message about the dwarves and why does it make us smile?

What remains of the fish?

The tooltip to this item alone is so interesting to me, that I do not even know where to start. Apart from the funny relation between the item and its name we can see, that it is a green item. For those of you not familiar with World of Warcraft, green means that the item is uncommon and usually is stronger then a white (common) item. Another important property of green items is, that they can be disenchanted in order to get enchanting materials which serve as raw materials and can be sold to other players that might need them for crafting. This now opens up a whole new dimension of the item, as now the weapon is a potential good. The item itself is bound to the player when picked up, which means, that it cannot be sold to players via the auction house because it is attached to the player that takes it first. The Dwarven Fishing Pole thus cannot be set up for trade in the auction house but if disenchanted the raw materials are exchangeable. The player is given a choice, he can disenchant the item (if he is trained in the craft) or he can use it himself as a weapon. There is a sell price indicated on the bottom of the tooltip, which is the price a non-player character (NPC) vendor would pay (items can always be sold to NPC vendors). So that there are three choices now:

1. Keep the Pole
2. Disenchant the Pole
3. Sell the Pole to a vendor

Breaking down these three choices it will become clear that there are complex choices to be made here, which might all be useful for learning. So, here a brief break down of the three choices and there repercussions:

1. Ya, I like guns and damage so of course I keep the Pole

Now, damage and guns are all good but you probably already have a weapon equipped. Am I right? Now, you need to compare your weapon with the Dwarven Fishing Rod in order to find out which is the more damage efficient weapon. The Pole does 16-31 damage per hit and has a shooting speed of 1.90 which gives it 12.5 Damage per Second (DPS). Basically you compare the 12.5 DPS of the Dwarven Pole to your current weapon and look at what makes more damage. Not that difficult he? This is very basic but don´t forget that more advanced weapons give you addition stat bonuses where you might end up facing a choice similar to:

Do I prefer to have +15 Strength (more damage) and +20 Stamina (more life) but -4 DPS or do I prefer more DPS but not have the attributes (and those of you who play games where these sorts of decisions matter know, that I am still oversimplifying) ?

2. I am a Druid, what am I supposed to do with a Dwarven Gun? I disenchant, of course!

Not a bad choice but now you need to ask yourself if its more efficient to keep the raw materials and skill up your crafting in order to make better equipment or do you make some quick gold and sell it in the auction house? If you are disenchanting, your tooltip might look like this:

Disenchanting the World

The part in the green square is an Addon that shows what an item becomes when it´s disenchanted and it tells you the price of the raw materials that you get. This item here has a chance of 75% of becoming Vision Dust, 20% of becoming Greater Mystic Essence and 5% of becoming Large Glowing Shard. These items have different values as they are more or less easy to receive. If you want to level up your crafting, that allows you to disenchant even better items into more valuable raw materials, you will eventually need these parts yourself. Facing you with the choice to sell or keep the materials now. And then, there might be other players offering there stuff as well so that the prices are low; you could wait and hope for a reduce in offer or a climbing demand so that you can get more money for your materials.

3. Done with this! I sell it do a vendor and take the 9 silver and 22 copper

You like to know what you will get and take the simple road. This is in fact the simple road but it has zero potential beyond having the 9 silver and 22 copper but you have those for sure.

There is much more that could be written, and maybe I will write more, but for now I think this is a good start. I hope I could show you, that playing a game like WoW is an environment where choices need to be made and making money for buying better equipment and lots of other cool stuff in the auction house.

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Well if you are anything like me, you probably do not know the difference and you also probably think that it is not that important. Well, a recent study seems to show that it does matter, even if it is the exact same robot marketed as Turkish for some and as German for others. The experiment was simple, take a robot and tell the German students it is Armin, a robot made in Germany. Now take the same robot and show it to other students (also from Germany) and tell them it´s Arman, a robot made in Turkey. Taken from another blog, the results are described as follows:

The students evaluating the supposedly German-built robot Armin, rated it as warmer, of superior design, as having more of a mind, said they felt psychologically closer to it, and expressed more of a willingness to live with it, as compared with the students who evaluated the supposedly Turkish-built Arman.

The results suggest that we rate some that belongs to “our group” differently than we rate “foreigners”, and this not only for people but also for robots. Dehumanization is a known phenomenon as it is used in war to make the enemy look evil, inhumane and facilitate killing. It seems that even if we are looking at robots we try to find something that we can relate to, despite the robot not being human we seem to identify with its “origins”.

What does this mean?

The original poster writes:

Sooner or later, they predicted, robots will enter our homes. “If one and the same product shall be marketed in different countries, it might be valuable to provide the robot with a brand name that signifies in-group membership,” they said.

But I ask myself, when we will have robots in our homes, what then is more important, the fact that the robot is from a certain “origin” or that it  is a robot? I have seen early versions of potential robots that could become standard in our homes but I have no clue if machines will develop something like feelings one day. When we are able to treat group outsiders with disgust because they do not belong to the same social class or nationality, how will we treat robots? Is this even an issue, or not?

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It´s not half empty or half full. Its half a glass

Source

I stumbled over this quote some days ago and it really made me think. I am not quiet sure I even understand what it´s saying, which is fine with me because it made my brain cells light up on all different spots. The quote of course is taken from the optimistic/pessimistic saying that either the glass is a half full or it is half empty.

Only half a glass?

This quote puts that way of thinking aside. When I woke up this morning, I had the quote in my mind and figured what would happen if we just pour the content in a smaller glass. All of a sudden we have a full glass. So the glass is important because it shapes the content and for once size does matter. I personally think that the quote shows that either way we look at it (half full/half empty), we ought not forget that it is only part of the glass we are looking at because the other part is always the opposite (quite funny he?); the glass is half full and  half empty.

Going back to real world talk now because I am not sure it makes sense to stay on the metaphor all day long, I think the quote tells us something important: context matters!

Oh, I hear you scream of course it does. And you are right but how often to we actually take that into consideration on a day-to-day basis? How often to we look at a bad situation and try to see the other half of the glass and how often do we forget the glass itself?

It is good to have standards because we need to have goals but I personally see a lot of people setting their goals higher and higher each time they succeed. The more we pour in our glass, the bigger we make our glass. Inherently I do not think it is a bad thing because it makes us strive to learn, develop and we keep something to look forward to but at what point do we stop? Should we not leave half an empty glass as well, just to remind ourselves that it’s not only content but that there also is a glass and even glasses do not exist out in a void. Bill Cosby brings it straight to the point when he says that:

Is the glass half full, or half empty?
It depends on whether you’re pouring, or drinking.

I hope you got something out of reading and if you like please leave a comment, I always like to read new ideas or points of view.

Related Readings:

Collection of 10 optimism/pessimism quotes

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Stories create bonds, while Tan Le and her family each told their story to the others in bed in order to share something, she now offers her narrative to anyone that listens and invites them to share a piece of her world.

I hope you enjoy!

It is not absurd to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there. In fact if games are cultural factors and images, it follows that to a certain degree a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games.

(Caillois & Barash, 2001. p.83)

A quite interesting quote, like Huizinga Caillois also tries to link culture and play. It was interesting to read the illustrations given on the example of shamanism which can be seen as a form of simulation and vertigo (which is a form of play where the loss of control and the search for “dizziness” are the main goal) .  The use of masks is religious celebrations as well as certain rituals is indicative to Caillois that the shaman becomes someone or something else; a spirit.
(compare Callois & Barash, 2001, p. 87).

I have already written about similar topics but instead of rewriting what has been written I would like to accept the premise given by Caillois and ask the following question: What does Video Gaming tell about our society?

If you think that the hypothesis is not a valid claim then think about the status of movies or sports in our society (at least here in Europe). People watch football as a source of entertainment and the money that is floating around in the sports and entertainment industry has reached far into the millions (source ; source). Well if you have heard about Modern Warfare or World of Warcraft you probably also know that these franchises bring in lots of cash for the industry. Modern Warfare 3 alone has reached 6.5 million units sold  and IGN speculates that it might even be around 20 million; which means that a large amount of people are playing the game. Blizzard has announced in January 2011 that “World of Warcraft’s subscriber population had grown to more than 12 million players globally”, which also indicates that the game is broadly popular. The video gaming industry is not niche anymore, it has become a million dollar industry, just like sports and movies. Games like Starcraft or League of Legends are even played on competitive level and people watch them just as they would sit down and watch a football match on TV.

As I cannot focus on every game I would like to make a more general overview focusing on World of Warcraft and Modern Warfare. I am aware that other games are very popular as well and that by no means these are really representative. However I think using these two as examples you guys can surely extend to other games and find differences or similarities.

Video gaming can be individual and I can only speak for myself when I remember the days and nights I spend playing alone in our living room trying to beat that boss or get to that next level. I think that there is a change, games tend to become more social even by integrating local or online multiplayer components. Modern Warfare is played online against other players, Starcraft, League of Legends are competitive games that live from the online components and World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO). I think that the rise of social media like Facebook and Twitter and the parallel development of community based video games do say something about our culture. Communities of gamers form around games like Modern Warfare and they adapt and modify the game to their like as can be seen with Minecraft and the huge amount of Mods for Starcraft.

I think one important aspect that differentiates video games from sports such as football is that you can be whoever you want and play what you want. If I feel like playing a fighting game I can take up the controller and become a fighter and an hour later I can become a nightelf priest that supports my raid in World of Warcraft. In a sense I think that video games are our masks and the taking the role of someone else has moved from the real world to the digital space where we meet other people. The masks are not handcrafted and individual but the trend goes to more customization in video games as well so that each player can create his own avatar according to their liking. A study (Blinka, 2008) has shown the relationship between the players and their avatars, stating:

At the same time, it may mean that the player does not perceive the avatar as something “more” but simply as a game mechanism [...] The data obtained in our survey also show that it is younger players who tend to identify with (i.e. not to distinguish from) their avatars, while the younger the respondents were, the stronger the phenomenon. On the other hand, the “immersion” factor shows a deeper interconnection of the player and the avatar.

So even though the players perceive the avatar as something different from them the study suggests that there is a relationship between the two. At the very least the avatar allows the player to get in touch with other players and thus is one way of presenting themselves in the game; they are in that sense a mask.

I think there is a competitive aspect to most, if not all of these games. Sometimes it might be who gets the most kills or who kills the other player first and sometimes it might be who makes the most damage, who has the best gear or who is the most creative but I think there is also a cooperative part. It might be more present in some games then in others but a lot of games also have a “working together” part or some part that makes players work together in improving the game by creating a community; a shared interest.

Just as we share our experiences on Facebook, we get shared experiences with video games, they enable us to connect to people all around the world and allow for the creation of gaming communities.

Reference:

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, a hyper-intelligent chimpanzee, is raised by a human that teaches him sign language.Caesar later on becomes the leading force behind a massive uprising of apes that are mostly locked in by humans for some reason or another. The movie´s tagline describes this process as “Evolution becomes Revolution“.

Caesar is not an ordinary ape, he his the result of a human experiment with special drugs that are meant to increase intelligence. It is because of this reason that Caesar is able to learn sign language and have human like capabilities. In fact a recent study shows that chimpanzees are more closely linked to humans then we thought.

We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament

- Frans de Waal

Because  we share 96% percent of our DNA with the great apes  scientists have thought about putting the chimps into the “Homo”-genus category; so the same one than we as Homo sapiens are in. This position is best explained by Deborah Fouts, co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, who states that:

They are a people. Non-human, but definitely persons. They haven’t built a rocket ship to the moon. But we’re not that different.

The Wired article provides a lot of interesting ideas and gives insight into chimpanzee communication. Making a point about how chimps did not fly to the moon, Fouts points to an interesting idea, namely technology. Our human capacity to use science and build new technologies and tools allows us to spread our horizon, in this case quite literally. Apart from our shared DNA we also share behavioral patterns with the great apes. Apart from Caesar, apes might not use complicated sign language but they have complex means communication. An interesting thing to think about, is the following quote (also taken from the Wired article):

They have been shown to have all kinds of complex communication  and cognitive powers that are similar to humans. They have feelings, they have ideas, they have goals.

-  Jared Taglialatela, Clayton State University primate researcher

As if all of this would not be fascinating enough, yesterday I found out about Ayumu. At just 11 years old, he is unbeatable in memorization and can memorize the exact location of a set of numbers from 1-9. This might not seem that impressive at first but he can memorize the location of each of the numbers is less then a blink of an eye. Here is the video of him doing it (and if this is not cool, I do not know how else to impress you):

Now this seems dangerously close to the fiction that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is proposing. Ok, so but what does all of this mean?

Charles Darwin

Well first of all I think this is a strong argument for evolution but it also shows that apes are very intelligent and there might be things we can even learn from them. How does  Ayumu memorize so fast? Can we use the insight we get from this experiment in order to improve our memorization?

Chimps´ lives are different, still very different but studying them has shown that we also have a lot in common and this is where we can put our focus in order to learn. I think that it is our capacity to learn from each other but also from nature and other species that helps us survive. Today´s problems can be solved but I think we need to learn from our environment and history in order to adapt and find solutions.

Today is Charles Darwin´s birthday and I would like to try and honor his heritage with this post. Happy Birthday Charles!

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Jede Form der Kategorisierung muss notwendig danach fragen, was an dem konkret aufgenommenen Text nicht das Besondere ist, welches anderem ähnlich ist, sondern das daran Verallgemeinerbare.

This, translated into English would mean that any form of categorization does not ask for what is special in a text but for the similarities to others, for what is generalizable. Science has a modern tradition to search for “rules of nature“ , for the generalizable. In statistics we look for trends and my professors tell me on a regular basis, that a single case study just as a lot of social science research are looked at with skepticism. They are not representative, they might be special cases and thus it is not useful…

Escaping the average

Yesterday I came across a TED talk by Shawn Achor and I was intrigued. In order to explain my thought, I would like you to have a look at this graph and think about the singled out dot. What does it represent, what does it say and why is it there?

Shawn Achor says that this data is interesting because there clearly is a trend going on, there is something to be studied. This is a good thing, he says, because it means he can get published. But what he says, not without humor, about this dot is even more interesting; it is a measurement error. Of course it is, because it does not fit in the rest of the dots forming a trend and thus it must be an error. In a statistical graph, this single dot is not worth looking at, the interesting part is the generalizable, the rule.

It makes sense to look at the rule but I think this single dot should not be eliminated or seen as an error. This dot might stand for a person and that person might have a story to tell. Instead of focusing on the generalizable it might be of scientific value to look at this special case because this person might be there for a reason. I personally think Achor has a point when he states that by looking at the trend we study the average and thus a question like: “How fast does the child learn in a classroom” becomes “How fast does the average child learn in classroom”.

The single dot might have something to tell, he might be doing something differently that is worth studying because he might have solutions to problems that the average does not have. Is it weird that we study the average when we want to find out something but that great discoveries are often made by individuals like Einstein? Maybe we are missing out on something when we ignore this single dot, his story might be the one we need to hear.

References:

Scholz, Gerold (2005): Teilnehmende Beobachtung: eine Methodologie oder eine Methode. In: Günter Mey (Hrsg.): Handbuch Qualitative Entwicklungspsychologie. Köln: Kölner Studienverlag, S. 381-412

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