Electronic games now earn more money than recorded music or Hollywood films, about $21 Billion in 2013.
The Strong Museum collects and preserves video games and artifacts through its International Center for the History of Electronic Games. The collection includes more than 55,000 video games and artifacts, personal papers and corporate records that document the history of video games.
“In 2015, cults are being discovered and rebranded in Silicon Valley as a way of modeling the twenty-first century corporation. ‘You should run your startup like a cult,’ one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors, Peter Thiel, advises …. For Thiel it is the very excesses of cultish sociality, that have typically been proscribed and demonized, that make it useful for business. ‘Taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: It’s not even rational,’ Thiel argues, working to transform the cult from a social model typically associated with irrational, decadent, violent excess to what Thiel argues is the most rational way to model a startup business.”
— “Cults at Scale: Silicon Valley and the Mystical Corporate Aesthetic,” Kate Losse, DisMagazine.com
70 American Airlines flights were delayed last week when an app on the pilots’ iPads crashed. The problem wasn’t with the planes or the iPads but with the software, made by a division of Boeing. According to Re/Code a conflict between two versions of the Washington National Airport map jammed up the software, and the glitch was finally solved by deleting and re-installing the app.
American Airlines has been using Apple tablets in all its planes since 2013, replacing the 35 pounds of reference papers and manuals each pilot used to haul on board for each flight. The airline says going paperless and replacing 24 million pages of documents with 8,000 iPads saves the company 400,000 gallons of fuel each year.
The Strong Museum in Rochester, home of the National Toy Hall of Fame, has announced the creation of the World Video Game Hall of Fame. “Electronic games have changed how people play, learn and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography,” said museum President G. Rollie Adams. Unsaid: Games now earn more money than recorded music or Hollywood films, about $21 Billion in 2013.
You can nominate significant arcade, console, computer, hand-held and mobile games here until March 31, 2015. An international panel will choose the annual inductees.
The British Ministry of Defence is escalating cyberspace combat capabilities by assembling a laptop army of computer nerd reservists. “The Cyber Reserves will be an essential part of ensuring we defend our national security in cyberspace,” said UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond. “This is an exciting opportunity for internet experts in industry to put their skills to good use for the nation, protecting our vital computer systems and capabilities.”
The Defence Cyber Operations Group (DCOG) is under the MoD Joint Forces Command (recruitment info here). The UK is thought to lag far behind the USA, Israel, and China in militarizing the digital domain.
“In January, New Jersey launched new face-recognition software that forbids license applicants from smiling widely or making other exaggerated facial expressions that might confuse the computer.”
“Pennsylvania and Delaware use the software, too. But ‘smile/no-smile is not a problem,’ said Jan McKnight, a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokeswoman. ‘You can smile in Pennsylvania.'”
— “Why you can’t smile for your N.J. driver’s license,” Dana DiFillippo, Philadelphia Daily News
Tom Scocca, managing editor of Deadspin, feels dread when he gets an email with a Microsoft Word document attached:
“Time and effort are about to be wasted cleaning up someone’s archaic habits. A Word file is … cumbersome, inefficient, and a relic of obsolete assumptions about technology. It’s time to give up on Word.”
“Death to Word: It’s time to give up on Microsoft’s word processor,” Tom Scocca, Slate.
It’s a long article, 1405 words with 7596 characters. How do we know? We pasted it into memory-hogging, metadata-infested, editorially intrusive Word and used the word count feature. That’s really the only thing the program’s good for.
“The United States government offers tax incentives to companies pursuing medical breakthroughs, urban redevelopment and alternatives to fossil fuels.
It also provides tax breaks for a company whose hit video game this year was the gory Dead Space 2, which challenges players to advance through an apocalyptic battlefield by killing space zombies.”
— “Rich Tax Breaks Bolster Makers of Video Games,” David Kocieniewski, New York Times
Cute Aimi Eguchi (above) is a member of the Japanese girl group AKB48. She’s also a computer product, completely digital. The cybersongstress was created by sampling the attributes and actions of other singers in the group, synthesizing “Aimi,” then uploaded the result to the adoring public, who regarded her as another aidoru (アイドル), a pop idol. Now they know she’s a digital diva, but they dig it.
Let’s take a meeting about meeting presentations. A short one. Here’s the take-away:
A slide show is not a presentation.
Q: Says who?
A: Edward R. Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics, and graphic design at Yale and Dr. T.X. Hammes (Colonel USMC, retired), among others.
Q. I have another meeting in ten minutes. Can you summarize that for visual learners?
Q. Does anyone have rules for using slideware like PowerPoint?
A. Plenty of folks. People who do presentation training often have complex systems, but venture capitalist and author Guy Kawasaki has a good rule of thumb: 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30-point font.
Meeting adjourned.
Image (“Portrait with PowerPoint, after Pieter Jansz van Asch”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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