Category: University of Oregon

The following is an excerpt from an article posted on The Guardian by Aisha Gani on Wednesday, November 19, 2014.

Breaking away from her pink heels, pink ball gown and oversized pink hairbrush, Barbie – the fashion doll manufactured by Mattel – now has a range of gender-stereotype-breaking books. In the “I can be” series, we learn that Barbie can be president, a sports star and a computer engineer … except in the latter case she needs the help of a man.

Pamela Ribon, a writer at Walt Disney animation studios, this week pointed out the sexism on her blog when she picked up the Barbie: I can be a Computer Engineer children’s book, published by Random House US.

In a book intended to inspire young girls, Barbie the programmer, who wears a pink heart-shaped USB drive around her neck, needs help to reboot her computer. And one passage from the book reveals that this computer engineer cannot even code:

“What are you doing, Barbie?” asks Skipper.

“I’m designing a game that shows kids how computers work,” explains Barbie. “You can make a robot puppy do cute tricks by matching up colored blocks!”

“Your robot puppy is so sweet,” says Skipper. “Can I play your game?”

“I’m only creating the design ideas,” Barbie says, laughing. “I’ll need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game!”

A “Feminist Hacker Barbie” website is now taking in submissions for suggested amendments to the book, to help portray Barbie as “the competent, independent, bad-ass engineer that she wants to be”

To read the full article, including a selection of furious Amazon reviews of Mattel’s book on Computer Engineer Barbie, click here.

WPI offers a master of science in Interactive Media & Game Development (IMGD), which focuses on designing immersive, interactive environments.

Whether you’re a college graduate looking to further your education in interactive media, a game industry professional interested in a leadership role, or a professional from another field retooling for the game industry, earning a graduate degree in IMGD will enable you to pursue a diverse range of careers—as a producer, a designer, a teacher, or a project leader in such specific subfields as technology, art, or design.

As an IMGD graduate student, you get to choose your own areas of research and thesis. WPI’s courses provide a base knowledge relevant to the design of interactive media. You select courses from technical, serious games or management focus areas that allow you to tailor the degree to suit your individual interests and career goals. By designing, developing, and evaluating a substantial group project or by working on a thesis with a novel scholarship as a capstone experience, IMGD graduate students become qualified for the career of their dreams.

For more information about the program, visit their website and request an information package.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Allie Caren of NPR’s All Tech Considered.

Of all of the things that were a big deal as a sprouting toddler, learning to talk was one of the major milestones.

“Ma-Ma,” we uttered, wide-eyed, to camcorder lenses and disbelieving parents. “Da-Da.”

Talking is a big part of who we are as humans: as families, as business partners — as a society. It’s arguably one of the most powerful forms of expression, alongside writing and art. We use our voices to ask questions, to deliver bad news, to tell someone we love them.

But the way we talk to each other is changing. The uniqueness of our voices is being drowned out by the pitter-patter of keyboards; we’re always typing, texting, responding.

“People use these technologies to sort of fill in the gaps around the communication that they do with people,” Aaron Smith says.

He notes that sometimes there are things that are hard to tell people in person. Shooting them a text or an email is often just easier, more convenient and more efficient.

But that “time-sensitive” expectation — being “too reachable” — can be stressful.

Technology has added to the already-silent staleness of elevator rides, subway commutes and cross-country flights so much that it’s almost more awkward not to be holding a phone than it is to be looking around, observing, hoping for someone to say “hi” to.

According to a 2012 Pew survey, 67 percent of cellphone owners found themselves checking their phone for messages, alerts or calls — even when they didn’t notice their phone ringing or vibrating; and 29 percent of cellphone owners described their phone as “something they can’t imagine living without.”

Can you relate to the habit of excessively looking at your phone? In the age of smartphones, are we growing increasingly addicted to information? To learn more about the effects of smartphones on communication, read the rest of Allie Caren’s article over on NPR.

The following is an excerpt from NPR’s “All Tech Considered,” by Priska Neely

Many penguins tracked in Antarctica have data-collecting devices underneath their skin. Usually, researchers have to get close to them and use hand readers to pick up a signal from the devices — which freaks the penguins out.

Yvon Le Maho, who has been studying penguins for more than 40 years, decided to tackle that problem.

“I thought maybe we can use rovers,” Le Maho says.

He got the idea to use a remote-controlled, wheeled device disguised as a penguin to infiltrate the colony about seven years ago. Turns out, it works. Le Maho and other scientists at the University of Strasbourg in France published a paper about their work with rovers in the journal Nature Methods last Sunday.

Le Maho and his team equipped some penguins with heart monitors and saw that when the rovers approached instead of humans, stress levels stayed low.

After a few model tweaks, they made a fluffy baby penguin that they call a “chick cam.”…With this special access, the chick cam got a shot of an emperor penguin laying an egg — a moment that hadn’t been captured before.

To read the full article and watch a clip of the “penguin cam” in action, click over to NPR.

 

The following is an excerpt from The New York Times. The full article by David Streitfeld is available to read here.

Brewster Kahle is a librarian by training and temperament. In the mid-1990s, when many saw the nascent World Wide Web as a place to sell things, he saw it as data that cried out to be preserved and cataloged. Later, he widened his scope to include material — film, books, music — that was not native to the web but could be digitally gathered there.

By most standards, Mr. Kahle has been pretty successful. The Internet Archive serves from two to three million visitors a day with such tools as the Wayback Machine, which provides snapshots of 435 billion Web pages saved over time. The archive has seven million texts (you could call them books), 2.1 million audio recordings, and 1.8 million videos. It is an immense library.

Mr. Kahle has even bigger dreams, however. With a limited staff, the archive can conserve only so much. But if anyone can become a curator, the archive may one day resemble one of those Borgesian fantasies of the Total Library, a place that not only collects the world but becomes it.

“We thought the machines were going to save us — crawling the web, digitizing the books, organizing the information — but we were wrong,” Mr. Kahle said. “Communities of people are at the heart of curation.”

At an event Tuesday night at the converted San Francisco church that serves as the archive’s headquarters, the nonprofit’s staff showed off exactly how it and communities are going to be “building libraries together.”

To learn more about the project ideas being discussed surrounding community building of even more diverse digital archives, read the full article over on The New York Times website.