mssv

  • Dispatches From Davos

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    Dispatches From Davos – an ongoing report of the Davos World Economic Forum conference by Wired’s editor, Chris Anderson. Fun and interesting stuff.

  • Misunderstandings

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    Yet again, people are being confused by Kevin ‘Captain Cyborg’ Warwick’s work. Wired has just published an article about Tech Predictions for the Decade, and here’s a quote: Other futuristic technology poised for human consumption is the implanted sensor. Gantz pointed out that University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick, who has a sensor implanted in…

  • Uplink

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    Something tells me that Uplink would make a marvellous massively multiplayer immersive fiction game, or at least a decent component of one.

  • SimCity 4

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    I’m seriously considering buying SimCity 4 at the moment; all the reviews I’ve read have been fairly positive and it seems that with a bug patch the game should be very playable. Plus, I’ve always been a big fan of SimCity. The most interesting thing that I’ve read so far is that the best way…

  • Rewarding Behaviour

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    2–3 minutes

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    While browsing through hot-shot Cambridge lecturer and security expert Markus Kuhn’s homepage, I came across these two articles about the detrimental effects rewards can have on performance: For Best Results, Forget the Bonus and Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator. While some may view these articles as part of the backlash against behaviourism, I do…

  • TerraQuest Axed

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    TerraQuest game axed. I talked about TerraQuest earlier in mssv.net. I can’t say I’m particularly surprised about this development; not only were they offering a $250,000 grand prize, but also six prizes of $25,000. The total prizes alone are $400,000, and that doesn’t even take into account the production costs. Sure, they said they had…

  • MREs

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    Son of Spam – a fun article about the US military’s latest advances in creating edible and long lasting food for troops on the move. Says Darsch: “It wasn’t the four-letter words” in soldiers’ letters that caused his lab to abandon its “father knows best mentality” about MREs [meals ready to eat]. “It was the…

  • Stepping out

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    So for a couple of hours this evening I tried to replicate the Dance Dance Revolution experience using my PC. Waiting for me at Cambridge today were two nice new Playstation gamepad USB adaptors that I bought off Ebay; I was intending to hook my two dance mats up to the computer via USB, download…

  • Digital TV

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    An interesting quotation from this week’s New Scientist confirms what I’ve suspected* for a while: The latest 42 inch widescreen flat plasma panel screens cost around $7000, not counting a $250 wall mount and the digital tuner needed to receive broadcasts. Yet customers appear unconvinced of their quality. It turns out you cannot see the…

  • WMD

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    In the Sunday Times today is a short opinion article by John Humphries; it’s a relatively pedestrian essay about how we shouldn’t make AK-47s any more, etc etc. Not really worthy of note, other than the fact that its title, ‘AK-47s are weapons of mass destruction too’ is quite obviously ripped off from Michigan’s Lake…